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Midlands Warmup Bears 2 Captain’s Report

At the end of week 1 we sent two teams to a midlands warmup tournament, Bears 2 was made up of JLaw, Adam, Win, Calum, Harvey, Cheese, Chris and captained by the dream team; Me and Wrah. Here’s how we got on:

Game 1: Lemmings 1 (1-9 ish)

We hadn’t played together before and had only been back at uni for a week of training sessions and it showed in this game. Over the course of the tournament we wanted to work on 2-1-2 and Organic Stack on O and FSU and the ever-faithful Man on D.
Off the rip we tried 2-1-2 however we weren’t really able to hit the iso and struggled to move much past half way. We sticked to Man D and it worked pretty well, generating turns but we weren’t able to capitalise on the opportunities.
Can’t remember the score but it was a big loss, with our only goal coming from a huge grab by Chris Wrah. Also, Carver got injured by a nasty Lemming and so couldn’t play for the rest of the tournament. 🙁

Game 2: JR (5-7 ish)

They were a much taller team than us so we tried some FSU, putting our one tall player, JLaw, as our deep. It worked well and generated a few D’s. On O, I think we tried 2-1-2 again and got it working a bit better than the first game. We played much better than our firstgame with some fluid O and good zone D.
Can’t remember the score for this either but I feel like it was fairly close.

Game 3: OW! vs JR (No idea)

I thought I’d talk about this game instead because on the youtube video, Hamza and Tobias seemed much more interested in their game than ours.
It sounds like there was a lot of spicy throws that didn’t come off and for at least one point, OW! did a 2-1-2, some would say they chose to do this after watching Bears doing it so well.
Also, we played MINCE and won 9-5 ish, had some pretty good O and D but probably should’ve won by a bit more. P.s. I’ll work on my footwork when bring the disc in on the sideline Hamza. I never really pay attention to where my feet are in those situations but just for you, I will in the future.

Game 4: OW! (3-10 ish)

OW! were a much taller and experienced team than us and knew exactly what we were going to do on O, and had made plans for it.
This was a pretty big loss but I don’t feel like we played that badly, they were just a better team than us.

Game 5: Staffordshire (4-6 ish)

This was a bit of an annoying game, we probably should’ve won it but we had a few too many unforced errors which cost us the match. The D was pretty good though.
The results meant that we were put into a power pool with OW!, Bears 1 and Lincoln.

Game 6: Bears 1 (4-9 ish)

We were pumped to play our other Bears team and really wanted to prove we could give them a good run for their money. We played some really good O and D against them even though they knew our plays, had a height advantage and obviously had better players. A testament to this is that (I think) we traded to about 3 or 4 all, until Bears 1 finally ran away with it.

Day 2

We started the day down two men after Adam had been taken out in our first match of the tournament and JLaw was otherwise engaged on the Sunday (thus reducing our average height by about half a metre). However, what we lost in height we gained in experience and handler ability as our wonderful Women’s captain, Kat, was kind enough to join us for the day.

Game 7: Lincoln (5-3 ish)

Lincoln had just played a match before this so our aim was to play hard man D and tire them out. The first point was really scrappy by both teams but the rest of the points showed how well we can play when we run the 2-1-2 properly. We were able to get big yard gainers to our iso and when that wasn’t on, we ran the weave a lot more fluently than the day before.
This win against Lincoln meant that we were in the middle third and were guaranteed to improve our seeding!

Game 8: Bears 1 (3-11 ish)

Can’t really remember this game but Bears 1 had just come off a tough loss and were looking to get a big win here. Don’t really remember any details of the match but we were still able to put some goals in and push them a bit when we were on D, stopping them getting as big a win as I’m sure they wanted and thought they could get!

Game 9: IOU (3-5 ish)

This was our last game of the tournament, playing for 15th and we wanted to end well. Our O was pretty good but we a few unforced errors again and our D was pretty solid too but they were just able to hit their tall players with some really nice deep shots.
IOU came away with the win meaning that we finished 16th (Bears 1 finished 13th, only 3 places higher!).

Overall, I was really impressed with the improvements we were able to make to our offence over just two days. For example, just watch 0:30 – 0:40, where we were able to quickly discount the iso and fake the dump and 8-06 – 8:26 where we were able to keep the cycle going all the way up the pitch in the game against IOU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrCF5JLBDPs) and 4:40 – 4:55 and 8:29 – 8:40 in our game against Lincoln (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgGOvubKP-g), where we hit the iso for big yard gains and compare it to 1:49 – 1:56 in our game against Lemmings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPpZH4a7S-o) and 3:00 – 3:04 in the JR game (http://youtu.be/XyEERxVEUX0) where we weren’t able to get it moving and weren’t quite on the same page. Our man D was pretty solid throughout and our FSU also showed some improvement over the tournament.
As I said at the start, this was the first time we’d played together as a team, we’d only been back at uni for a week and Bears 1 stole all our tall players, so to finish only 3 places behind our first team was a big achievement, so well done to everyone who played! After 4 more weeks of training and hopefully a couple more tall players to help our endzone offence and zones, I’m really excited for our prospects at regionals and getting that spot in div 2 nationals! #BearToBream

Peter Weightman

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