Coach Flip Naumburg's Journal

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

We leave tomorrow for Utah; Logan, Utah to be exact, the home of Utah State University for the Rocky Mountain Lacrosse Conference Championships. The postseason officially begins for us at 4:00 on Friday when we, as the #1 seed will play the Utah Utes, the #4 seed in the second of 2 semi-finals. The early 1:00 game will match, of course, the #2 seeded C.U. vs. # 3 BYU. This two-day tournament is annually a very interesting little affair because of the quality now of the top 4 teams in the conference.

SIZE ISN’T EVERYTHING

Our conference is in fact so small that we do not have enough teams by national rules to have the champion qualify for an automatic berth in the national tournament. We have five teams and you need six. In a national sense and for Dallas, this RMLC Championship means very little. I find this somewhat ironic, however, because when you look at it, we play in what one must consider a premier MDIA power conference. The RMLC has currently 4 teams in the top 12 of the national rankings. Three of those are in the top five, and even though we only have the five teams in our conference’s A Division, four of them are likely to go to Dallas.

HATERS

Assistant coach Alex Smith is a voracious reader. He reads a lot of the electronic bulletin board stuff on line, and fortunately writes much less of it than he used to. Anyway, he tells me from time to time about things people say about us. There is sentiment out there that somehow we, CSU did not deserve to be the #1 seed for the tournament this week. I'm not sure why exactly. There was some kind of tie-breaking procedure that determined it all anyway. I had no idea if we could even "get it back" (we actually never had it) after losing to BYU a week earlier, but that was part of the goal I had set for us before we played C.U the other day. We had to beat C.U to have any chance to get the #1 seed of course, but I really had no actual idea at the time about what it would take for us to be the #1 seed. Truthfully all that stuff is too complicated for me. It’s like reading directions. It’s out of my league. I have to have ‘people’ to figure this stuff out for me.

I just assumed that ‘if we did good enough’ we would surely rise from the rubble and get to play in the late game of the day, which is all I really wanted anyway. The #1 seeds almost always get the late game, and I like that. I didn’t know then that it would all come down to how B.Y.U., C.U., and C.S.U. had done against U.C. Santa Barbara, a team that each of the three had played during the course of the season. It is called having a ‘common opponent’. It almost seems funny to me, but that is how it all actually sorted out, and we were the only one of the three teams to beat the Gauchos, so we get the nod for our conference championships.

Since BYU, CSU, and CU had been busy beating each other I guess it does make some sort of sense to go out of conference to break a tie.

So anyway, according to Alex there are people out there who hate us enough to actually go on line and write about this stuff, and have the opinion that we for some reason don’t deserve to wear white (#1 seed) on Friday. Who really does care this much, and where is the injustice of the tiebreaker I ask? I thought the purpose of those things was to achieve some kind of random answer in the seeding process in the case of ties or other weirdness. Oh well, it’s nice to know that the players might come and go, but I remain the most hated coach in the MDIA.

YOUTAH

I have no doubt that the Utes of Utah will be in red and gunning heavily to upset us. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose. They have the capability to beat us just as much as the other ‘big two’ do. Utah has become a very solid program over the last five years.

For Utah, unless they beat us it could be the last game played under their coach, Moses, I mean Mason Goodhand, who has led them from the lost desert of lacrosse, and on to the Promised Land (a berth in Minnesota in ’05). They (Utes) are believers in the teachings of this Mason, and I know they will give us all we want and more unless we handle business from the opening whistle.

OUTLAWS TO THE END

Assistant Coach Alex Smith can't come to Utah with us. We will have to fill his void by pulling together a little extra. Alex is getting a chance this weekend to tryout for the new Denver Outlaws team of the outdoor professional MLL. Me and this team wish him much luck and ninja skill.

GET ON THE BUS, baby!

I’m not a big 10 hours-on-the-bus guy, but you do what you have to do. You go wherever you have to go. You bring whatever tools you need to get a job done. There is a task at hand. There is a silver and wood thing out there in Utah that I want to pirate or extricate from the Provo premises where it currently resides, and I want to bring it back to Fort Collins. I want it to sit right next to me on the bus.

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