Let the season begin!

For most college teams the fall was a time to get those rookies up to speed, dust off returners rust, and have your stars be frustrated with the entire process But now the College Regular Season has begun and its time to head to the Santa Barbara Invite.

The SB Invite is typically full of SW teams all trying to figure things out. Most teams recently returned from winter break meaning their few practices have been highly saturated with conditioning & overall ultimate content. So the teams loaded with veterans tend to have the best results at this tournament. For Example; UW, UBC, SDSU, and UC Santa Cruz were semi final teams last year and all came into the season with many returners who could handle the lack of practice.

As for the pools...
http://scores.usaultimate.org/scores/#college-open/tournament/10542

The pools are not that surprising, it's tough to seed such an early tournament where you have no results to base anything on. It's really a guessing game.

Pool A:
Santa Clara is not the roll over team they used to be, I expect they will have a couple of guys who can play and will do their best to make plays. Since they played in the qualifier they are one of the only teams at this tournament who have played actual competition, should help them capitalize on teams with slower starts.

Chico has always been athletic but the past two years they seem to have been approaching the game with more seriousness of purpose. Less flannels & nalgenes of colored beverages and more hard defense, discipline, and big plays. They will be a tough opponent all year.

SDSU had a great run last year but fell short at the end at regionals. They lost several stand out seniors and 5th years and will now be a younger team. With younger teams come typical younger team mistakes. However seniors Dominic Leggio and Steven Milardovich have grown into stand out players since playing for Streetgang this summer and they will be the ones to lead this team and build off last years successes.

Stanford comes off a Nationals Quarter Finals appearance last season and are the top dogs in the pool. They have a program that just keeps winning so you cannot count them out in any year. They looked athletic and energized at Sean Ryan but were a bit too rusty and ended up losing to Cal, I expect they will be much more polished come Saturday.

Pool B:
I believe this is SLO's pool to lose. They are the perceived best team in that pool, I say "perceived" because with no results I could be eating my words later on. Jake Juszak will be ruling the skies and Peter (I don't know his last name) will be touching the disc every other. The only thing that I would be concerned about if I was SLO would be depth, but we'll see if that is an issue.

UCLA returns a lot of guys from last year which, as I stated before, that may be helpful this weekend. They seem to have moved from an handler centric offence that was typical UCLA for a long time, to a huck and make big play type of team. With retained chemistry from last year I would expect them to play well.

Santa Cruz is the opposite of UCLA by not retaining anyone, or at least not anyone of note. They are well coached so they should be prepared at the least.

Cal-Poly Pomona won the qualifier so they will have a lot of confidence working in their favor. We'll see if they can turn that into W's.

In the end I think the SLO vs UCLA game will be the best game of this pool.

Pool C:
Cal is in the same league as Stanford in my opinion, looked good at Sean Ryan, they have an army of guys who are athletic and make plays. They have a system they rely on that they know and trust, and with James Pollard as their guy they are the favorite in this pool.

Tide is always tough at their home tourney and since most of their guys played Condors they should be a team with established chemistry.

Not sure what to expect from Arizona or Long Beach. LB will probably have a skeleton roster while Arizona will have some athletes to huck to.

Pool D:
This pool I have no idea what to expect from any team. UW went to Nationals last year but who have they returned? They went to the finals of this tourney last year and I would assume that they expect to be their again. Davis is young but hungry and with Kevin Cissna coaching they should play close to their top potential. UCSD has a lot of good players and are well coached but they are young and who knows how they will respond to adversity. And who knows anything about Williams, quite the trip to make all the way from MA. I'm thinking no one wins this pool outright, two teams will finish 2-1 and someone takes it on Point Dif. This is absolutely the most interesting pool of the tourney.

The SW should have a good amount of parity this year and the results here should be interesting. But in the end the cream always rises to the top, so expect the semis or even the finals to be a potential Regional Finals match up.

The boring prediction is obviously Cal and Stanford in the finals but SLO should be at least in the semis and we'll see about the rest.

But my "take it to the bank" prediction is that Santa Clara will avenge their SB Qualifier Finals lost to Pomona this weekend, go ahead and make the call to Vegas. Easy money.

Sweating!

Did a work out yesterday with the Blade. Took a page out of Pumba's crossfit book.

As many rounds as you can complete in 20 minutes

5 pull ups
10 push ups
15 squats
20 sit ups / crunches

I completed 10.5 - crushed the Blade!