RecapSummer 2018Scooby Doo vs Goofy

A good percentage of this season’s characters are old school.  Goofy is from 1932.  And that’s not even the oldest character.  Felix the Cat first appeared in 1919.  And the Cheshire Cat comes from the 1865 novel by Lewis Carroll.  Scooby Doo is also on the relatively older side, first appearing in 1969.  If you were a child of the 70’s like me, you definitely watched Scooby Doo.  And then when you became a teenager and first heard Casey Kasem on the radio doing American Top 40, you were like “that’s Shaggy!” and your parents would be like “what are you talking about?”

In fact, some of you younger players have already said “what are you talking about?”  That’s fair.  The best equivalent I can give you is if when you first heard Ryan Seacrest, you recognized it as the voice of some animated cartoon character he did.

Alright, now that I’ve shown my age, let’s go the recaps from two other guys who are also Gen X’ers.  First up is Scooby Doo co-captain Seth Gillum:

First game of the year! I don’t think I’ve ever missed the first game as a captain. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, but if you like to set a tone for your team, the first game is a good place to do that. It’s not easy to get a team in enough flow where everyone can touch the disc and all of your players feel valued. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, it’s not possible to do. So it’s tough to miss the first game. And as I went through my roster and saw player after player not able to make the game I got nervous. But I’m co-captaining with AJ this year and so I knew I was leaving the team in safe (maybe the safest?) hands. This recap is going to be a little lackluster, because I wasn’t there. But I had a lot of phone calls about it.

TEXT at the wedding – The score is 5-1, but I’m not sure who’s up. What!! Scooby Doo is up 5-1? Later I learned we dug deep into our playbook and broke out a bit of the Berlin defense that Marshall started using in 2003. (thank you Randy Hall, we’ve gotten quite a bit of mileage from that D)
Scooby Doo takes the game 15-5.
Things people told me. Matt Warden had a solid game. AJ didn’t at first recognize it was John Warden’s son.
I heard Aurora kicked a lot of ass, but no one game me a specific play.
Molly Schwartz scored some
Michael Schwartz, who was worried about matchups, was excited to play against (THE LEGEND) Chuck Aramaki. And despite no cartilage in his knee, managed to leave feeling good and to continue fulfilling his dream of playing with his daughter.
Jeroen laid out for a D and missed it by a finger’s width, but surprised us all with that effort. Way to set the bar for the older half of the team.
At 14-5, a really pretty deep throw went up to Jarrett Taylor. One of those throws that looks like it might be too long, but then sits up pretty at the end just waiting for you to run it down. And Jarrett was 5 yards in front of his defender, but to the surprise of all in attendance Erick Lankey sprinted to make up the ground and get the D. (I’m not that surprised, as I said at the draft when I picked the Cam/Lankey baggage in the second round, “I’m very pro Erick Lankey”

Huge shoutout to Jenny and JT, who despite having an early game up in SF the next day, still managed to make our Friday night game. I had a year where I lost my first two games pretty badly. And by the third game, you could feel the team starting to fall apart. When we went to talk about a plan for the game it felt like everyone had an idea, they were all different ideas, and a team plan was going to be impossible. This is a nice moment to thank Joe Forbes, who saved me that day by very casually saying something like “Don’t worry, Seth knows what he’s talking about, we’ll be fine.” We won out the rest of the season, but as (perhaps more) importantly we all worked better together to do it. A lot can change with a little synergy, and I think we were very lucky to catch team Goofy early in summer league.

It’s good to know you can still run without that pesky cartilage in your knee.  Who needs it?

Molly and Michael, and John and Matt join other parent/child Summer League baggages of the past like Debbie and Dylan Patton, Alex Carey and his dad, Ben and Duncan Brin, and several versions of Landesmans.  John Babbin played with his two sons in Goaltimate League one year, but I don’t think they played Summer League.

The next recap from Scooby Doo’s side is from Mike Zurer:

I got there pretty early and a couple of young (8 years old maybe?) neighborhood kids were throwing around with a St. Pat’s Hats disc that Tyler had given them the night before! I threw with them for 5-10 minutes and then continued my slow jog around the field. Outreach!

Both teams looked to have a bit of lightness on the roster, especially in regards to women. Scooby Doo picked up Brooking out of the sub pool to bring our number of ladies up to 4. Goofy also only had 3 ladies but didn’t get any reinforcements – the teams agreed to play 5/2 and then converted to offense chooses after the half.

First half was dominated by Scooby Doo’s “Marshall Wall” zone defense. It was pretty effective and we ran away with the first half 8-2. After the break we played matchup defense for the rest of the game, which Goofy was able to do a bit better against – we traded points out of the break, and then Scooby Doo clamped down a bit and took it to the end – final score according to the web site was 15-5, but I thought maybe Goofy got one or two more than that.

Miguel (Onyx?) was a standout for Goofy, throwing himself with regularity at the not very soft surface at Rancho Cienega. JT who was also constantly flying through the air on bids both O and D, as though he weren’t about to drive up to a tournament in San Francisco the next day – pictures of Spoiler Alert’s tourney debut have me jealous and thinking fondly of those days.

Scooby Doo greatly benefitted from Brooking’s solid play all around, and it’s way more fun to be throwing to AJ than having him patrolling the air against you.

Great first game out for the season!

Lightness of roster is always a potential issue on Fridays.  This was the only Friday though on the schedule.  No Party Friday unfortunately.  The sacrifices we make for all turf fields.

Here’s a recap from Jenny Richardson of Goofy, added two weeks later:

We were savage on women and almost on men. So we asked AJ, their captain, if we could start out 5/2 or do offense dictates since they only had 5 women too. AJ agreed and we decided we would change it at half if needed.

At half, AJ asked to go offense dictates which of course we agreed to. We were just thankful we didn’t have to play savage the whole night! My fault, I should have asked for subs. They started off the game throwing zone the first five points. Scoring 4 out of 5 but we finally learned how to play through it.
We did have a brand baby new player on our team, He had never played ultimate frisbee before. So we explained the rules to him but I also talked to the other team to let them know that if he did something wrong just explain it to him because he wouldn’t know any better. That was my mistake. They picked on him every time he was on the field, they double teamed and fouled him because he didn’t know to call it. Eventually we started to call it for him. He still seemed to have a good time but hasn’t been back since. I will say they had one player, and I don’t know his name but he was older, I heard him talking to him team at half that what they were doing wasn’t what summer league was all about. So I’m thankful for him.