Centex

Centex writeup (by Dibs)
As Winter quarter finally came to an end, and glorious spring break started; the squids traveled to their annual spring playground: Texas.

Centex this year was run in the same format as the Stanford Invite. We knew almost all of our games beforehand:

Saturday - Arkansas, UNC, Harvard, Illinois
Sunday - Minnesota, Iowa, Final Placement Game

Splat was nice enough to house the team on Friday night, so we arrived to the fields nice and fresh on Saturday morning ready to play. After 45 minutes of warming up, our opponents (Arkansas) were nowhere to be found. Finally, 10 minutes before the game started, they showed up with a pretty small squad of about 11 or 12 guys. They had 2 real handlers and two fast recievers. My favorite play call of theirs was "blacks" where their two fastest players just went deep for a huck. After trading the first few points with them, we clamped down on their huckers and stopped the easy deep throws, and maintained our offensive poise to win the game 13-9.

Game two was against UNC's Darkside, who I've never played against before. I think the relative ease of the first game lulled us into a false sense of security and we stared the game with a three point deficit. Our offense finally locked down by switching to stack, and we got some turns back on D to make it a close game. At one point, after a particularly long and frustrating point, Bobble spit on the ground after scoring, which really pissed the UNC coach off. Someone pushed Bobble, I pushed the guy back, then someone else pushed someone else and everything escalated. Both sidelines cleared, Coach Stu was up in their coach's face and finally some nearby observers intervened to break it up. The rest of the game was played with observers, and we really stepped our intensity up. On double game point, Pumba had a great layout catch to keep the point alive, and we put the score in to win the game 12-11.

After a tiring and emotional game against UNC, we had trouble focusing for the next game against Harvard (who, by the way, had the ugliest uniforms I've seen). Harvard's play reminded me of Stanford. All their guys were smart and moved the disc quickly around the back. They rarely made a mistake and went up on us by 4 to start the game. Once we settled down we started to get some rhythm on offense. After half the wind picked up, and both teams began to massively overshoot target receivers on downwind points. They chose to throw a force middle defense on our stack, which gave us a couple easy hucks for scores. Even with these points, Harvard handed us our worst loss of the year to this point: 8-13.

The last game of the day was against Illinois, who didn't really come to play. They looked lazy on D and gave us some easy points on O. We found that as long as we cut hard on offense, we were able to score easily every time. We opened up the rotation a bit and even had some (unsuccessful) fish points. We won 13-7.

We found out what true southern hospitality was on Saturday night. Didj's (one of our fish) parents live in Austin and gave us all pads to sleep on, great food to eat, Gatorade, and breakfast tacos in the morning. This combined with the bye, meant that most of us felt nice and fresh in the morning.

The wind was strong when we got there and stared our game against Minnesota. Besides that, I really don't know what to say about the game. We turned the disc over 8 times in the first half and were down 7-1 at halftime. We played really really bad, but they also never gave the disc back. I've never lost a game this bad on Ice. We managed to scrounge up two more points before the game ended, with us losing 3-13. Ouch.

Our next game against Iowa was tough. We had to take a deep breath and try to regroup from that ass raping. We focused on keeping our throws solid and improved our offensive efficiency. On D, our young 4man cup started generating D's. The Iowa handlers looked scared when our cup was on, and they kept trying to jam it through, which didn't work. We won this game 13-10.

In our final placement game, we were pitted against Kansas. They were a very similar team to us, and scored most of their points by hucking to tall athletic receivers. The 4 man cup seemed to be working pretty well against them, so at double game point we put a young cup line in. They got the turn twice, but were unable to score. We lost the game 12-13.

So we went 4-3 in our last tournament of the year. This gives us a final regular season record of 20-8. In the last couple of seasons, we barely broke .500, so I'm glad we stepped it up in the regular season this year. Sectionals is 2 weeks away, and we're excited to start our journey toward nationals.

Dangle lives in Houston, so he let us stay with him on Sunday night on the way down to Surfside.