Tournament 3 - Lesson 2 - Mismatch trouble

We lost one game last weekend to Snipe (or Tux as many of my teammates prefer to call them). In terms of the two teams I think we were evenly matched up in most departments, but they had two women that were better than ours and made the difference. That and my team forgot how to beat a zone in no wind. I don't know if this post is so much a lesson learned, but I've been mulling over it since the loss.

Pictured Above: Seb pulling down a blurry grab at ULW'07 in a game between the Magic Alliance and the eventual winners Godzilla (picture from Shawn Lee).

As described, the situation is you have two strong women who are dominant. The opponents strategy is to isolate these women in the stack using a horizontal. We tried using a zone (to varying degrees of success) since that is a strategy to hide mismatches, but zone is normally meant for windy conditions or very poor handling teams and this was not the case.

I've come up with a few options to change the flow of the game:

1. Mismatch a man to one of the strong women. The opponents will likely move the other gender mismatch into the stack, but you could counter by playing a zone like defense where 3 people cover the handlers (regardless of gender) and four people cover the stack cutters (regardless of gender).
2. Give the in cuts so the dominant players are handling. We tried this, but these were strong female players all round and this had little affect.
3. Force straight up so loopy hucks go out that a defensive man might be able to D. We did this a few times and it had varying success.

The reality is we lost because we didn't put it together on our own offense. We got a fair number of Ds. They played well and used their advantages successfully. I just wonder if we could have stopped their run earlier and turned the game around. The clear mismatch is a tough one to deal with, but in general the mismatch will get the disc, but the goal is to let them get the disc in the least threatening spots.

PJ