Posted to rec.sport.disc on November 11, 2001:

Just thought I'd write up a few thoughts about our (Red Fish Blue Fish) games at Nationals.

First, a clarification: the Nationals web site mentions me as "RFBF's team captain" several times, but that's not true: our captain is Tom "TK" Kenny, though Greg Wolff makes a lot of the strategic decisions.

I. OUR ROAD

We started out as the 11th seed overall (having finished third in the NW at Regionals), and third in our pool. Our pool on Thursday was (1) Holes N Poles, (2) Chaos (Winnipeg), (3) Red Fish Blue Fish (that's us), and (4) OTIS. Going in, we expected a close game against Holes N Poles, and that we should probably win the other games, especially because of the wind: we play a good zone, and have better-than-average upwind throws and much-better-than-average zone offense.

Holes N Poles was our first game, at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday...that's 5:30 am as far as our west-coast bodies are concerned, meaning we had to roll out of bed at 3:30 a.m. by the body clock, ugh. I had been setting my alarm for 6:30 a.m. for the previous few days, back at home, trying to get my body used to moving around at that hour. I encourage future east-coast organizers to try to find a schedule that lets the first-round games start an hour or so later on the first day.

I won't give a game-by-game summary, which would be of interest (if any) only to my teammates, and maybe our opponents. However, I will tell everything from my personal perspective---what did teams do against us, what were our games like---because after all, that's all I saw.

For the whole day (and, indeed, almost the whole tournament), the wind wasn't impossibly strong but it was plenty strong enough to affect throws---upwind pulls rarely made it to the upwind brick mark, and sometimes didn't make it past midfield. I think that on Thursday we gave up only two upwind goals in our three games. We were hardly rocking the upwind endzone ourselves, either, scoring something like 3, 4, and 3 upwind goals against Holes N Poles, Chaos, and OTIS, respecively...but since each of these was effectively worth two points, this led to comfortable scoring margins: 15-8, 15-11, and 15-10.

On paper our victories over Holes and Chaos were both "upsets", but we didn't consider them that way...and not just because of bravado, but because we knew that we should beat Chaos, and we thought we should at least have a good chance against Holes N Poles. We had lost to Holes N Poles by two at last year's nationals, with Brian Herriford getting something like 8 poach blocks against us in that game...he only got one this time, and the rest of their players weren't really able to pick up the slack.

As for Otis, several of us have played on teams with several of them over the years, so this was an opportunity for some good-natured smack-talking and bragging rights. The game was very tight until just after half, after which we pulled away, but we were pleased to see that they were pretty strong, and were sure that they would easily beat their seeding (and indeed, they finished fifth overall, improving on their pre-tournament seeding even more than we did).

The format, which I like, put the top two teams from each of the four Thursday pools into an upper pair of pools, and the other teams into a lower pair. Results from any team that you had played on Thursday were carried forward to Friday. After playing out the pools, the top three teams from each upper pool advances to quarters (accounting for 6 of the quarters teams), while the bottom team from each of the upper pools played against the top team from each of the lower pools, with winners advancing to quarters.

This gave us games against Griffin and Mayhem on Friday. Both teams scored a few upwind against us, but once again we were able to score more than our share upwind, and again our scoring margins were fairly comfortable in spite of only representing 2 or 3 extra upwind scores on our part. Our undefeated record in pool play made us the overall 2 seed going into quarters, and gave us a rematch against Otis. They played well again, and in fact were ahead at half, I think. Eventually we put together a few upwind goals in a short period, along with the downwinds to go with them, and won yet another closer-than-the-score-indicates victory.

The victory over Otis put us in semis, against Blue Ridge Ultimate a.k.a. BRU. Several people told us going into the game that we shouldn't have too much trouble, but these people proved not to know what the hell they were talking about: BRU was clearly the best team we faced all weekend, and their victory over us was no fluke, although I think we would expect to win 6 or 7 out of 10 games against them in similar wind conditions. Although they didn't have any standout performers, they were solid across the board, and certainly more athletic than us (although that falls in the "damning with faint praise" category). They also played smarter than any other team we played all weekend...which, come to think of it, is also faint praise, since most teams made some really terrible strategic decisions (more on that below).

We started by pulling downwind, and BRU worked it all the way up against our zone and scored it. Fortunately, we answered back with an upwind goal of our own. Unfortunately, they again scored an upwinder on the ensuing point. So, their first two times going upwind, they scored...that turned out to be all of the upwinders that we gave up, but it also turned out to be all that they needed.

After the first few points, the wind picked up a bit, and we made some defensive adjustments, and I think BRU only got past the upwind brick mark one more time. On the other hand, we were up at that end of the field at least five more times that half, and another four or five times in the second half, but we only got one more goal to show for it....so each team ended up with exactly two upwind goals, which translated (thanks to the halftime switch of sides) to a 1-point victory for BRU.

II. STRATEGY AND TACTICS IN THE WIND

We played zone both ways on every team, almost every point...I think we did play one or two points of man D, but that's it. Most teams played man D against us, though I think they played more zone against each other---we have a reputation (deserved, I must say) of being able to handle zone D much more easily than man D. We also hucked downwind almost every time we got the disc on our half of the field.

Given the wind, teams had maybe a 20% chance of going 35 yards upwind against us. That means that if they have to go 70 yards, they have to go 35 yards upwind _two consecutive times_...the statisticians among you will realize that the odds of that happening (assuming you accept my 20% figure for a single 35-yard progression) is 0.2 * 0.2 = 0.04, or 4%. So if we turn it over in the downwind end zone, the other team has a 4% chance of scoring on their possession, whereas if we turn it over at midfield, they have a 20% chance of scoring.

Although I can certainly understand how other teams could miss (or disagree with) the mathematical subtleties, I'm still amazed that other teams didn't intuitively grasp the take-home message, which is: when it's that windy, if you're defending the upwind end zone, turning it over on your half of the field is by FAR the easiest way for the opposing team to score.

The reason I know that most other teams don't understand this fact is that except for BRU and Otis, every other team tried to work it downwind against our zone (and even Otis tried to do so sometimes). As a result, in almost every game we had a few upwind possessions that started in the upwind half of the ield, so we only had to go 20 to 30 yards for an upwind goal. Given that only two to four upwind goals were needed in order to win any game that we played all weekend, conceding these relatively easy upwinders was enough to lose the game for most of the teams, even if the teams were otherwise equal.

On downwind offense and defense, BRU and RFBF took similar approaches: on downwind O, try to get off a huck to a receiver who has a chance to make a catch; if the end zone is clogged with defenders, try to hit an offensive player within 20 yards of the end zone and work it in from there. On downwind D, try to take away the targets in the end zone, and hope that they miss the target underneath.

On upwind O and D, the teams played differently. RFBF played zone D, so of course BRU was forced to play zone O. After the first two upwind points, when they had some success pulling our deep-deep back or to one side and striking through the middle, and also gaining 5-10 yards at a time along the backhand side, we adjusted and took both of these away, and BRU had little success moving the disc upwind.BRU played man D upwind, forcing forehand, and counted on their superior athleticism and the wind. That approach wasn't quite as successful, in the sense that we still managed to work it to within 15 yards of the end zone a bunch of times...but poor decision-making, the compressed field as we got closer to the end zone, some good defensive plays, and some offensive execution errors, all combined to make us (RFBF) no more successful than BRU at actually scoring points upwind.

One interesting characteristic of the game is that the stronger the wind, the more height is an advantage: discs were much more likely to hang, or be way out front or way behind the receiver. As a practical matter, this made passes to women harder than passes to men, at least for us, since we have a lot of short women. They could often get open, but we had trouble hitting them.

III. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Three years ago in Sarasota, with fairly similar weather, we (Red Fish Blue Fish) easily won the first-ever Coed National Championships. Although some of the teams that we faced then had some good players, none had a complete package of quality men, quality women, and full integration of the groups into real coed teams.

The following year, in San Diego, the same could be said of most of the teams, but a small handful of teams were clearly putting things together. Last year, players could compete in the coed division as well as in other divisions, and some did so, so the overall skill level of the players was slightly higher...but overall I still felt that only a few teams really had this coed thing figured out.

This year seems to continue the general progression towards higher quality. Comparing some of the other teams to my team (not that we're some kind of standard, but it's a comparison that I can make): Trigger Hippy has improved every year of their existence and is now better than us, though we were really hoping for a chance to play them at Nationals, especially in the wind. (They thumped us soundly at Regionals). BRU is a genuinely good team that is probably better than us in non-windy conditions, and at close to our level even in strong winds--good enough that, as they proved, they can beat us in any given game. And presumably they'll get better from here. Otis is another strong team, and if they had played a little smarter in the wind, and gotten a couple of breaks, they could have taken us down. Donner Party had a very disappointing Nationals, completely unable to handle the wind, but having lost to them 2 out of the last 3 times that we faced them, we know that without wind they are a very strong team. Holes N Poles needs to work on both strategy and tactics---they made some very poor decisions in their game against us---but their personnel are strong and they ought to be able to pick their game up several notches.

Perhaps equally important, there were no really _bad_ teams at Nationals this year, as there were in all of the previous years (or at least, if there were any bad teams, we didn't get to play them). The worst team at Nationals this year would have had a shot at making quarters in 1998. So as far as I'm concerned, the coed division is doing very well, and it's really a pleasure to see.

IV. OOPS, STILL MORE THOUGHTS: SEEDING

Eh, sorry, I forgot that I have another point to make: the UPA probably needs to consider the issue of how to seed Nationals. The teams that made semis were originally seeded 1, 5, 8, 11.

One thing that the original seeds didn't seem to recognize is that the regions are very different in both strength and depth. As BRU, RFBF, and Otis show, a team that takes second or even third place in a strong region can be better than a team that wins a weak region.

Perhaps in the future, the UPA should provide Sectionals and Regionals scores, and information on previous years' Nationals performances, and let the captains vote on seeding, or something like that. I suspect that procedure would provide outcomes at least as good as whatever mechanism was used this year. However, I must say that the format for Nationals is rather forgiving of seeding errors, and I don't think this is a really big deal.

OK, that's enough...congratulations if you've managed to read this far. And congratulations to Trigger Hippy and Blue Ridge Ultimate for playing such good Ultimate.

--Phil Price