end of college season thoughts

This should have been written a while ago. Penn State at regionals.

Our performance at regionals was average. It wasn't bad, we didn't play terribly. It also wasn't consistently good enough. We had some very nice moments of greatness to come back and win a game when we were down at half time. We ended up placing two higher than our seed, which is a nice measure of success.

I suppose you can't expect too much when it is your first year back to regionals after being suspended. I suppose it is also very hard to expect high results (playing on Sunday, being in the run for nationals) when only 10 of your 18 players come to practice on a regular basis. That is probably one of the most frustrating things for me this year, and I know it was for the two captains. When you see a team with good on paper potential, but then no one comes to practice, you can't get results.

adaptability

I read (on a DoG blog, I think) that a sign of a great team is a team that adapts and changes strategy when they are being beaten. I think that same principle can be applied to players too. So one thing I'm going to focus on this year is changing my defensive playing when I'm being beaten. I had a chance to work on this at summer league a few weeks ago. I was guarding a good lefty handler who was touching the disc every other pass and killing us with his high release backhand. I didn't do anything during that game to change my defensive strategy and I started thinking about it on the car drive home. During the next game I had to guard a very similar player, so I tried some of the strategies I'd thought of to stop him.

The first strategy was to force the handler away from the disc. This strategy did work several times. His team threw some up to him but I won the air battles twice. One problem was that when I did get beaten back to the disc, he had wide open throw options for a few seconds.

Our other team strategy for this guy was to change the force from flick to backhand. This makes righty hammers and flick hucks harder to get off, and backhand hucks take more wind-up. It also makes the one lefty throw flicks and neutralises his short inside-out, high-release backhand break throw. This one worked okay too, but it's harder to evaluate from a personal performance point of view.