Heads up

The Metro East Region (both men/women) gets an extra bid (3 total) to Nationals next year.

Get to work on your game Haze.

~Q

Summer plans?

Just wondering who's out there reading this blog right now and cares to share their summer plans?

Ultimate plans?

I plan to be playing a bunch of pick up when I can + play on TFKAC (team formally known as crafty) up until I leave for London .... just in time to miss the series....

What are your plans? (anyone viewing can comment of course, just hit up the "comment" button!)

~Q

Callahan vids

Just for kicks:

Will Neff- Michigan- I like this video. It shows that he's a force to be reckoned with and doesn't seem to have horrible spirit (no spikes when he has huge catches)

Jimmy FOster- Wisco- I hear he and Sarah Klein used to date. hubbahubba

Tom James- Stanford- Looks like a nice guy....stanford cutters make nice deep cuts.

Mac Taylor- Colorado- Pretty neat how he didn't play ultimate before college. Funny site pic too.....but i dont like how he spikes before the other team is gone. I mean god knows i love spiking but not until the opponents are a little farther

Georgia Bosscher- Wisco (women)- kinda redunculous....ultimate crush material? mmm maybe...boner check.

Video- Go out and play.

Although this highligh movie isn't even done yet......watch it.....some amazing plays.
Some of my favorite parts:

4:55 breakside flick to the openside?
+ next catch
6:12 spike- ....followed by opponent turning around, picking up disc and nailing the spiker.....i hope a fight ensued...

Captains email

Hey boys,

First off, we just want to say that we are honored to be the captains of this team and that we will do everything in our power to make next year's team as baller as this year. Second, we want to stress this point: next year will not be a "rebuilding year." We are not just going to leave off where we ended but we are going to go even harder. We want each of you to take it upon yourself to push farther than you did this year, because we believe that you can do it. We know that sounds difficult, especially since we worked so hard this year, but honestly, our biggest asset is our intensity and heart and we will keep this tradition.

With that said, go out and play this summer. We cannot emphasize this enough: play ultimate, play ultimate, play ultimate. Summer is a very long time to be away from each other and committing to a summer league/club team will make your summer so much sweeter and will give you a chance to improve as individual players. Some of us who stay in the city may be able to play with each other, but for those of yougoing back home, it's on you to improve your game. If you need help finding a club team/summer league let Qma know, he'll use his googling skills to try to help. For all you new jersey fools, there is a MCUDL and maybe skylandsWherever you go, remember to be active (throw everyday, hit the gym, swim, etc.) Summer should be all about improving your individual Ultimate skills and having fun so that you can come back in the Fall and ball out with your brothers again.

We love this team more than anything and we know you do too. We're both extremely excited for the 2009-10 season and want you to know we will do our best as your captains and teammates to help this team be successful. If you need anything, let us know and we'll be there for you because we know that you'll do the same for us and each other.

we family and we out here.
~q/lu

My Ultimate Career (Part 2)

Took me a little while to get to it, but here is the next exciting installment of "Ryan Schulz: An Ultimate Retrospective." It seems I'm getting increasingly long-winded in this post. Hope you guys can stick with it.

When we last left our young hero, he (me) had just gotten accepted into the prestigious pharmacy program at Rutgers University. Let's tune in an see what happens...

I would like to tell you how Rutgers was, but first, a little diversion back into high school. Right around the time me and my friends started playing ultimate, we also got turned on to volleyball. We started playing intramural volleyball and at one point we won a high-school-wide volleyball tournament. The prize was the school (or whatever club was hosting it) would make tshirts for your team. Being immature teenagers, we had cleverly named ourselves the Coalition Of Cool Kids, which makes just a delightful acronym. Unfortunately, they refused to make our shirts and didn't even offer a different prize. How rude. That's somewhat beside the point though. The real reason for this digression was to convey that by my senior year of high school I was playing just about as much volleyball as ultimate, and I was much better at spiking than I was at hucking. That being said, let's jump forward to Rutgers again.

Arriving at Rutgers, I had already decided that I was going to play ultimate and intramural volleyball. However, once again fate was to intervene in my ultimate career. The practices for ultimate and volleyball were at the same time. In that moment of truth, I remember the decision being remarkably easy. And so ended my volleyball career.

Rutgers Machine Ultimate was a very handler-heavy team. They focused highly on a structured vert-stack offense and good disc movement. With all those handlers around, the offense had a lot of dumps, swings, and dishies. This worked out great for me because I still couldn't throw well and freaked out whenever I had a mark on me. There were a butt-load of competent handlers there to bail me out when I got the disc downfield. If I remember correctly, the team was captained by the great Tim Chang and the infamous Bill Kieffer that year.

The obvious disadvantage of having all those good players was I looked worse in comparison, so when I first joined the team, I did what many rookies do and played extra hard to make sure they noticed me. I sprinted my butt off every point and laid out for everything. I had just learned how to lay out the previous winter when mother nature provided me with 2 feet of snow to practice in. Excited to show off this new talent, I laid out perhaps slightly more than I should have. After one particularly rough lay out at a tournament, I tore a muscle in my lower back. And that is how I got my first major ultimate-related injury.

The problem with those muscles in your lower back--specifically, the problem with tearing them--is that they're the muscles that are responsible for stabilizing your spine. So for about a month I was unable to turn my upper body or bend over. It took about a month and a half before I was able to play again. To this day my back still gives me trouble sometimes. Every once in a while it likes to give me a little twinge of pain to remind me that it could decide to give out whenever it wants to. Thankfully it hasn't done that again...yet.

The good news is my strategy seemed to work. People on Machine started taking notice of me. I had some huge shortcomings as a player still. I didn't really have a good sense of when or where to cut, still had no forehand at all and still freaked out when I had the disc. However, my senior year of high school I had done a program called Air Alert with my ultimate team, which is supposed to increase your vertical by some absurd amount. Coincidentally, it also destroys your knees, but hey, we were young. Who needs knees anyways? I had just gotten the hang of jumping high and after doing Air Alert my vertical was the highest it had ever been, and higher than it ever was again. I was practically flying around. This, combined with my increasing speed, made me a pretty good receiver, and despite my lack of disc skills I started getting in on an inordinate amounts of points for a freshman.

That winter was the first time I had maintained a workout routine in my entire life, so I was getting into alright shape. I was still exceptionally scrawny though. I ran more that winter than I had my entire life before though probably. There was a large parking garage on campus that we would sprint up and down all night. I thought it was a pretty intense workout, at least until this year (we'll get to that later though).

In the end, Machine had a fairly good season. We didn't win any tournaments, and they didn't go to High Tide that year for some reason, but we played pretty well in general. I remember playing NYU at Sectionals that year. I think Rutgers beat NYU like 15-5 or something. We were playing all our freshman and taking it as an easy game. We might have won the Section that year, but regardless, we made it to Regionals. The sports department gave us a giant check for about $200 for qualifying. I got to keep the check.

Regionals wasn't a great experience for me that year. Because of the stiffer competition, Machine played exclusively veterans. I literally did not play a single point the first day. The second day, they let the freshmen in at the end of a game when we were getting crushed. The first point we were in, my best friend on Machine, Greg (Rutgers Quinton), threw an assist to me for a lay out goal. They should have put us in earlier. I think we scored a couple points that game before they took us out. I don't think Machine did too well at Regionals that year.

Around this time, I had really started liking ultimate. I had invested 3 years of my life into it already (and I still couldn't throw a flick! After three years! Seriously?!). I loved playing with Machine, but I didn't care for the university. So it was around Regionals that I started looking to transfer. I applied to all the schools that wouldn't let me in as a freshman, and a few extra schools for good measure. I had pretty much gotten a 4.0 at Rutgers so I figured it would be an easy transfer. Turns out, schools still didn't like me.

I had finished all my transfer applications and was sitting around waiting to hear from colleges when my then-girlfriend, Christine, reminded me about NYU. It had been one of my top choices when I was in high school, but for some reason I had totally forgotten to apply to transfer there. I quickly went online, only to discover that I had already missed the application deadline by 2 weeks. I was a bit sad about that, but Christine insisted that I try to apply anyways. So I threw together an application in a day and sent it in late. A few weeks later, I get a nice fat letter from NYU. Not only had they accepted my application 2 weeks late, but they gave me my decision about 3 weeks early. I think it was the first one I got back.

I didn't feel as strongly about NYU as I had as a senior in high school, so I waited to see where else I would get in before I made my decision. Turns out it was a very easy decision because every other school denied me. Looks like I was NYU-bound. That winter my parents had moved from NJ where I went to high school, out to Arizona. So they flew back out to Jersey to help me move into the city.

Looking back, Rutgers was an alright time. Very different from NYU. I had friends who didn't play ultimate. In fact, most of my friends didn't play ultimate. My roommate sucked though. I promised everyone I would come back and visit soon and I was on my way. Somewhere in my time at Rutgers, I got famous. I don't know how.

Well, it's once again time for me to leave work, so this will end the second installment of this giant post. Stay tuned for the NYU years next.

My Ultimate Career (Part 1)

I am terribly bored at work, so I've decided to post on this blog once again.

I was inspired by Quinton's ultimate history post, so if you ever wondered how Ryan became Schulz Schulz the Schultz Schulz, then this post is for you. If you don't like long, rambling autobiographies, then this probably isn't for you.

Before Ultimate

I've told this to some people, but not many know this about me. I used to be short and kinda chubby. I would post a picture, but no one is ever allowed to see me like that anymore. If you visit my house in Arizona my parents would be happy to undermine me and show you pictures though.

Like pretty much everyone else, when I was little, I played soccer. I guess I played for quite a while, starting when I was about 7 until 7th grade, but never that competitively. I used to be a fullback, but when I got a little faster I became a mid-fielder, always on the side though. My middle school required every student to do a sport after school, so during that time of my life I picked up track and wrestling as well. In track I ran hurdles. Keep in mind, this is when I was still short so I sucked at it. I was pretty awesome at middle school wrestling though. I conveniently fell in the top of my weight class, which made things easier. I got a few gold medals out of that.

In the summer before 8th grade, my family moved to New Jersey and I subsequently stopped playing sports. I probably got fatter. Also, I was a nerd. I was a nerd king though. I had a large posse of people who I could assemble at a whim to play Halo. Did this for the first part of high school. Things began to go awry though when one of my friends, Kevin, began hanging out with a few guys in the grade above us, most notable Ben Tong and Chris Oey. These troublemakers liked to spend their free time throwing around frisbees.

I should note that at this point in my life, I despised ultimate. It was just an annoying game we would play occasionally in gym. I had a slightly better backhand than most of the gym-ultimaters because I always used to play frisbee golf with my dad when I lived in Ohio. But I thought the game was stupid and generally avoided it when I had the choice in gym. Unfortunately for me, Kevin started hanging out with Ben and Oey enough to pick up some ultimate stuff. He slowly managed to get other people from my Halo posse to warm up to ultimate. Before I knew it, I was grudgingly tossing with them in the gym before school every day. And so it began.

The Early Years

This all began during my junior year of high school. Perhaps the most important take-away from this era of my ultimate career is that I sucked. Compared to most actual ultimate players my age, my backhand was pretty bad and I had absolutely no flick. I got pretty good at catching though, and I had one important development during this time.

I got bigger!

I got a hearty growth spurt around junior year and by senior year I had shot up to the impressive 6 feet you see today (5'11.75" if you want to be specific). The grand part about this was that I grew almost entirely vertically, and not at all horizontally. I went from short and chubby to tall and lanky, which did wonders for my ultimate career.

With my new long legs, I could run faster and jump higher. It was fantastic. I still couldn't throw, but at least now I could be a decent receiver. I still couldn't really jump that high though, so I wasn't nearly as good as I would have liked. I certainly wasn't skying anyone back then. It didn't help that most of my friends I played with were 6 foot or taller. But thankfully, another miracle was about to occur.

Up to this point in my life, I had never had a cramp. That was about to change. I was sleeping happily in my bed late junior year, when suddenly I was awoken by a sharp pain in my calves. I writhed in pain for a minute or two, trying to stretch out my ever tightening muscles until it eventually passed and I was able to go back to sleep, slightly irritated. I woke up the next morning to sore calves, and they stayed that way for a few days. However, later that week when we were tossing around, I discovered that I could suddenly jump much higher than before. My epic late-night cramps had somehow unlocked a new level of athleticism for me. Just like that, I became a deep threat.

I should remind you again here, I still sucked at throwing, so a deep threat was the only threat I was for a while. It worked out alright in the setting though. We were the founders of the ultimate frisbee team at our high school, so strategy was not a huge part of our game. Ours mainly consisted of running a bunch of ineffective in-cuts until stall 8 then hucking it and hope we're taller than the other team. Thus, I became one of the 4 or so guys on our team who just ran deep and skyed people. Good times.

Nonetheless, it was a little depressing since most of my team had developed at least serviceable flicks and pretty decent backhands, while I still floundered in my own suckitude. That was pretty much how my high school career looked. Eventually it became time to graduate and move on to college. Among many other schools, I applied to NYU. Then, like many other schools, NYU denied me admission. And so began...

The Rutgers Year

It's about lunch time now, am I'm particularly famished after finishing my last final, so I'm going to take a break now. If I have time after lunch I'll continue with the second part of this epic tale.

What should I talk about?

Hmmm....finals suck.

I'm excited for club.