Reflections of AUG

It's been over a week since I dragged my worn out self back to B-Town after a long, arduous week at Australian Uni Games. There's been plenty of write-ups around the place about what went on among the top few teams, so I thought I'd focus on Ballarat's efforts down the bottom end of the table. We finished 16th out of the 19 teams after making it through to the top 12 on Day 2, which I am incredibly disappointed with. I thought we had the capability to finish top 10, and if we were given the week again, I have no doubt we'd have been in Deakin's place playing Latrobe for 9th spot on Friday.

So what went wrong?

Actually, that's an unfair question. We should be asking ourselves, "What could we have done better?" And the answer is easy - better preparation. We had 16 players - 5 with AUG experience, 3 who were at the higher end of the learning curve but hadn't played a tournament longer than two days, and 8 whose ultimate experience level stood somewhere between 'little' and 'none'. Our biggest training (the week before holidays) saw 12 players in attendance. More commonly we had 4 or 5 show up at any one time, and our Geelong league team consisted mostly of non-uni players. The first time all 16 of us were in one place at one time was at the backpackers bar on the Sunday night. As best as we'd tried to make it happen, we did not have 16 players on the same page come Monday morning.


Day 1

Our first match up was against QUT. I knew that they didn't have much going for them, with all but one player making their debut. But I didn't tell our team that - we wanted to go out and do what we practiced. And that's exactly what we did. Once our jittery throws got out of our system early, we cruised to a 15-2 win. Our next game was against Sydney, and our team had caught wind of the hype. It was Suufa's first game, and they weren't keen on showing any mercy. The game was over 15-0 in about 40 minutes, but we'd showed some promise on defense. The third game against UWA was the biggest shock of the day. In years past, BUUF vs UWA was always a tough, hard fought game, but this year we got rolled 15-1. UWA brought the one thing we left at home somewhere - intensity. In the first 10 minutes, we got stalled out four times. Our newbies faced up against a pommy zone and a LOUD sideline, and they froze. They completely forgot the one thing Greta had drilled into them at training all year ("turn and look at your dump on stall 5") and would throw away on stall 8 or just not even throw at all. We pulled our experienced handlers back behind the disc to work their zone around a bit, even if it meant we weren't going to score. After several breaks through the zone and an eventual score after a magnificent drive of around 40 passes, UWA abandoned their zone. We'd achieved one of our aims - face up to a top team and force them to rethink their strategy.


Day 2

Our final pool game was against Wollongong - 7 players who had never played before. We approached this game with the completely wrong attitude (walk-in-the-park). Our key players didn't hit their stride at all (I didn't even cleat up until 30 minutes into the game) and our D was flat out lazy. It wasn't until 10 minutes to go, and we were down 5-4, that Coach Greta put her game face on and called a rockstar line. We closed out the game 7-5, and we were through to Pool E. That afternoon we faced Flinders, who possessed a very strong lineup. However it was remarkably similar to the team we beat for the bronze medal at SUG in 2006. Hmmm. This game demonstrated just how long two years is in frisbee (ie: it's pretty much fucking era), but Flinders approached this game very differently to Sydney. They came out all guns blazing until half (8-0), and then took the foot off the pedal. Joel Pillar didn't play the rest of the game, while Erin Wallis and Sean Lace only played a couple of points each. The second half went Flinders' way 7-4, but their tactic of resting their key players obviously payed off later in the week. The game against Adelaide was a similar story to the UWA game - we contained them on D to the point where they didn't get easy goals, but we simply couldn't get our shit together on O. The 2 points we got against them were the result of steady, patient O - something we couldn't consistently achieve.


Day 3

We only had two games on Wednesday to round out the Pool E games - Latrobe and Melbourne. By now we'd identified where we were getting killed - the transition from O to D. Our new players were too used to both teams taking their time to set up on a turn, and had never come up against teams that "run and gun" off a turn. In previous games, we'd turn in our endzone, and 10 passes later, the opposition was shooting for their endzone and we still hadn't matched up man-on-man. Our big focus against Latrobe was getting that done. And we did. There was a strong cross wind in this game, and both team's zone D was forcing turns, their's moreso than ours. Latrobe would often break past our wall, and our deep and wings would be able to pick off risky punts to the endzone. However our O could never get it moving because Latrobe's wings would play short enough to mark the handlers, leaving only their deep to police the entire field behind their wall. And it worked - have you ever tried breaking a force, around a wall to hit a marked cutter while throwing upwind? And that was just to hit the dump. In the end we started taking risks on long throws to force their wings to get out back. Despite a lot of turns, this worked and we were able to get 4 points and hold out until timecap for the first time (in a losing game). Latrobe 11-4.

In the afternoon we faced Melbourne, minus Tarrant Meehan and Michelle Phillips who were resting injuries. At this point we were content just to get out there and work on our weaknesses - we were finishing 6th in Pool E no matter what, and Melbourne were relying on some convoluted result to finish higher than 4th, so the game was more or less a dead rubber. Once again, zone D was the order of the day, although the wind had died down since the morning. As expect, Chris Freise ran the show on O, and his upwind hucks always came when they were least expected and caught our deep and wings out every time. We simply could match their efforts, and were relying on short throws. We eventually started to use the width of the field and opened up several gaps in a tiring zone and got 2 points, but Melbourne closed out the game 14-2.

For the final point, we opted for a bit of fun. We suggested to Melbourne we have an "all-in" point - 16 on 16. They took the line, while only myself and Doobie took the O line for BUUF. As the pull went up, Melbourne sent their two rookie girls down to play D. Doobs and I had great fun with this - blatant fakes, directionless cuts, and bullshit throws that should only be reserved for showing off down at the beach. We turned it over around 5 metres from the endzone. Sadface. Chaos ensued as the rest of our squad stormed the field, and in the end, we got the point.


My memory of Wednesday night and beyond is hazy at best due to a kick-ass Rubix Cube party at The Precinct. I'll continue this story when I start getting Lost episode-style flashbacks.