Moondoggies – Day 1

As I ask other teams to submit daily reports I figure I should do one for our team as well.

Moondoggies are a team captained by some of the younger players on GOAT (Mike Jones for this tournament) and they’re considered an experiment by outsiders.  Many of the players get to head to tournaments that GOAT wouldn’t go to and thus show their skills while developing through more playing time.

Regionals are where we started and at the time we played hard with a short roster of between 11 and 8 guys depending upon time of the day and injuries encountered.  For the most part the games at that time allowed for a first gelling of players.

Nationals has been a much better story so far with a larger roster (we had expected 12 guys to show up today but ended up with 16) and the results have been much better for it even though our first games don’t show it.

We played Firebird at the crack of noon.  Many of our players arrived minutes before the starting horn and decided that playing a point was the best way to warm up.  Firebird capitalized and kept pace with us for the first few points.  It was bound to happen but our unfamiliar players managed to get themselves sorted out and we started our march.  The first game ended 15-7.

I’d like to say our march didn’t encounter any problems today but ROY decided that they’d punish us for our lackadaisical defense.  Aidyn left several of us (me included) flat footed with his strikes and it wasn’t until the second half that we finally organized ourselves.  With O and D lines set we quickly found ourselves at game point and took the game with our O line.  Credit to the ROY fellows for smartening us up ahead of our next game.

The final game of the day was against Blackfish and it was the one that we were wondering to with regards to toughness.  We had heard mixed reports with some teams claiming they were stacked this year and others that were unperturbed by them.  Our adjustment in the ROY game was specifically for teams like Blackfish and those that we will face tomorrow.  We buckled down and came out strong.  While it felt like we grinded it out a bit we were at half with an 8-2 lead in no time.  Throughout the game we were pumped up and in great spirits due to the jovial atmosphere created by Adrian Yearwood and Andrew Butler.  With a variety of man and zone defenses our D line created and capitalized on the turns to finish out the day 15-6.

All in all we’re feeling great and having more than two lines really helps.  We’re excited to play Mephisto tomorrow and we look forward to what Red Circus and Bloody Gary will help us develop our game in (much like Firebird and ROY forced us to play hard defense).

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