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.