Creativity

This is a post of questions and experiments, certainly no answers will be found here.

How do you build a creative player:

Creativity, awareness, and feel for the game.  This is my end goal of player development.  How can I fast track a player who can’t throw a flick to be comfortable with the speed and flow of a Frisbee game?

3v3:

My first idea, which I still haven’t given up on, was to reach a critical mass of 3v3.  During the fall NUT plays an hour of 3v3 three times a week.  We can get about 5 games of 3v3 done each hour.  By the end of fall quarter, given they show up to practice, NUT players have 30 hours/150 games of 3v3 under their belt.  I played 210 games of ultimate in my college career.  (A typical college ultimate player can expect to play ~50 games a year, ~7 games a tournament, 2 fall tournaments, 3 spring tournaments, 2 series tournaments).  My thought when deciding how to allocate fall practice time was how to manufacture as many game-like scenarios as possible.  With 3v3 you are forced to be involved, you have to play quick, you have to be a thrower, you have to be a cutter, and you have to play defense.

I thought this idea was simple enough to be brilliant until my boy Sahaj, my contemporary Kennedy, started questioning the value of 3v3.  It’s not actual ultimate, all people do is throw hucks, no one is trying on defense.  All good points by Sahaj, although my obsession with 3v3 is still high I cannot claim that it is the golden ticket to creativity.

Keep Away:

The first ideas we encounter are always the right and the best ones.  Or so we believe.  Ultimate is certainly no exception, play club for a season and the struggles of working with people “who were always taught to…” will make you want to battle them in the octagon.  So when you have players that have a narrow view of a game, and all they are doing is playing within that narrow view how do you shake their world and force them to see it differently?  My idea was change the rules.

In keep away you have a box, and all you have to do is complete passes.  Ignore the need to go downfield and gain yards, just completed passes at angles and distances you aren’t used too.  The plan was to give no instruction on keep away strategy, because I don’t have a strategy I believe in myself, and just let them figure one out on the fly.  Offensively do we just move the disc around the border like a big wheel?  Do we go back and forth diagonally?  Do we try to get the disc in a corner and attack the two adjacent corners?  Do we keep the disc in the middle of the box?  Defensively do we force one cone?  Do we force middle?  Force outside the box?  Try to set a trap?  Play zone?  If you can get your players asking these types of questions then they are displaying higher cognitive function.

So there I am patting myself on the back for changing the face of the game and forcing the team to think about it in a different way when Sahaj, that itch on my conscience, informs me that any 3 monkeys in the box and they’d win by throwing the disc up in the air.  Bummer that one.

Watching footage:

This is an idea that is bubbling but I don’t have in production mode.  I’ve been sending “pulled hammer” videos to all my sophomores, I can see that they’ve received the messages but then when I try to talk to them about it they can’t even remember what the video was about.  Most of these are just throwing form or handler give and go videos, about 7 minutes long that have fallen on poorly cultivated ears.

So where do I turn with this new idea?  I looked to none other than Sahaj, that little rapscallion of a dissenter.  I’ve given Sahaj a game with Bobby Ley and Justin Lin, both small handlers with fantastic throws and the ability to get open often.  I talked with Sahaj about these games and he had some thoughts and seemed to have actually owned the exercise.  The game is about 30 minutes, so maybe the longer film gave him more ideas; we also had just played both those teams at Warm-Up so maybe the taste of being beaten by them was still fresh for him.

The horizon:

I’m not sure where to go from here.  I can go with the “hope they learn during tournaments” or the “hope they play club ultimate” strategy.  In terms of creating a creative player myself, I think time is going to be the one variable that I cannot streamline.  If I want 15 game-breakers I am going to have to wait and I’m going to have to keep throwing them out of their comfort zones.