Reflections from 2013

            The first obstacle in coaching a brand new team is the tip toeing in period.  In college ultimate teams have their own culture, idea of how ultimate should be played, and personality.  For me to come from an in state “rival” team and just start asserting myself would have been catastrophic for my relationship with the team.  So I resigned myself to wading in.  During that period there were a lot of things that rubbed me the wrong way, but I held my tongue because I tried to respect the possibility that there are different ways to play ultimate.  Here at the end of the season there are several things I have beef with, that never looked clear to me.

            I felt like at the very start of the season we we’re rushing to teach people everything.  I guess Northwestern is in a tough position because they start school about a month after everyone else, and then they have their first tournament within the first 2 or 3 weeks of school.  So they panicked and tried to teach everyone how to throw, cut, force, stack, and zone in this narrow window.  I understand the desire to want to do well at tournaments, but my opinion has and always will be to punt the fall.  The fall college season is supposed to be a time for Freshmen/Rookies to learn how to play, and for returners to work to getting to the next level.  There is plenty of time to teach people to play and dig back down to the foundation of the game, and I think it’s important that people slow down and pace themselves.  An incoming freshmen shows up to the first ultimate practice because he wants to play, not because he wants to be bashed over the head with a whole bunch of information, so I think it is on the leadership to let them play.  The first 3 weeks every practice should look very similar.  There should be 4 small fields, games are played on 3 of them and a single drill is run on the 4^th.  We do the same drill for an entire week.  Then after that week we move onto the next one.  After those first 3 weeks you should have been able to zero in on the skills you reckon are most important and you should have also given young kids enough time to actually synthesize what is going on. 

            I think people overvalue young throwers.  If a freshman comes in and is capable of throwing the disc people quickly think to themselves, “this guy could be great”.  The truth is that the really athletic kid who no one notices because he can’t throw and doesn’t understand how to take advantage of his athleticism yet is going to be far more valuable.  For smaller programs who are trying to get to the next level, athletes are at a premium.  You will find no one who will argue with you about whether defense wins championships, but for some reason everyone wants to make decisions on the Ateam based on offensive ability.  We can teach someone to throw competently in about 5 weeks (100 throws a practice x 3 practices a week x 5 weeks = 1500 throws).  It takes about 18 months to make difference in someone’s athleticism.  I am in favor of spending the first 3 weeks teaching and working on just defense.  I think in an ideal world people are prioritizing their defense, and they don’t have the massive distraction of not being able to throw holding them back from making an impact on a game.

            Watching UChicago and how successful they are with what I feel is a small amount of natural talent I came to the realization that being focused on a few things all season is far superior to trying to have everything.  There were times at Northwestern where it was like, we need to be able to do this, this and that, we need to have this or we need to try this new thing against this team.  Building all these tools really detracts from the potential sharpness of any one skill.  UChicago worked all season on throwing through marks, keeping the disc centered and playing man defense.  They were a really tough matchup because everyone on UChicago was focused on what they were doing (which is a very small amount), and Northwestern kept looking at this artificially large back of tricks and wondered what we should do to stop Chicago.  It was tough because it was like, well clearly this is what Chicago is and even though we know what they are doing they are still being successful, so what is Northwestern good at that will be successful no matter what?

            I need to find a way to coach people into having an edge.  There is a fine line between being an inappropriate jerk and having a competitive swagger.  Somehow there needs to be a way to create a culture where people are out to kill within the bounds of the game.  I think running 1v1 cutting drills all day are where I will start.

Order of Skills Coached

            I sat through the USAU Coaching clinic on April 20^th, and although I was more than satisfied with the ethics portion of the clinic the actual coaching strategies portion rubbed me the wrong way.  The question posed was to rank the order in which you would teach a brand new player ultimate.  Here is the list I came up:

Marking

Downfield Defense

Cutting

Catching

Throwing

Apparently I am crazy for trying to teach defense first.  My reasoning is that if you show someone how to mark, they can go out on the field and immediately make an impact and help their team win.  If you then teach them to play defense off the disc they can make an even bigger impact on the game.  I believe it takes about 3 players to score, but it takes 7 to play defense.  If there is even one hole in your defense then the offense can just exploit it and score.  Marking is also the biggest place that a lot of ultimate players don’t play with very much energy.  If you teach it first and you stress how valuable it is for the team then maybe people will start to take pride in the way they mark and the way they help their team win.

The USAU list had Catching and Throwing first.  They argue that everyone has caught something, and that playing catch is the essence of the game and that as soon as you share that with people then they are on their way to becoming good players.  In my mind this is completely fine and I do agree that it is the essence of the game and that’s cool and all.  If I were going to teach my children to play basketball the first thing I would show them is how to shoot.  Shooting is the essence of basketball and it is very easy for someone to go outside by themselves and shoot, ideally creating a love for the game in that player, but how many times does someone get to shoot in a basketball game?  In a game of basketball each team has a very small number of guys that they rely on to score points.  Usually 1-2 guys do all the heavy lifting in terms of shooting.  This is the actual strategy of the team, get the ball in the hands of your scorer and let them take shots.  In Ultimate a lot of teams have a group of guys whose job it is to take shots.  Usually there are about 3 guys on the field for each team who are looked to too make throws. 

So what is the fastest way to find playtime in basketball?  Is it to get good at shooting (the skill that takes the longest to master)?  Or is it by playing defense, boxing out and getting rebounds?  These latter “hustle” skills take way less time to get good at, and being valuable at these things helps you get playtime as a young player.  In ultimate if a young kid can play defense, put on a mark or is good at helping on jump balls then he is going to get more playtime and playtime is going to get him better at the overall game.

During the clinic I was asked if my method was going to make people better role players or better ultimate players.  I was pretty disappointed by this question, because first of all it’s not like I am against teaching people to throw.  As a coach I would definitely get to it just a little bit later.  In college you have about 6 months to teach people to play ultimate, I feel like a lot of teams kind of panic in the time window and try to teach people ultimate in the first 3 weeks and then hope that they get good over the next 5 months.  Patience is the name of the game here, introducing ideas slowly and systematically is the best way to avoid players getting overwhelmed.  Just because you take the first 3 weeks to ingrain defensive ideas in them, doesn’t mean that you’ve doomed them to be role players for the rest of time it just means you take the next 3 weeks to start introducing offensive ideas.  I also didn’t like this claim of me making role players, because if you taught someone to throw and catch but slacked on everything else then that person would be a role player who can throw well but might struggle to play D and to get open which are huge parts of the game.

The official USAU list goes:

Catching

Throwing

Marking

Pivoting

Cutting

Downfield Defense

Force

Stack

It is a pretty solid list, but at the end of the day I feel that if you needed to maximize a young players impact on a game then that player would need to know how to mark and play defense.  With those skills a coach can justify giving him lots of play time while also taking all the time in the world to work on the throwing and catching finesse skills of the game that take years to get good at.

Scrimmaging

Almost every team in the country runs too many drills during practice. Practice is the only time an entire team is together. Playing ultimate requires at least 14 players. Players should be working on skills on their own time for the most part.  Only when an overwhelming number of people need to work on the same thing does a drill become appropriate for a practice. There is probably a strong case to be made for drills as warm-ups, to get throws and catches ready. However, many teams have opted for simpler partner throwing to begin (see: circle drill). 

The scrimmage is far more versatile than most people give it credit for. There are countless ways to tailor a scrimmage towards a team’s needs. A short list of examples would be; disc starts on sideline, half sized endzones, double score, break side scores worth double, focus on no around, focus on no inside, focus on deep help, must throw a break before a score, must complete five unders, etc.

Very few players make individual gains during team drills. For the most part the benefit is that everyone is on the same page (as long as the drill simulates a game scenario). Any drill which focuses on developing a skill rather than a situation is a waste of precious practice time. Swinging a disc off of the sideline to a defended player is a much better drill than a break-mark drill. 

Teams should practice as often as is feasible, and as much of that time as is feasible should be used scrimmaging in some fashion. Beyond that, players should work on skills in smaller groups according to how much they desire to get better.

Good teams play more tournament games than bad ones. Here is the average number of games played in descending order (i.e. top 10, 11-20, 21-30, etc): 20.5, 20.3, 18, 17.2, 17.6, 17.1, 20.2, 14.7, 14.1, 14.4. Clearly the good teams have either consciously or unconsciously realized that playing more tournament games is better. The most similar thing to a tournament game is a scrimmage. Scrimmages are where people compete, they are where you get to see people’s best skills in use, and they feel much more like a tournament game than a drill does. 

Drills have their uses, and if there is an unseasonably strong wind it may be good to have an upwind throwing drill to shame those who have not practiced and to show others what is possible, but in general, a drill belongs in a smaller group setting or a specific circumstance. It is probably almost never optimal to drill when a team could be scrimmaging.

Drills v. Scrimmaging

The first obstacle to designing a single practice and the sum of practices for a season is the allocation of time spent on drills and time spent scrimmaging.  Usually this issue gets skimmed over because people agree on whatever gets said first.  This first idea is usually a 50/50 split of time spent on each, everyone nods and moves on.

Growing up I was constantly told by soccer coaches that the best teacher of the game is the game; this idea seems pretty prevalent in ultimate.  My question is what can you actually improve on when playing the game?  I believe you can work on your field sense, decision making, and awareness of what is going on around you.  I believe that the best way to get in shape for ultimate is to play ultimate.  However, I do not believe that you can work on any individual skill.  In a scrimmage there are so many things going on and there are so few reps in each of these things that you can’t actually hone it in.

If you want to get better at a skill you need thousands of reps at that skill.  In an hour of a scrimmage an individual might get 5 touches on the disc, and odds are he throws 5 different kinds of passes.  In an hour of a drill that same person could get 100-200 reps at one type of throw.  For example, let’s say an individual wants to improve at throwing a backhand around.  Within throwing the backhand around there are tons of individual pieces that need to come together in order for that person to be great at making this throw.  Here is a list of things that person needs to be thinking about.  (Assuming a right handed person).

·         Can I get my right foot past the marks right foot so that I can use my butt to box out the thrower?

·         Can I release the disc within six inches of the ground? Six inches to 2 ft? 2ft to 3ft? 3ft to 4ft?

·         How far am I able to step out?  Can I do it explosively? Am I balanced when I get there?

·         How difficult is it for me to throw around my knee?  Can I reach past and around my knee?

·         Is my left leg parallel to the ground?  Is my left toe turned so that I am not putting any crazy lateral forces on my left knee?

·         Where is the weight in my right foot?  Is it on my toe so that I can come back out of the lunge?

This is a list of a single type of a backhand around.  This is a situation where someone is driving past the mark and releasing.  There are other backhand arounds though, for example if you can juke into an invert throw and pull back into an around there is a completely different list of things that need to be worked on in order to get that move down.  Beyond just this throw there is an extremely long list of individual skills that all come together to make an ultimate player great.  An individual will never be able to work on all these things without tons of concentrated, focused and well coached repetitions.

Over the course of a season the goal should be to make every individual improve as much as possible.  I think that the leadership should have a short list (about 5) of drills they want to do (as well as a goal for what everyone is getting out of this drill) and they should be very focused on doing the same drill over and over again.  I get really frustrated as a coach when I introduce a drill and the team looks at me and is like, “yeah we’ve already done this.”  After this I get the sense that the team doesn’t feel like it is important to do that drill because they have already done it in the past.  Since they’ve done the drill in the past they feel they have already gotten what they need out of the drill.  The truth is doing a drill once only gets you about 10-100 repetitions at something (cutting drill would be lower reps than a throwing drill) and before you get 1000 reps in you won’t actually get anything out of it.  That drill needs to be done all the time to see measurable gains over the course of a season. 

It is true that a team will get bored with a drill.  This is when leadership needs to step in and twist the drill so that people see it a different way.  For example if the team is doing a break mark drill and you notice that the team is settling for either leading the cutter or hitting the cutter in the gut, then the leadership should encourage guys to make the opposite play.  If marks start getting lazy, encourage them to completely shut down either the around or the invert and be willing to give up the other.  Leadership needs to give the guys something to distract them or make them see the drill differently, not come up with a new drill.

After an individual has put in tons of time to develop and get better at a skill, then he needs the playtime in a scrimmage where he can learn to use this new skill in a game setting.  It takes some time to figure out how to use it effectively and destructively in a game setting, but that amount of time is about 100x smaller than the amount of time it takes to gain the skill.  Similarly I do believe that when a team is about 3-4 weeks out from the biggest tournament of their season, then it is too late for anyone to actually get better at something and that the team needs tons of scrimmage time in so that the individuals know what they are capable of, what their role is and how they are going to operate together in a maximally efficient way.

Here is an example of what I think a typical college team should do over the course of their 8 month season.

·         First 2 months (25% Drills, 75% Scrimmage) the emphasis should be on getting back into the game from the summer off, as well as trying to get freshmen interested in the game.

·         Middle 6 months (70% Drills, 30% Scrimmage)  Pick something you want your team to be sweet at, e.g. getting open as a long, getting open as a handler, throwing breaks, throwing hucks, marking, playing handler d, playing cutter d, jump balls, deep game, timing between cuts.

·         Final Month (25% Drills, 75% Scrimmage) Iron out everyone’s roles, and give the players who are actually going to be doing things plenty of reps doing whatever it is they do in a game.