BPL Is Back

After spending the two month off-season meditating and creating JCVD-style training montages atop the rocky outcrops of the Dojo's hillside estate, the kenshi descended once again into the fray of Ultimate combat in the miasma-smothered marshlands of the AJFC fields.

Of course, making training montages doesn't actually mean doing any training, so those Kenshi that didn't take advantage of the excellent off-season training sessions ended up using the first four or five points of Game 1 to get back up to speed. Hence the early scoreline in the first Dojo outing of the season (against UQ Passion) being something like 0-4 Passion...

But once the first Dojo point was on the board, the opportunity to set up a defence wasn't wasted and the kenshi went straight into a choking Zone D formation. This yielded instant results with lots of cheap turnovers near the UQ endzone and easy goals for the Dojo. So despite that heavy early deficit, the Dojo took the first half by a couple of points. Okay - it's not exactly the first time we've seen that happen...

The halftime break gave Passion's maestro Johnny Mac a chance to talk his young chargers through the intricacies of breaking a Zone D, and Passion had a lot more success getting the disc into those little pockets behind the cup (via the traditional BPL zero-wind over-the-top route) and managed to force the Dojo D to adapt into different Zone formations and a few points of Man. By now however the Dojo offence was looking after things very nicely, and before anyone knew it had closed out the game 15-10.

Kudos to Passion for their phat new shirts (goes to show that if you have to rip off a logo you might as well make it a good one) and committed playing style. This is a team we can easily see becoming much stronger as the season progresses, especially if JMac can get them working as a solid, motivated unit - which we're sure he can.

But the Dojo can always depend on the depth of its roster, as was the case in this game. And that brings us to the first Above&Beyond poll of the season, which is ready for voting on the right. It's a bye for the kenshi this Thursday, so the next outing will be on August 27th against the other UQ team - the Lovers.

Going Way Back

Before we get underway with the first round of the brand new BPL season tonight, we thought it might be an appropriate moment to indulge in a little Dojo history. A short pictorial history, to be precise, showing the evolution of the Dojo jersey over the years...

Some say that there is a mythical "original" jersey design out there somewhere, perhaps under the pile of dirty clothes that Watto never gets around to taking back to his Mum's place for a wash, but as far as we're aware the chronology goes pretty much like this:



1. The Cobra Kai Frisbee Dojo (2001 or maybe earlier - 2004)

Very cheap cotton XL-only black & white shirts sporting hand-printed graphics that show an afro-touting, gi-wearing martial artist mid flight. Worn during what were primarily mixed weekend matches where Dojo was, of course, the dominant team. Other teams included The Collective, Boot Camp, and a few others we can't remember the names of right now.

Seems Liam and his buddies over at the fledgling Cobras team have pretty short memories as well, but that's to be expected from what appears to be a bunch of schoolboys (at least Mat and Jimmy still run around like schoolboys, although we can certainly quote Will Churchill as having said that the same isn't true of captain Wetnose...).



2. DojoMojo (2004-2008)

These quality VC Ultimate shirts first saw action at the 2004 National Ultimate Championships in Brisbane, where the Dojo team starred in the second-tier competition, blitzing the division and defeating the Div 1 Tasmanian team, then losing narrowly to the Div 1 Newcastle team early on the last day. DojoMojo went on to destroy their opponents in the Div 2 "Plate" final, a game which included the notorious behind-the-back cross-field throw from Ryan Black to Dave Watson (who appeared to have been the only person expecting it), Watto then throwing the game-winning huck. Dan Walls was holding the video camera at the time and managed to get none of it on film.

These shirts also saw tournament action in the 2006 Nationals in Sydney where Dojo finished a pretty superb 7th. Notable moments were Dojo winning a spectacularly tense local derby against the other Brisbane team in attendance (MBB), and then losing out via Golden Goal to a double-Dowle'd Fakulti team in the quarter final round.



3. DojoMojo (2008 - current)

Earlier in the year, many people voted for this jersey as the best in the world. And at least a small fraction of those people were real, not just fake Google identities that Stefan uses to vote for himself in the A&B poll each week...

Made from silky soft, lightweight Patagonia fabric, these things are an absolute joy to play in. Dan Walls even lays out in his and it still looks fresh. We can't see these being superseded for a very long time.