Yng-Fu

Yngve is the guy that I can never agree with, or maybe we are always agreeing and just saying it differently, or maybe neither of has any idea what the other one is trying to say.  Everything is an argument.  The nature of my relationship with Yngve, has forced me to reconsider my own personal canon and question whether anything should be canon at all. In such a young sport is it even possible that we know what the best way to approach the game is?  Is it safe to lie something down and say this is good, or should we be questioning any and every preconceived notion.

When it comes to Yngve I do not have things that I’ve learned.  I have things that I discovered I do not know.  The hardest part of not knowing something is that we don’t know what it is that we don’t know.  Yngve is the guy who asks so many questions and pokes so many holes in the ideas I lay down that he has shown me many things that I do not know.

1.       “You said something vague about…”:

Every time I try to make a point or express a sentiment, Yngve tells me what I said was vague and hard to grasp.  He tells me that it doesn’t really mean anything to him and is not solid or relevant to him and that if he were one of the sophomores listening to me he would have just nodded along but had no idea what I was trying to convey.

I rush when I speak.  I have this theory that everyone’s attention span is the length of a goldfish and so I work to say one or two ideas in as little words as possible.  I want to just throw something clean, concise, and sticky.  The problem is that it isn’t sticky at all because I made it too concise.  I tell people to drive their hucks but they have no idea what a driven huck is, I show someone where to position on handler defense but they have no idea how to get to that spot during a scrimmage, I tell people to spread out but they have no idea where to spread out from.

My goal for moving forward is to spend more time talking.  I’ve erred on the side of saying too little for too long, I am going to go back to saying too much and trying to find the middle ground.

2.       How to create buy in:

Yngve is the master of buy in.  My own voyage of ultimate has been through the lens of “I want to play ultimate”, “I want to play sports”, “I have pride so I am going to try hard regardless of team culture.”  It always shocks me when people say they aren’t having fun at practice, or that they don’t feel motivated, or they don’t really care about trying to be competitive at regionals.  I am surprised and caught flat footed when people say these things to me and I have no method for how to react or comfort them other than to question their manhood.

Yngve knows how to make people want to be there.  He has a way with taking those who have given up on themselves and bring them back into the fold.  I think it has something to do with Yngve’s own trip down the road of potentially quitting.  Regardless of what it is, his success next to my struggle at it has revealed a gaping hole in my ability to get people to want to be there.

Give me someone who wants to get better and I can go to town, challenge me to get someone to buy into a team and you might as well have them walk away from the team now.

3.       Jersey’s Matter:

It is my opinion that whatever I am wearing I will try as hard as I can.

It is Yngve’s stance that a bad jersey design reflects poor leadership.  A failure by leadership to design a jersey that the team would want to wear is a strong indicator that leadership is out of touch with the team and incapable of getting the most out of their team.  A bad jersey yields lackluster results.