1984 Condors
Nationals Semifinalist
(team photo from Santa Barbara Classic)
Back Row:
Brian O'Donnell / JK / Jim Bozeman / Ken Calloway / Tim
O'Donnell
Middle Row:
Barney Drake / Tom Lewis / Bart Merrill / Kasey Clark
Front Row:
Doug Saulter / Bob Austin / Marty Crowe / Johnny Olcott
/ Sean Greening / Ted Roach
Not pictured: TK (injured) / 'RickyDude' Martz / Kent Mayell
"Arguably, this has to be the greatest defensive team ever. Start with JK, Marty Dude, Turbo and myself to shut down any set of throwers. Next throw in TurnFat, SauerPuss, Sean Daddy and R.D. to take out the middles. Then have Kent, Ted, and Schmechel sky on the deeps. Finally, refuse to play anything but straight up man-to-man and you are talking, shut down, turnover imminent, totally dominating D."
You may be wondering why we didn't win Nationals this year if we had such a good Defensive team. The simple answer is the Circus sideline trap. The Circus was our chief competition on the West Coast and while we had better athletes, they were smarter. This was evident in their offense, which was disciplined and based on timing, while ours was freewheeling, based on speed. It was even more evident in their defense which was the sideline trap. The objective of this D was to try to reduce the size of the field available to the opposing offense to operate in by having the marker always force the thrower towards the sideline. The effect of this was to allow the remaining players on D to utilize positioning, instead of athleticism, to a much greater extent and still be effective. Unfortunately for us that year, our offensive team did not play very well against this defense, turning the disc over too many times, allowing the Circus to score while our strong defensive team was off the field. That year we lost 1 game at Regionals, in the winners bracket finals to The Circus, and we lost 1 game at Nationals, in the semi-finals to The Circus. We played the winner of Nationals that year, the St. Louis Tunas, in pool play at Nationals and beat them by 10 points.
Time has shown that The Circus were the innovators. All teams today run some sort of structured offense and always force one side when playing man-to-man defense. The game has always been biased towards the offense and consequently you have seen constant innovations on defense to try and neutralize this. You saw the latest example of this at Nationals in 1998 as the multiple defensive formations utilized by Boston's Death or Glory (DoG) enabled an older, slower team to neutralize the power and speed of the Condors. However, it is this same innovation that made our defensive effort in 1984 stand out. We achieved our success utilizing a now archaic, straight up marking, man-to-man defense, that today is viewed as too difficult to successfully employ.
Keay Nakae
Cal States Trophy
(picture taken June 1999)
