Today is thursday, which is Frisbee Day. At least for me, that is. Every thursday, a large group of people get together and play ultimate frisbee on the field behind Beckman Institute. We usually have mostly grad students and non-caltech people show up for the game, though recently there have been some SURF students, and displaced people from the more serious ultimate group which was playing on the north field until softball season.
For some of those reading who may not know what ultimate frisbee is (or just "ultimate"), I direct you to this link. There are three qualities I like about ultimate: it requires a lot of running, but a good portion of that is short sprinting, which I am good at. It requires upper body and hand/eye coordination to throw the frisbee well, as well as there being a lot of technique to the different styles of throws. Finally, it's also a good thinking and mind-reading game: if you know some of the basic strategy to playing, fast decisions and being able to read people's motion, you can do a lot of fun things.
To illustrate the last point, let me mention part of today's game where such a situation occurred. In ultimate, since you must throw the disc to advance play, when someone is trying to throw to a teammate, there are what can be thought of as passing lanes, the clear areas of the field in which they can actually throw through. If they throw too close to a defender, the disc could be intercepted or knocked down (roughly equally good), and so there are clear limitations based on the current field position to where someone will throw. If you add in the motion of all the players to the mix, you can tell which currently open lanes will be closing, and which people on offense are actually entering clear passing lanes. Today's game had just such a situation (and here I realize that I actually need a diagram. I'll add one later, check back if the word description is confusing), I was playing defense, guarding one of the players on offense, and was pretty far downfield from where the thrower was. In this type of situation, I pay a lot more attention to the thrower than to the person I'm guarding, because there are only a few things the person being guarded can do that will require me to react to them (they are: sprint towards the thrower into a passing lane, or sprint downfield away from the thrower to get open for either a long pass or for a continuation when the thrower passes to someone else). As it happens, the person guarding the thrower was forcing the throw to be to only one half of the field, which helps tremendously in working out where the pass can go, and so when the pass was released, I could tell exactly which path it would take to reach the person I was guarding, who made a move towards the outside of the field. Which meant that instead of trying to catch the person I was guarding, I could take a more direct route to the frisbee and intercept it before it even reached them.
That probably sounds pretty complicated to be thinking about all the time, and a lot of the time it doesn't really even help: the throw could be perfect and you'd have no chance to reach it first, the person you're guarding could be a lot faster or less tired than you, and so on. But I still find that aspect very fun, as it adds another dimension to the game.
Anyways, that's what I look forward to on thursdays. Today we even got to play two games simultaneously, there were enough people for two games of 5v5 (you can play 4v4 up to 7v7 normally, and sometimes we have substitutes so people don't get as tired. 3v3 is possible, but really really tiring). I feel a lot more in shape now than when I started back playing after the winter, though I still get really sore after the games, it doesn't last long. The important thing is that it's really fun to play.
5 comments:
My chest isn't bothering me immediately after the first few points anymore, though I am definitely sore today.
Also, I'd actually prefer fewer people than there were today (and there are one or two people who aren't very nice who I would prefer not to show up). 24 people there is a little much.
And soon we'll be have pick-up games twice a week, which is especally good in light of my not having softball games this summer. (That said, I wish I had softball.... sigh...)
I dunno, when we were in the range where there were 2-3 subs per team if we play 7v7, it's better to go up to the multiple 5v5 games. I don't mind playing 7v7, with 1 sub or so, but I prefer not playing with subs, as people are too timid about swapping in/out: some people just won't swap out, and the others who do can feel like it's always them who do so, even if they don't need it. So I liked not needing to do subs.
I agree there's a few who I'd prefer not to show up, though that only really happened this week: the hardcore pair who kept spouting rules and put themselves above everyone I could really do without. Theoretically it wouldn't be an issue except it looked like they were gaming the teams so that they were always on the same team. Not cool.
If you're referring to the person who was crowding you, he was technically correct: it's a frisbee width between the defender and thrower. That doesn't include any arm length in addition. However, we play by more relaxed rules. If someone's being crowded too much for their comfort, people should back off, so you were definitely correct there: that particular player tends to go overboard on crowding people on defense, which for some people just isn't fun.
He was being a dick on that account and on one other. I'm more concerned with that than with any technical disagreement. We'll see how things go in subsequent weeks but if we slide towards a harder-core feel (and I'm not yet worried about this in any nontrivial amount), then I'll just stop showing up because attitudes like that just ruin the fun for me.
I don't like 2 side by side games over one single game. I agree that yesterday there were too many people to do a single game with so many substitutes. The preference I was expressing was to have fewer people show up so that 1 game at a time would be tenable. (Also, I need to be able to sub a bit because I don't have the stamina to do otherwise.)
Fair enough, as I said, the important point wasn't the technical one. Hopefully he relaxes a bit, I think the issue is the group that played on north field is more hard core than our usual group. Hopefully the monday games will ease that up if it's only the usual group.
I don't really have a preference with the multiple games or not, I'm curious why you do if you can elaborate. As I put it above, it's more for me the number of subs and the number of people playing at once which determine whether I like the team set up. I do think that field isn't particularly well suited to two games at once, because the second field is edging/on top of the grates, but it turned out to not really be as difficult to play on as I'd expected.
Even with 24 people, we didn't have enough people to have 2 games side by side and have a nice setup for people to occasionally be out. My preference would be to have exactly 14 people with 6 people per team in at once and one person on the side rotating. (But with the rotation fixed so that everybody had to take some time on the sidelines.)
With 2 games going on at once, the field had to be thinner and I think that part of the reason my feet are so sore today was the attempt to do lots of running on the sloped lower field, which was causing tons of problems for me. They're more prevalent today than they felt yesterday, but I just don't have the running legs to deal with the extra slope on top of everything.
We'll see what happens with respect to the hard core stuff, but my attitude has always been if enough of the players are assholes, I'd rather be doing something else. It ruins it for me, and I simply have almost no patience for that sort of thing. I actually never saw the major rules lawyering from the people you mentioned (there were so many people that I couldn't come close to keeping track of everybody), but I want this to remain a laid back thing.
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