Wisconsin Wolves

First, a quick word on sectionals. The weather won and the tournament was moved to this weekend. Weather looks to be around 60 degrees, maybe some showers on Saturday, with a light wind. All in all perfect conditions for the pimps. All that other stuff I said still stands.

I feel at some point I'll figure out how to add links to the sidebar, highlight words as links in the text, and add photos so the blog doesn't suck, but that's a summer project, so we'll just deal with it for now. Photos of stuff are on Facebook anyway.

So the subject of the post is Tyke's latest adventure, that of being a professional football player. The season opener was last weekend and I went, not quite knowing what to expect. I had gotten dirty looks from Tyke a couple weeks ago when I said I thought womens football would look like the 7th grade football team I covered for yearbook in 8th grade. After seeing the game, well, I'll say in terms of size and average football experience, the women are probably around that 8th-9th grade level, but they play a lot smarter, which would be expected.

Not that I know a lot about football, but from I saw there were very few sacks/missed blocking assignments or miscommunications between players compared to the middle school football I've watched, which at times resembled a gag reel of screw ups. The weather (snowing, windy, temp around 30) didn't help at all, and the football proved very hard to throw and fumbles from frozen hands were prevelent. Wisconsin has a good QB, so I'm looking forward to seeing what this team looks like when it's warm enough to actually throw a spiral.

In the end the Wolves lost 14-7 to Chicago, mainly due to size difference. The largest player on Chicago was a running back, and she was about twice the size of any of the Wisconsin defenders, so most of the Chicago's plays involved running this woman up the middle, where behind a nearly-as-large O-line she was usually able to gain 4-5 yards. Very hard to stop.

The highlight of the game though was Wisconsin's touchdown, which originally started out as a screen pass to the left for about 3-4 yards. At that point the WR was about to be tackled, but she decided she saw an opening back to the right, turned directly around, ran back to the line of scrimmage and began a dash across the field, allowing another Wolf to throw a viscous block, opening up the entire side of the field for the WR to beat the Chicago defense in a sprint to the endzone. The play was recorded as a 21 yard pass, but the woman probably ran 80 yards. For a second there I thought I was watching Reggie Bush. Very cool.

Tyke unfortunately didn't get to play at all, as despite being the 2nd fastest on the team she hasn't fully transitioned from no-contact ultimate to full-contact football. She's listed as Tight End and Corner back, and as soon as she figures out that whole jamming/getting out of being jammed thing, she'll be a force. Hopefully I'll get to see her wreck havoc as a special teams gunner at the next home game in May against Detroit.