Yiding

My memories of Yiding Hou:

Yiding is quiet and rarely asserts himself.  If you aren’t looking for him you will often miss him.  The first thing I remember was everyone on NUT yelling “Ding Dong” when he made a good play, I thought to myself “that was pretty racist.”

I remember learning that Yiding was only a sophomore and being super pumped, in my mind I was thinking about how perfect it was that Yiding could be a feature OLine handler for 3 years.  When Yiding said he wasn’t ready to play on the OLine and being furious.

At Chicago Invite Walden gave me a hard time for not having Yiding on the OLine.  He commented that Yiding had the best composure and fantastic release points.  When I tried to explain to Waldo that Yiding didn’t want to play OLine he retorted “who’s the coach of this team?”

The summer of 2013 Yiding was a practice player for Chicago Club.  By Heavyweights he had worked himself onto the roster.  He had two D’s in his first game for ChiClub.

In 2014 Yiding was nominated captain, I asked him in front of Jack and Ian if he was ready to play a big role or if he was going to say “I’m not ready” again.  Yiding assured us he was ready to step up for NUT.  2014 brought Max Shepherd.  With Max and Ben on the field and a plethora of athletic cutter Yiding was able to remain a passive Frisbee player.  He continued to defer to the others.  At one practice I tried to get Yiding doing more in the offense, we tried to set up a Yiding dominator and after trying it once just to have it not work out Yiding bagged it.

After Sectionals most of NUT walked away from losing to Illinois thinking “we were close we can get them next time.”  Yiding was the only one I remember who had any thoughts about how to adapt.  Ben and Max couldn’t get open in the endzone sets against the Illinois defenders, so in practice we started working on bringing cutters out to handle in the endzone.  Using Yiding’s plan our endzone conversion was far better at Regionals and that led to a W for NUT.

Yiding hurt his hand in the game to go at regionals.  I don’t even remember how it happened, but I remember not having him.  After we lost Yiding stood alone, head hung, clutching his hand.  Often people joke about how robotic Yiding’s personality is; I have never been able to see what they were talking about.  To me Yiding was a driven, passionate, and caring teammate.  Seeing him in this moment was a difficult sight to take in.  He had placed an enormous weight on self-blame on his shoulders and that weight could be felt just by looking into his eyes.

Yiding got cut from Machine for the second time in the summer of 2014.  The feedback was the same as always, he deferred to others.

In 2015 it was obvious that Yiding could no longer hide.  If Yiding hid in the offense then NUT was going to be really bad.  I was worried that Yiding would fail to assert himself until Steel City.  At that tournament he and Champe were able to hold almost every O point.  They dragged a rag tag group of doggertons that couldn’t force a turn all the way to a respectable 5^th place finish.

When Champe got hurt at Warm-Up I was getting stressed about how we would ever score.  I was with BK, who was also out injured, talking about how Yiding would have to step up in a big way.  BK said, “If anyone can shoulder a big weight it’s Yiding.”  I remember being annoyed at BK, to me it was like he hadn’t been paying attention for the past two years as Yiding stood in the shadows of teammates who weren’t as good as him.  Belief is a muscle and it has to be exercised.  Yiding balled.  He looked like a man on a team of boys.  We didn’t win any game but we didn’t have any bad margins, mostly because Yiding was able to run Feinberg a ton of times and was connecting for goals.

At Easterns Yiding thanked the team for choosing this tournament over spring break.  He barely said a sentence before he choked up.  That was a huge moment to me.  That was the final straw of confirmation that NUT made the right decision.  Going to Easterns had made Yiding happy, and no quantity of upset sophomores can outweigh the reward of making Yiding happy.

At Regionals against Michigan NUT got a D on universe and moved it a bit before Champe called a timeout.  The first thing that got said in that huddle was Yiding, “I love you guys,” – so much for a robotic personality.