Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Sick Day Post....

So, I am sitting here at home sick with my washing machine still in a dismantled heap in the basement, and me losing a days worth of work to sleep off a nasty cold.

Yep, that means time to update the blog. It has been a while.

MIT is currently in IAP. I have no idea what it is, but apparently only about half of the students opt to do it, and the half that are here, take a weird gaming class where they essentially spend every waking and non-waking hour programming to compete in some weird virtual game. Lame.

We also are having a fairly bad winter with lots of ice and snow keeping us indoors. Indoors is bad because we don't get any time (1 hour 2 Xs a week). Some parent of an MIT student just spent a lot of money on a new nexturf soccer field on the inside of the outdoor track. The next logical step would be for them to put a bubble over it so people can run indoors and play indoors. ..... maybe next year. As for now, it sits, unplowed. And although the team has offered to shovel it in return for some field time on it, the athletics department declined the offer.

So, for now, we are stuck doing track workouts, weight lifting, shuttle runs, and then as many drills as you can smash into 1 hour of time on about 80% of the available space in the area inside of an indoor track.

I am working on getting the handlers to be aggressive with their upline dump cuts. I am also working on getting the cutters to respond to those cuts with deep cuts for them. If we are aggressive with the upline cuts, we will either get a lot of upline dumps, or a lot of non-contested swings. If we get the upline throws, I want the handlers hard work to be rewarded with a viable deep option. I am hoping this will increase our deep look percentages and completions as well as opening up the underneath game.

I think it is hard for cutters to get a feel for how easy it is to throw a huck making an upline cut as opposed to hucking from a handler spot. Cutters normally have worse marks and more separation than handlers do allowing most of their throws to be easy. Handlers are rarely more than a couple steps open on their defender, and the defender is relatively fresh to put on a hard mark. Getting it upline with all your momentum with no mark is like christmas, even for a shitty deep throwing handler like myself - you have to try really hard to NOT complete that look no matter what dog meat you normally put up.

I am trying to get the team ready for vegas, but I am afraid that by the time they go there, they won't have played on more than a 40X 40 yard patch of indoor space for only an hour at a time.

Will catch up later, but time to sleep.

-josh

1 comment:

Mackey said...

Ah yes Vegas.

Otherwise known as "my God, you can run so much faster with cleats!" and "why is this sun so tiring/why is my skin burning?" for many a NE team.

That and the first spring break tournament always have this wonderfully long learning curve--if we're lucky, we get back to a decent level by the end of the tourney...but not always.

Good luck!