Ultimate

Despite my blog name is Jakarta Athlete, I realized that I have rarely posted anything about my athletic life. So I'm gona do one right here.
On Saturday, May 18th, 2013, the SWA Ultimate team participated in the first ever high school Ultimate tournament ever. Four schools came to play, Bandung International School, Jakarta International School, SPH and SWA. There were 6 teams in total, JIS had 3 teams.

We had trained for about 4 weeks, with only 2 practices that the whole team had come, mostly it was small groups coming on one particular day.
We were the unlucky team, we had three back to back matches. Also the playing field wasn't what we expected. The playing field was a soccer field cut down in half, but it was the long half, not the wide half which we have been practicing on.

Our first match was against Bandung International School, a veteran of Ultimate, they have been training for two whole years. Even though we were up against a great team, we played good defense, blocking them several times, but always give out turnovers. Africa, James, Min Hao and me gave out several blocks and steal, but on offense we were bad. Our long range passing wasn't really effective, and was blocked often. We lost that game 7:0 I think. BIS team captain was the best player I ever saw that day, with amazing speed, stamina, high jumping abilities and quick reaction.
The second match, which we played 5 mins after the first one, was against SPH. They were fast and quick, their passes were good. Most of their players can both throw forehand and backhand. Which made it hard of us to intercept, but we still did on multiple occasions. James played defense extremely well, with lots of block from his basketball skills. Africa could have done better, he was the best player on our team, but he just gets nervous and sometimes hesitates too long. The girls were improving as well, they begin to go after the frisbee but our stamina isn't very good. We lost that match as well, actually, we lost all the matches that day.

After the first two matches, the toll of playing of matches in a row took its toll on us. All of us were tired, and our strategies weren't really working out. Therefore, this game we devised a simple strategy which was kinda effective. James would play defense and stop them from scoring, after picking up the frisbee, he would pass to Africa who was in the midfield. Africa has the best passes and can be very accurate, he would then pass to me at the end zone. Ms. Z gave me the scoring role because I was the best catcher after Africa. Min Hao would be the back up plan, if Africa can't pass to me, he would pass to Min Hao.
That game we played against JIS III, the strategies worked out quite well. I scored one with an assist. Rhein scored too. We lost the match 3:2. But we were improving. Gyu played good defense, he succeed in denying the frisbee from player bigger then him. Bening was injured that game, she twisted here ankle on the dash for defense.
The games after those were fun, because we got used to playing and began to score much more. James played extremely well defense, foiling several great offense plans. Our defense was really our strength, we had great steals and blocks. The problem was really our stamina and the cooperation between boys and girls.
I think Ultimate is a great game, because we are required after each game to gather round with the opponent team and high praise one another, well in our case of praising them was all true, but them praising us was all lies, well kinda lies.