April 10, 2005
Hi Everyone,
B-Mo competed at Yale Cup this weekend in New Haven, CT. It was our last non-UPA/College Series tournament of the spring as we now have only Sectionals, Regionals, and hopefully Nationals to look forward to in the coming weeks. Overall, it was a very successful weekend as we won all our games and repeated as Yale Cup champions (we won last year as well!).
We entered the tournament as the #1 seed and played four pool-play games on Saturday. Our first was against Columbia, and we shook off some early cobwebs to cruise to a 13-5 victory. We immediately followed this victory with a solid 13-3 win against Princeton. Although not playing our best in these two games, it was a good start to the tourney as everyone was contributing and things were comfortable. After a bye for lunch, we returned to face an athletic and well-organized UMass team. While often talented, these guys are notorious underachievers and so we didn’t really know what to expect; what we got was a team ready to pounce on our mistakes and was disciplined (somewhat a surprise, to me at least). Anyways, in a pulsating game we found our stride and played with the intensity and speed that had been missing so far. Strong B-Mo defense forced UMass into often ‘punting’ the disc downfield (throwing to no one) because their cutters were being tightly guarded by our defenders. Behind this strong D and solid offense we came away with good 13-5 victory. Also of note in this game was a sweet Callahan goal (when you catch an opponent’s throw in their end zone for a score) by Paul Vandenberg, an exciting and important play in this heated match. We ended the day by defeating the Wombats (what an awesome name!) from Skidmore 13-1 in a relaxed and happy affair. So onto the quarters…
We started off strong in the quarters (I believe we were up 3 or 4-1) against Williams on Sunday morning and seemed to assume that we’d cruise to victory. Oops! Sporadic defense and many mental mistakes (including a host of gaffs such as drops and slips) suddenly put us down 10-9 and threatened to end our tournament. A couple hard defense stops and scores gave us a 13-10 victory, but it was a wakeup call for us as were suddenly aware that if we didn’t ‘bring it’ we’d lose. We had to get fired up. We did. After a comfortable, but not spectacular, 15-8 or 15-9 victory (I’m a little hazy here) over Cornell in the semis we ‘brought it’ in the finals against Dartmouth. Our offense was patient and scored with ease and our defense was all-over their cutters and forced them into tough throws and got turnovers. Fueled by the great play of rising stars Ben Saper and Michael Buff, as well as newcomer and goal-scorer extraordinaire Tyler Gage, B-Mo took half 8-2 and won the game 15-7. Mike Vandenberg also contributed a tremendous layout D in this game; a D that was all the more tremendous because we’d never seen him do anything like it before. He almost flew. It was cool.
Anyways, because I’ve got mountains of schoolwork to do, I’ll cut it short and summarize by saying that we won Yale Cup and are quite happy about it. We played great defense at times and many players improved a lot. Our offense, especially around the end zone, was also quite good as we used the break-mark side well and played our game. Our next tournament is Sectionals this weekend at the University of Rhode Island, and we hope to continue to improve.
Best wishes,
Colin