3/1/2006 - Separation Anxiety

Today was the first day of the A team/B team project. As denoted by monday's meeting, the team will be split off into two groups determined mainly by skill level and commitment. I was not there for the first hour so this was all reported to me after I had gotten there.

I was told that the warm-up jog and conditioning continued as normal, as a whole team. Then after one go-to drill, the A and B teams broke off. The B team was headed up by Jamison and the A team was headed off by the captains, Matt and Allen. The B team worked on an H stack drill and a cutting drill. The A team worked on a diamond shaped cutting drill and then learned a new 3-2-2 zone, which was used on the team earlier by UCLA-B.

The new 3-2-2 zone was designed to force-sideline vs the 3-3-1 which was a force-middle. The idea was that the cup would force the disc to the side, where the force-side mark would block off the dump throw and the wing would cut off the up-the-line throw. This zone requires cup to be much tighter than the 3-3-1 cup as the short deep is now part of the deep and cannot cover the holes in the cup. However, the main strategy of this zone is to trap the disc on the sideline with an essentially 4-man cup and have the 3 deep players covering any low percentage hammers or high releases over the cup.

The A team split up into darks and lights and ran this zone for push-ups. The offense started off about 15 yards from the goal line. For every drop, the offensive team had to do 10 push-ups. For every score, the defensive team had to do 10 push-ups.

Quick match-up of the practice zone:

Offense On dark:
Handlers - Box, Max, and Danny
Poppers - George and Bob
Deeps - Jerry and Steve

Defense On light:
Cup - Raph, Mark, and Prez Eric
Wings - Alphabater Eric and Mike Ng
Deeps - Adam(returning grad from Earth Science) and Grad Mike Lawler

Lights defense worked well and forced 5+ throwadays on dark. Dark only was able to score once. By the time dark was able to score and have offense and defense switch, it was time to scrimmage. However, Allen and Matt had the current teams scrimmage the zone out on the full 70 yard field.
Unlike the practice zone, dark was able to score 4-1 to lights.
A team highlights:
-Light shredded dark zone, which lead to quick flow over to Mark where he made a huck to Grad Mike over Bob (deep) for the score.
-The dark's zone quick setup lead to a 'no 2nd throw' D by Danny at light's endzone, which lead to a quick score.

At that time(around 8pm), half of the A team left early for midterm cramming. Unfortunately, this left several of the players to play savage.
Highlights on the team scrimmage:
-Jerry and Raph having a large collision after Jerry caught an up-the-line dump.
-James had a clutch lay-out D against Raph to prevent a score.
-James ripping the bottom half of his cleat right off after that lay-out D.
-Jerry hucked to Daniel who was able to box out Jamison for the score. HOT!
-No drops or throwaways for Kaitlin who was freaking awesome!