WWWD

Before being exposed to the way Walden thinks about ultimate, I viewed the game as a track meet.  If you can outrun your opponent then that is basically it.  I credit Walden with being the first person to ever teach me about ultimate.  Sure Wiesbrock and Roush deserve the credit for teaching me the rules.  They taught me about travels, picks, and fouls, but it was Waldo that showed me how to be a student of the game.

The challenge I pose to myself here is to pick three things that I learned from Walden.  Three is way too little.  I can rant rave about Waldo for pages, as I am sure most of you already know, but by forcing myself to pick three I can limit the noise, minimize my appearance as a fanboy, and really distill the most impactful things that I’ve learned from the big nasty.

1.       Throwing is really important:

It was the end of my sophomore year; I could throw a forehand huck pretty far and thought that I was basically done with throwing.  In my limited view I had checked all the boxes on throwing, I could throw it forceside and I could throw it far.  Then Walden told me I my throws needed a lot of work.  He told me to throw from my knees all summer, I did this and I still give it most of the credit for my development as a thrower.

My list of requirements to be a good thrower went from about two questions to a page of questions.  Suddenly I was asking myself can I complete an upline with a hard pass, with a soft pass, can I roll it in, can I lead my guy to space, if the defender undercuts can I roll it around him, can I throw it super early and just let my guy run onto it, can I do all of these things left handed, can I pop an upline with a righty backhand against a flick force?  The list goes on, and this is just completing a forehand upline.  Throwing is a book of questions, and it takes time to go through it and answer all of them.

The throwing quest is my favorite part of ultimate, the power of holding the disc is intoxicating.  I never would have even set out on this quest if I was forced down there by Walden.

2.       See the thrower:

The thing about playing with Walden, and later in my career Kennedy, is that the disc my come flying at your face at any second.  Missing the catch because you didn’t see the disc go up is not an excuse.  It’s an unforgiveable offense to allow your thrower to hit you with the disc and you didn’t catch it because you weren’t aware that the disc was coming.  Being shocked that the disc was thrown or being surprised that your teammate is capable of getting off a throw is not okay.

Often in scrimmages I would be the cutter on the breakside sideline.  When cutting from that spot it is very typical that your defender will turn his hips to the field and take a few steps over the top of the offense.  Then your sideline will immediately start yelling at you that you’re poached.  What are your options?  Run straight across the field and get the disc even if it means cutting off your team, sprint deep, or dive into the backfield for an easy dump.  However if a thrower has the disc you might want to stand perfectly still and get ready for that disc to come whipping in at your face.  I can still see Walden lining up a low release backhand break straight across the field, he’d look like a lumberjack chopping down a tree, and it was on me to catch that disc.

Now imagine you’ve made an incut and are going into your clearing cuts, are you ready for the quick invert, are you ready for the late around, are you ready for a fancy high release or scoober?  No? Why not?  You should be.  Let’s say you’re the thrower and you complete a pass, are you ready for the disc to come right back to you?  No?  You should be.

Playing with Walden forces you to be ready for the disc.  It forces you to learn to move and see the field all while constantly being ready for the disc to come, because you never know when he’s about to lumberjack the disc right at your face.

3.        Be critical:

Rabuck once said, "the greatest thing I learned from Walden is how to critic people."

Some people think its mean, rude, and abrasive.  Walden is capable of, maybe notorious for, writing short novel length player feedback.   I see it as an extremely valuable skill.  There is always something for us to work on as players.  The road ahead is always long and it is always treacherous.  You can never “arrive”; you are never done trying to get better.  Having a voracious hunger to constantly improve is necessary just to stay afloat.

This is hard to describe here on this forum, but Walden has amassed an encyclopedia of questions and compiled them in a flow chart.  As a player ultimate is a voyage of answering questions, and once you’ve answered a question you then just move onto the next question on the flowchart.  Walden’s flowchart of questions is so long and so detailed that it could seem impossible to complete it, however I don’t think completing it is the point.  I think going through it, checking as many boxes as you can, and never losing heart even though the questions stretch on endlessly can yield an extremely good Frisbee player.

I often wrestle with putting together this flowchart, it is really hard and I end up getting frustrated and quitting easily.  I don’t have anywhere near a good enough grasp on what it would look like.  That’s why I consider this part of Walden’s genius.  Here is a concept that I can barely even map out without making mistakes and Waldo can do it all off the top of his head in an orderly and clear manner.