Championships CUUC 2015: The Road to Gold written by: jessie wu photo by: ed kung
This year TULA had their eyes on the big prize right at the start of the 2015 Canadian university season.
Our goal was to win CUUC. We had a strong squad consisting of players that have toured with various elite women’s team as well as experienced players from Team Canada U19 and U23. However, we knew that in order to win gold at CUUC, we would need to develop a deep bench as well as focus on the basics of Ultimate.
We focused on the basics in most of our practice time but also reinforced defensive and offensive strategies. We did well at our first tournament at Steeltown and clinched a spot for CUUC. Regardless, we knew that McGill and Ottawa would be our biggest challenges and we still had room for improvement. We had the opportunity to have several guest coaches coming out to assist with the team, which helped immensely.
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Coming into CUUC, we were placed in a challenging pool with Guelph, McGill and Queens. Guelph had strong handlers and great receivers on their team. In order to stop their deep game we played a lot of zone and zone transition. Against Queens we know we had to shut down Laura Kinoshita as she was the go to player. It was difficult to find the perfect match up to cover Kinoshita because she is so versatile. Queens has great IO break throws, which helped open up their offense.
McGill was our final pool play and we knew it would be a hard one to win. We came out strong from the start and focused on the basic open side defense at first and mixed in some zone transition to stop their deep game. Molly Lewis was a great receiver and we knew we would have to prevent her from going deep. We won our pool and looked forward to day two.
We had a fairly easy game against
Dalhousie for the quarterfinals. They are a new team with a lot of raw talent. We ended up playing Queens in the semifinals again. The game was much tighter and we were trading for the first ten points. Kinoshita and Kerry Lake were the two dominant players we had to shut down.
We were pumped to meet McGill again at the CUUC finals. We knew they would give their all in this game and we knew that past results do not mean anything at this point. McGill put on a great zone in the wind and our offense was too stagnant.
We had to adjust our zone offense and open up our long game despite the windy/snowy conditions. Lauren Kimura was the handler that we could trust during these situations. She has incredible field sense and has a great repertoire of throws.
Our defense was what fired up our Ultimate Canada Magazine -
www.canadianultimate.com
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