Hopkins: A season in review

The Hopkins season has ended and we failed to become 3 time defending state champions. All in all, the season was a good one in which most began the season all thinking this was a "rebuilding" year. Our team was composed mainly of players who last year lost at State to Como Park in a Chumpionship bracket game. No disrespect to Como Park, but no one will argue that they are contending State Champions any time soon. Maybe I'm still mad that I didn't get a hot dog from them at the Granite City Letdown ... I mean ... Granite City Classic, which was officially the worst tournament I've ever attended.

Story time: games were to begin at 9:00. At 9:10, there was an impromptu captain's meeting in which about 75% of the important information was discussed. Then "is there a girl's schedule?" was asked. "Um ... ", a dramatic pause, "... yeah, I think so, there should be," was the response. Still, no full schedule or maps were out for the boys and the first round was to end at 10:00 because there were 9 rounds in this one day event. That's right, we had 8 games and 1 bye. We began our game at round 9:35. We did manage to complete the game before 10:00, however, with a winning score of 11-0. The rest of the game were not all that different, including the finals against Cathedral in which we won 13-3.

Cathedral went on to be given the 1 seed at the State tournament, forcing a semi final between the two best teams (by far) in the state, Hopkins and Cretin-Derham Hall. We lost. Despite an 8-6 lead at half and receiving with the wind at our back at half, CDH went on a 6-2 run to defeat us 12-10. In the other semi, Mounds View (a team that we easily defeated in pool play) defeated Cathedral. CDH went on to win a well deserved state title in a 15-3 domination of Mounds View.

On the girl's championship game sideline, John Sandahl was asking about whether we had played CDH before (somewhat in reference to the seeding) and I said we had and we lost by 2. I added that we had defeated Cathedral 13-3 two weeks earlier. "Yeah, but there were missing their best player," John said.

"John, we were missing our two best players," I countered.

The next thing he said really surprised me. [closed circuit to Greg: do not read this next sentence] Greg Arenson, our captain, and one of the finest high school ultimate players in the country was standing directly between John and me as John replied, "Eric Johnson is way better than anyone on your team."

Greg says, "Gosh, thanks a lot, John."

I then said, "John, Eric played today and they lost to Mounds View."

"That's true," he conceded. He didn't add anything further and slowly walked away.

This addresses (on the surface) a point I've been making a lot this season: one player in ultimate cannot elevate a team as he can in most other sports (especially the 4 majors). I'll dedicate an entire post to this later.

Back to the item at hand, back in September, knowing our squad, it would have been hard to believe we could come as far as we did, but with such massive improvement from some of our guys, we did fight our way back toward the top of the pack at State. A third place finish was not indicative of our strength and more a product of some really poor seedings as I think everyone would agree we were at least the second best team there. Even at Nationals, we were about the 6th or 7th best team there.

With that in mind, I'd have to call the season a success. At times, the talk nationally was that Hopkins was "a joke" because we "lost everyone that was good" and other similar notions. But we overcame that and picked it up to be in the pack of some National caliber teams. We survived losing a very strong senior class AND a changing of the guard in the coaches' positions. We nearly doubled the number of participants in our program, which necessitated replacement of 3 coaches who left and recruiting one more. I learned a ton as a coach, too much to mention here, but I will outline it in another post. Not to mention, we strengthened an already very strong group of sophomores and juniors, as well as solidified some younger talent (and their learning structure) to prevent future "rebuilding" years. In fact, if you ignored wins and losses, and took only into account everything else that this team is about, this season was probably the most successful Hopkins has had.

And next year, we're not going to have to ignore wins and losses.

The State of High School Ultimate

Hopkins Hurt attended what is arguably the most prestigious high school tournament in the world last weekend: Paideia Cup. From Wikipedia:

To the ancient Greeks, Paideia (παιδεία) was "the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature." (1) It also means culture. It is the ideal in which the Hellenes formed the world around them and their youth.

The Paideia School is a neat private school system that started out as a small school wanting to challenge kids differently than they had been, by introducing new creative and intellectual challenges they hadn't seen elsewhere. The school later began to consume the neighboring housing and converted it to classrooms, as well as constructed their own new classroom buildings, which makes for a very eclectic campus environment.

For the first time in team history, the team lost every game of a tournament, going 0-5. I was thoroughly surprised by what I saw from the other high school teams, with the exception of us and Paideia, the other teams strictly played a field position game. I'm not sure if it was a conscious strategy decision by them or not, but the teams would just huck, huck, and huck. I had never seen a high school team huck as much as our first opponent, Columbia, did. At least not until our second opponent, North Hills. And then, our first game on Sunday against University School of Nashville (Grassburn) was almost comical. If they caught a D near their own endzone, they would at times literally just wind up like a pull and throw it to no one. I'd never played in a game like that before.

Actually, that's not true. It's close to the exact strategy I used to lead my team to back-to-back TCUL championships.

There's only 2 ways to overcome the field position strategy: one, execute the exact same strategy (only better); or two, play a solid possession game. In the windy, rainy, cold condition, possession just wasn't an option. We had to resort to playing the field position game in the Grassburn game, too, only we didn't execute it well at all. By the end of the game, Grassburn had scored 7 of their goals with a combined yardage of 0 yards on those scoring drives.

I'm looking forward to college regionals in a couple weeks to see if this strategy is being utilized more in the college division, too, since the level of turnovers for most college teams is high enough that it would be a very effective strategy. Maybe I can even talk Becky into convincing his team to do it at sectionals as an experiment. I can't imagine that the 6th best team in the Northwoods wouldn't succumb to a field position game (if executed properly).

Speaking of, my predictions for the Northwoods qualifiers are, in order, Carleton, Minnesota, Winona, Olaf, GOP, and St. Cloud.

Go lucky dogs!