Chicks Mate

Last weekend some Thunder boys (Phil, Max, Lex, Jackson, Josh, Sali and myself) and some star recruits (Eshan, Sam and Xavier from Chatswood High School, Luke from Thunder 06) were punching bags for the Women's team, the Firetails. This involved playing them in a game to 17.

Let's get things straight. I like women, and I really like women's ultimate.

The Firetails are a way better team than BLAMP (our name when we played them). We managed to pull out a win 17-16 (thanks Lisi). I think a lot of this was due to them not playing at 100% for fear of injury, and the fact that they'd been training extremely hard for the whole weekend. Most of BLAMP had fresh legs.

The Firetails have some very solid players. Though I was very impressed with perennial standouts Diana Worman and Liz Edye, also I'm going to have to single out Jo McClellan and Belinda Kinneally. The juniors were not supposed to be playing at 100% but I'm not (really all that) ashamed to say that marking the latter two really took it out of me. I'm tempted to blame it on my lack of fitness and rib injury making it harder to breathe deeply, but regardless of the reason those two girls were really tough to mark and kept up a good standard of play even though they must have been ragged from the end of the weekend.

On a slightly more important scale, I was really impressed by the Firetails team game. They played a very aggressive straight up defence, and their sideline let each woman on the mark know what was happening without flooding the air with useless yelling. There was a lot of intelligent switching from their end, which I really liked. They really worked us on some iso/sandshoe/feldy type offences, and after about an hour of gametime (after which most of us were out of sprint juice, somewhat negating the physiological advantage we had over some of them) their man defence was pretty strong.

I'm not sure exactly what they wanted to work on, because I'm not in their team - I should have asked! - but I really wanted to see them let loose their long game. They generally did not throw it long against us, unless it was to Mama or a blatant mismatch/no defender. It wasn't a huge downside to their game - what they were doing was working well enough, after all.

T.