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.