inspired by erikas

hkupa hosted a tournament this weekend where i met my worlds team (force durian) for the first time ever.

hk is pissed at me for not playing with them, but i don't think i owe them any loyalty, given they are a players association and not a team. there were no tryouts, and i hadn't even been assigned to a hk team yet when i commited to play with durians. other reasons hkupa is ridiculous: i would've had absolutley no input on which hk team i got assigned to (they could've put me on the c team); i'm new so it's not like i've been practicing with them forever; i paid hk$ 500 to use their fields, they've paid me nothing. it's not like they've built me up to be this awesome player and just when i'm getting good, i desert them. they have no claim on me.

in any case, durians is awesome. they are such a fun group of people. there's a girl who reminds me a lot of erika. she giggles nonstop (adilene). another girl is CRAZY (fi). she flew in from boston for the weekend. i'm kinda scared of her, but only off the field. she takes a lot of extra strength painkillers and red bull. when she got off her plane, she allegedly said, "i'm so tired, i need some vodka." phew! one of the boys is a 2005 harvard alum (minoa). he yells at me on the field when i screw up :-D! although once he yelled at me to clear out of the cutting lane (he was holding the disc) when i was in the middle of calling a violation on my d (she had caught up three whole steps before the disc was tapped in). i got really flustered and ran whereas i should've just said violation more loudly. sigh.

ok, maybe i need to be less jumbled. i missed most of saturday because i had to take a licensing exam (which i should've taken last month, but i missed it because i can't read military time), but i made it in time for the last game. we played hk's b team, and we creamed them. i started out playing o. they called me as a middle person in their ho stack (making me one of the primary cutters)...my girl was fronting me, and i had a little bit of timing trouble (i've never played with these ppl before), so when john cater got the disc, i just took off deep. i felt like erika. i think i had this huge grin on my face, but the throw was short, and i came in under for it, still beating my girl, but a boy tipped it and i couldn't catch the swill. i don't remember much else about that game except that i caught 2 in the endzone and didn't have any turnovers other than that first one. i was running everywhere, and people said it was cuz i had fresh legs, but secretly, it's cuz i had just finished checking nationals results, and i was totally pumped about brute's performance.

i left the party at 12:30, but i was still one of the first to leave. the team dressed up in bright orange cowboy hats and bright orange boas.

our first game sunday was against bangkok. we should've beat them, but we didn't. we came out really flat and made a lot of execution errors (drops, turfs, etc). i remember one point, where michael su made three turns in a row as the middle handler in a three handler zone. he wouldn't swing the disc; he'd hold it and try to throw through the cup. he's recovering from a badly sprained ankle, so i'll chalk up the suckiness to nerves. they started calling me as the offside handler in the ho/zone, so i didn't do much there. on d, i'm the strongside front wall for the 1-3-3. i did ok, but our marks kept getting broken. i played stellar man d. i mainly covered a handler girl who looks a lot like a certain unbeautiful best friend of nancy's. the first time i was on her, i shut her down for the dump, but they threw to her anyways to turn it on their own endzone. the rest of the game, she'd try cutting once or twice, then give up. they had to bring back another guy to play a three handler set. when she was off the field, i covered this quick little cutter too. her cuts were very textbook, but she got looked off everytime (i was always right on her shoulder). i watched the handler girl in one of her later games, and i saw her make a very good peri cut followed by a huge lefty backhand huck to a guy in the endzone. i had no idea she was a lefty. oh, and after soft cap at 8-5 or something, we scored the next couple to tie at 9-9, when their captain told us that the game was over because hardcap had gone off at 9-8 but no one knew. they were so scared to play the last point, but we forced them into it. they ended up winning off a hospital throw into the endzone where their tallest player skied two of our shortest players. whatever. btw, their tallest player is playing on our team for worlds (but bangkok paid his airfare and tourney fee so that he'd play with them).

we won our consolation game against guangzhou (to whom one of our girls defected--adilene, the giggly one, she's their captain). i made a couple more errors here, altho my man d was still perfect. i turned it twice on the corner of our own endzone (after the first turn i offered not to pick it up, but they made me)...one of the guangzhou guys was poaching. and once i made a really good in cut but threw it away deep (backhand). i realize that i don't have the same deep-shot roll on this team that i did on smite. given the number of boys with huge backhands, they definitely don't need me to take those chances. i asked jim (the captain, a doll) what a good deep percentage is, and he said 80%. hmmm....alright. oh, and i also got footblocked on a backhand break. after the game, we ran sprints.

because of this tournament, nadeem is visiting me from beijing. for those who don't remember him, he's the guy who taught shuangy how to throw (summer league, ODD). saturday, he changed my forehand grip so that my middle finger isn't bent anymore. i don't have as much of a grip on the disc (i definitely can't dent the plastic with my thumb), but i get a lot more spin all of a sudden. my flick goes 5 yards extra without any shoulder or elbow or hip pivot at all. it's amazing. apparently, my middle finger was acting as a spring and absorbing energy from the disc when i had it bent. oh, and i met nat, a boy on my team who plays on red fish blue fish who played with nurit at some point.