Coach Flip Naumburg's Journal

Tuesday, May 9, 2006

USLMDIA NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS ROUND 1

The humidity number was only exceeded by the heat index today.  It was all ninety something.  This thing (tournament) looks like it will become a war of attrition.  In some ways it always has been because a team has to win 4 games in 5 days to 'do it', but in this kind of what I would call 'lousy heat' it becomes all that much more important to keep it together, both as individuals and as a team.  There is no way to 'protect' your team from this kind of heat.  It gets all over you the second you vacate the indoor air conditioning.  There is no place to hide.  Shade is a joke.  That is no help.  It is as if the heat doesn't really come from the sun, but rather from somewhere below your feet, someplace like maybe Hell.  

They have tents available to rent.  'We' don't want us to stay out there one minute more than is necessary so we are not doing that.  They have people on sight who will tape you for $2 a digit.  That doesn't seem or feel so 'big time' to me.  One coach described it as "bush league" and I must admit I agree.  Why did we leave Saint. Louis by the way?

CSU 18  - TEXAS 6

We got off to a pretty good start today, but it was not an easy day.  We led 6-1 after one and 13-3 at the half.  I tried to get deep in the bench early and that went well, at least for a half.  I wanted to play a lot of people for depth charge purposes, but I also knew coming in that we might have very little chance for some of them to play in a game while here.  I want them all (players) to get into the game at some point, and that can be hard with the level of competition we are facing.  There will be no "garbage time" this week.

A lot of players (14) had points for us.  As usual we had a great assist to goal ration (13 of 18 were assisted).  This has been a good quality that has repeated itself often with us.  It is a trend and a team characteristic that I like very much.  Texas on the other hand had six goals and zero assists.  That causes me some defensive concern.  I don't want to get "matched up".  I want our defense to be able to deal with any individuals we encounter on a game day in a team way.

We dominated the statistics against Texas.  For example, we failed only one clear all day (25/26), and we unleashed over twice as many shots as the Longhorns did (57/28).  And, of course, we had three times as many penalties called against us (6/2).  I know, that is not winning a category, but 6 is more than 2.

We lost a little energy in the second half.  Texas played us even (2-2) in the third quarter. I got more focused on some other things, and I'm sure that didn't help.  We have a couple of injuries of concern.  For one, we lost an important player, Jack Genadek (#47 – M – 2007) to a broken leg, which sucks big time for him, but he has been such a reliable and versatile cog in our little train, that losing him right now is cause for some concern for all of us.  The truth is that we must just suck it up, 'bring on the next guy' and move on to tomorrow.  I don't want to reinvent our team.  At the same time we need to know what and who we are going to plug in and we took care of that at our nightly 10:00 p.m. meeting.

Hopefully everyone will sleep the good sleep and wake up fresh.  We have the late game again, but it almost seems hotter at 4:30 than it was at 1:00 for the early set of games.

Many played well for us today.  Many others know they didn't quite bring the game today they had hoped.  Fortunately we have survived to the quarterfinals, and we still have a chance to get better as a team every day.  That is my/our goal.  We want to do everything as one thing, do it right, and then move on to the next play, the next minute, or the next whatever.  The fight is definitely on.

Teams left are our opponent tomorrow, a very 'hungry' Arizona Wildcat team, Michigan, Sonoma, Cal Poly (sleeper), BYU, Santa Barbara, and Colorado.

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