so early sunday morning the bread line missed their bus and by hook or
by crook found their way to tufts for a very windy b-team tournament. 
we had four pool play games...  which went as follows:

harvard 8 brown 1:
in an upwind downwind game surprisingly the only goal we gave up was an
upwinder.  brown sent two teams to the tourney and so they were a bit
thin.  their zone offense was way too conservative and so the game went
something like dump-dump-dump-dump-dump-swing-dump-turnover harvard
scores.

harvard 11 wentworth 5:
another upwind downwind game.  wentworth only has one good player and so
they too had a little trouble with our zone.  another easy win for the
bred-line.

yale 9 harvard 3:
yale had a very small team of only 8 players who were willing to make
the long treck up here that morning...  unfortunately several of the
people willing to do so weren't exactly their usual b-teamers.  we had
switched to the field going the other direction and so were in a cross
wind.  they had a lot of experience with throwing in the wind and we had
a lot of trouble getting it off the sideline with their trap zone.

tufts 10 harvard 9:
again on the crosswind field.  we had a lot of trouble with their zone
in the beginning of the game, but our man to man defense really stepped
it up quite a few notches.  this was also true of the end of the yale
game, where we forced a ton of turnovers.  tufts took half 6-3 and then
scored the first point of the second half 7-3.  we then came back to 8-7
when the time cap came on.  we scored to tie it 8-8 and then took the
lead 9-8.  we had a good shot at the endzone from about ten yards away
but couldn't put it in.  they scored to tie it 9-9.  then they got a
great pull from their really obnoxious semi-ringer type person, who was
as much as a jerk as we expect a tufts player to be.  (the rest of their
team was nicer and even apologized for that guy a few times.) and forced
a turn on the goaline.  we dug in for another goal line stand, they
tried for a break and we forced a bad through which floated way up in
the air.  unfortunately two people saw it and sprinted towards the
floating disk.  one was me...  the other was an over 6-footer for
tufts...  i actually got high enough to hit it as he was catching it,
but height won and tufts came down with the game.  a really great
intense game.  the comeback took much of an hour because we were having
offensive troubles and so forced half a dozen turns on every point with
some of the best hard team man-D i've seen harvard B or any other team
play.

then came the cross pool game

MIT 11-10:
officially this was a hard fought down to the wire great struggle...
in actuality ken was only able to win 2 of the roshams against MIT
before they won their first one (we needed 4, since they suposedly still
wanted to play), and so that was that.

anyway it was a great tournament and a lot of people stepped their game
up to a new level.  i saw a lot of people making plays which they hadn't
made before.

in particular several things stand out (sorry if i forget anything):

dennis and john lai's handling:  we didn't have so many experienced
handlers because of john "i'm too drunk to come to the tourney" barkett,
ken "a tufts alum layed out through me yesterday" weinstein, and charlie
"i'm too sick to talk let alone play very much" cheever, not being able
to play as much as we had hoped.  this meant the handling burden was
passed to our rookies a lot, and they really made some great chilly
throws in hard zone situations, and generally were quite impressive. 
john's break the mark to throw to the wing was virtually unstoppable and
was the key to our zone offense for much of the yale game.

arthur's man defense: there were points in which i probably couldn't
count the number of layout D's he got on just that point.  we all
already knew he's faster than us, but he's definitely learning to
harness that into a lots of "i can run faster than you and layout for
the D".

everyone else's man defense: just about everyone got more D's then they
ever have before.

john lai's patented jump up and do a two handed overhead spike D.  he
may be no taller than me, but he's in line to do a new version of david
robinson's "this is my house" comercial.

ken's gutsy i can't really walk but i can run faster than you and get
the D performance in the tufts game.

those are the ones i really remember, but everyone else played
marvelously, our zone looked good, and our man looked great, and we
played very hard and out hustled our opponents.

thanks again to, Charlie, Kern, Ben, Dennis, Kevin Connor,
Hackbarth,Mark Hill, Andrew J., andrew L., Eoghan, Arthur, Ken, Phil,
and John Lai for a great tournament to end the bred line's fall season.

noah