2/05/2008 - Last practice before Vegas

We dodged the rain again today. The fields were closed yesterday, which cancelled the women's practice. Luckily, we hadextra space so they moved their practice to today with us.

This was our last practice before Trouble in Vegas '08. We will not practice on Thursday because most of the team will be on the road to Las Vegas during our usual 6pm practice time. Today's focus was on zone for the most of practice. We also divided our lines into Offense and Defense for the first time this year.

Drills:
Hospital throw drill - Two players must outread, box-out, and do whatever they can to catch a disc floating over head.
Breakmark Diamond drill - Diamond drill with thrower trying to break marks.
Wall Offense drill - Mark is forcing straight up. The receiver is being forced deep. Receiver attempts to get free on the in-cut, if it does not work, he makes the deep cut.
Blindside Defense Layout drill - one thrower and two receivers form a triangle. Another player on defense faces away from the thrower. He counts to three and turns around. At that point the thrower throws to either of the receivers. The defensive player attempts to layout and defend the disc. A small part of this drill is caught on video here:


Practice_Drill_2-5-08.avi

Scrimmage:

Teams
Light (Offense line) - Me, Box, Sam, Miller, Khosh, Thunder, Phil, Max(injured)
Dark (Defense line) - Allen, Kuzco, Jerry, KG, Cottontail, Bizzle, Sherlock, Stig, D-rock

1st "scrimmage" - This was an attempt at the lines to purely play their respective positions. Defense always pulled and started with 3 points. Dark always received. The game was to 5. This game focused on zone. Unfortunately, the offense line was unable to effective work their offense very well and ended up handing this game over 5-1. And just to add, the one point was a crazy hammer from Sam over to me (a deep), which was then thrown to Phil the other deep for a quick score. One of the points was a marathon. The defense for the offensive line was pretty good in this game. Their offense was not.

2nd scrimmage - This one was a typical scrimmage. Anything goes. This was the first time video was taken from an aerial perspective. It is not as cinematic, but you can see more of what is going on the field than any other perspective thus far. Thanks go to Guy who filmed this from Arroyo Drive. Video embedded here:


Practice_Scrimmage_2-5-08.avi

I believe light won this scrimmage 7-4, and pretty easily I might add.

Final note. Overall this practice was very intense. Both good and bad. Lots of energy, but you could see that the unforced errors were taking its toll mentally on players. The zone offense was pretty bad. The play of the poppers continues to be the achilles heel of the zone offense. In general, light's offense was pretty shaky. However they did manage to put on some decent defense after their turnovers. Although dark won definitively, they did not look like the superior team. The key conversions were made by badly executed throws followed by a quick break from Roeder to Allen deep for the score. In short, good intensity and energy, which did not translate into good play.