Idea Models

I think regrets are a little silly.  Per the butterfly effect every decision you have made in life led you to the place you are now. (E.g. If I had chosen to play football in high school rather than soccer I would have never become good friends with Jimmy Wiesbrock and would have never picked up ultimate).  So to say you regret something means that you are unhappy with who you are or where you are in life today.  Do I regret losing at Regionals in 2012?  If I hadn’t I would never have come to NUT, I would have never met Rose.  It would be a lie for me to say that I regret having had those things happen.

If I had played for Stupca I would not have played for Walden, also something I would never want to give up.  But every time I get to be around Stupca, every time I witness him fill and control a room, every time I watch him operate I feel pangs of jealousy that I was never coached by Stupca.  In Stupca’s final year before his first retirement I was a C-teamer.  I never had a single personal interaction with him.  So I turned to the stories.  I got into the google group and went through all his docs that outlined the team strategy, I read through his workout advice, I watched footage of teams that he said Illinois was trying to emulate.

Everything is earned with Stupca (in stark contrast to my own personal style where praise is given out like hot cakes).  As a personality I have an unquenchable desire to please, a trait I attribute my friendship with Waldinho to.  I think the challenge of rising to Stupca’s expectations and trying to satisfy his demands would have been a major motivator to me. 

When you blow a defensive assignment or miss a throw that you have no business missing, Stupca will let you know about it.  This mentality doesn’t jive with many people.  There is this pervasive sense that mistakes are their own punishment and leaders of teams should respect their players enough to trust that they know they’ve made a mistake.  Typically I subscribe 100% to the latter opinion, but let me hang out with Stupca, or even Zubair, for too long and my opinion changes.  If the mistake is its own punishment then how come you keep making the same mistakes over and over?  Maybe I should make it very clear that every time you drop an uncontested swing pass you’re hosing your team.  Ultimately this a trust issue, can you trust your players to recognize that they did something bad?  If the answer is no then you have bigger issues than dropped Frisbees.

Tactically everything I do is stolen from Stupca’s playbook.  The idea and pursuit of “total Frisbee” is the Mecca of strategy for me.  Total Football is an idea the Dutch national soccer team used in the 70s.  Listen to the announcers during the World Cup and it is almost inevitable they will reminisce about “when the Dutch were total footballing.”  The idea is that everyone should be able to fill every position.  If you have 10 strong points that are interchangeable and versatile then that is very difficult to counter. 

The idea starts small.  If you’re a center back why can’t you play wing back?  If you’re a wing back why can’t you play outside midfield?  If you’re a central fielder why can’t you step up into the role of a striker?  As you start smearing the identities of similar positions it becomes easier to smear them with dissimilar positions.  Eventually, given it is possible, you have 10 positionless players that are fulfilling functions of positions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RloHgUdzlU

So Frisbee – Why can’t a handler cut deep?  Why can’t a cutter fill into the handler space and run some handler cuts?  What is preventing your pull catcher from being good at uplines?  Why do your DLine players have to have terrible disc skills?  They don’t.  Ideally there are no handlers and no cutters, rather there are handler and cutter functions that at any given point in time are being filled by seven Frisbee players.  For example what if we started visualizing it like this:

Function:	Center	Breakside	Forceside	Middle	Middle	Edge	Edge
Player filling function at time 1:	A	B	C	D	E	F	G
Player filling function at time 2:	F	C	E	A	B	G	D

Total Frisbee: 7 interchangeable parts to a machine, step up perform a function, step out, reorient yourself, and repeat.  I’m drinking this so hard and the idea is from Stupca.

Illinois owes a ton to Stupca.  He bridged the gap between the great Illinois teams of ‘02-‘04 and ‘09-‘11.  He picked the program up and carried it through a dark age of not qualifying for Nationals.  Even players who spent their entire career in the gap of his coaching tenure felt his influence.

Being a Captain

Illinois opened their Captain voting process last night; and attached to the email that opened the process is a list of what a captain is expected to do.  I originally wrote this list after 2012.  Colin updated and attached the list in 2013, Neal did the same in 2014, and here in 2015 Marty has updated and attached the list again.  It’s funny to me to watch the evolution of this list.  It’s almost like a time capsule that I check in with at regular intervals.

The origin of the list is a classic case study in how little some people are aware of their surroundings.  In 2012 we were having our end of the season meeting and I was talking about how the captain process would work when Michael “Zoidberg” Pohling opened his mouth and said “What does a captain do?”  After a bit of time passed I realized he wasn’t joking, he genuinely had no idea what the captains do.  Even after an entire year of being a part of the team, he had never worked out what the purpose of the captains was.  So an annoyed version of me begrudgingly wrote a list of what a captain does.

Here’s the list with some updated comments:

1.      Decide on team leadership personal

a.       There is a typo here.  I wonder how many iterations this list will survive before someone changes it to personnel.  Pretty silly case study on the power of copy and paste.

2.      Decide what kind of offense the team will run, and the way the team will run it.

a.       Ho Stack? Vert Stack? Split Stack?  Multiple offenses?

3.      Decide what kind of defenses the team will employ

a.       Man to man?  Zone?  Variations of Man to Man?  Variations of Zone?  Zone to man?  Man to zone?

4.      Decide who makes each cut throughout the season, and who will be on the final Ateam roster

a.       In every team I have been a part of the captains have had the final say on who makes the roster.  Walden always let us pick our team.  This season with NUT was the most active I have ever been a part of the process.  I gave the captains a list of 16 players and said, “these are the people who will actually get playtime”, then the captains picked their own roster.

5.      Decide how play time will be allocated

a.       With 24 people on a team how do you decide which 7 get to play and when?

6.      Should be passionate about ultimate

a.       I am going to jack Stupca’s opinions here.  There is value in having a captain who is just nuts about Frisbee.  A Captain that eats, breathes, and sleeps ultimate allows everyone else to “sort of get into” Frisbee without feeling like a weirdo.  A young player might feel more comfortable researching ultimate, watching film, reading Ultiworld, or doing an extra work out if he knows that at least he isn’t as weird as the guys at the top of the roster.

7.      Willing to sacrifice their free time for the good of the team

a.       You can either leave Saturday night practice and head to the bars or you can grab some milk and hang out with some rookies and talk about ultimate.

8.      Must be a leader on and off the field

a.       When you’re captain you’re always captain.  Even if you’re at a party you’re still the captain.  Laying out down some stairs and breaking tv’s maybe hilarious, but it’s kind of hard to respect that person in a formal setting.  It may seem unfair but I think it’s even more unfair for you to ask your team to flip their respect for you on and off like a switch depending on whether or not you’re at practice.

9.      Capable of teaching both basic and advanced skills to a large group of people

a.       Some people need help holding a flick with two fingers, some people need help putting invert on their hucks.

10.  Plan out activities and drills for practices from AugustMay

a.       Most teams have about 6-10 hours of practice time.  What are you going to do with all that time?  Are you going to have random practices or are you going to try and make them all lead into each other?

11.  They decide how to split up the x/y teams

a.       Who goes on which x/y roster?  Are you going to split oline/dline?  Stack a team?  Try to split it even?  Stack handlers and stack cutters?

12.  Make the final decision on what tournaments the team will go to.

a.       Sometimes you have to decide that the team is going to Easterns even if the team would rather follow their womens team around like a pack of wet dogs.  The final decision is on the captains.

13.  Need to be able to sell the team in order to get into elite tournaments

a.       Maybe you lost every game at WarmUp this year but you still think you’re good enough to compete at that tournament.  Are you capable of convincing the tournament director that you should be invited back?

14.  Need to be capable of making rookies feel wanted, and getting them excited about staying in the program

a.       Some captains only keep three rookies, others get double digits.  If you don’t have rookies coming into your program then what is you even doing?

15.  Make any strategic adjustments in game, and in tournament

a.       Is Tufts killing you with handler motion and break throws?  Maybe you should put a flat mark on and force hardest on the off handlers.  Are we getting blown up deep?  Maybe we need some help over the top.  Are we completely dysfunctional at defending pull plays?  Maybe we should get a defense to help with that.  Gone are the days where as a player you can just run around and not know who you’re playing against.  As a captain you have to be aware of who the other team is and what they are doing.

16.  They need to be capable of balancing their own game, with making sure the team is playing theirs.

a.       Again, you can’t just go out there and worry about yourself.

17.  Need to bring intensity at every moment, because intensity is contagious

a.       Sometimes your team is tired.  Sometimes it’s a heavy midterms week.  Sometimes everyone is sick.  Sometimes a lot of people are faking injuries.  These are the forces that cool off the water.  Who’s going to add some heat to that water?  Who is going to turn up the yolo?  We can all wait around for practice to end or someone can decide that he’s physically at practice so he might as well be there mentally.

18.  Need to be able to deal with a lot of emails

a.       Just an absurd amount of emails. 

b.      “I’m sick”

c.       “I have too much homework, and am bad at time management”

d.      “I stayed up all night playing smash brothers, now I feel sick”

e.       “I’m pretending to be injured”

f.       “I’m actually injured”

g.       “I figured that since it was Valentine’s day I didn’t have to tell anyone I’d be skipping practice for a date”

h.      Here’s the greatest email I ever got:  “Captains,  I will be leaving practice early to celebrate a religious holiday, additionally I will be showing up late per usual.  DMac”

19.  Need to be able to evaluate and respond concerns about teammates health

a.       Mostly this is just telling people to go see a trainer.  Also it is pretty beneficial if you can tell people that just because their hip abductor hurts doesn’t mean the problem is with the hip abductor; odds are the muscles in your pivot leg are shorter than the muscles in your non pivot leg and this imbalance manifests itself in pain in the hip abductor.  Go to the gym and lift to make the pain go away.

20.  Be really bad at trolling RSD

a.       This stems from a tangential story.  2011 was the first year that we moved to 10 regions and consequently the minimum bids per region was moved from 2 down to 1.  The Great Lakes region only had 1 bid, and in classic Good Lakes 1 bid fashion Illinois took it home.  The path to winning the region that year included having to go through the #8 USAU ranked Michigan; which we did 15-9.  (Side note Michigan had beaten NUT 15-4 the game before.  In the 3 years I have coached NUT NUT has lost to Michigan three times at regionals by a total of 4 points, the year before I coached NUT they lost to Michigan by 10.  I really hate Michigan and if any team I am a part of plays like a bunch of wimps against Michigan I am just going to walk away and never return.)  After this W I went on RSDnospam and wrote a post called Dear USAU.  Walden was so mad.

21.  Need to be able to offer advice to teammates about dealing with injuries

a.       This one is repetitive because it happens all the time

22.  Need to be able to explain the reasoning behind play time allocation

a.       Sometimes that kid who can’t stay on the forceside of his guy wants to know why he isn’t getting any play time.

23.  Know the rules of ultimate

a.       Sometimes Champe thinks that double turns still exist, and sometimes you have to teach him that they don’t.

24.  Motivate the unmotivated

a.       This comment was targeted very specifically at Andy Kilinskis, Brandon Smith, and Alex Komisarz.  How do you motivate someone who is entirely devoid of internal motivation?  It’s an infuriating process, and one that I failed at.  Good luck.

25.  Organize the recruitment strategies

a.       Chalk the quad?  Put up posters?  Play pick up?  Send out Facebook spam to every incoming Freshmen?

26.  Help run Quad day, email high schoolers, respond to emails from high schoolers

a.       Often Quad day is the first time a freshmen ever sees you or your program.  I remember being grabbed by McClain.  He said, “you’re tall sign up for Frisbee!”  I was going to do it anyway, but that first interaction is huge.

27.  Run the Rookie Invite, and work towards every freshmen having fun

a.       This is an Illinois specific thing.  We have a tournament right off the bat.  Mix up vets with returners, just play Frisbee, and try to give rookies some familiar faces amongst the vets who can often be quite cliquey.

28.  Rig the Rookie Invite so that you can feed your ego by winning

a.       This is a direct shot at Kennedy.  I won the rookie invite as a Junior and made sure to let Kennedy know about it a lot.  So during our senior year Kennedy took the 3 very best freshmen, (Marty, Sarson, and Zoidberg).  No one came close to beating them.

29.  Make sure the week back goes as smoothly as possible, and make sure that the time there is allocated as best as it can be

a.       This might be getting a little dated, doesn’t Illinois only do like a three day week back?  Aren’t you guys down in Chambana getting soft? 

30.  Aid the Treasurer and President in any way possible

a.       Sometimes the Treasurer graduates but doesn’t give anyone access to the bank account.  Sometimes as an ex captain your obliged to hunt that treasurer down and get him to sign over access to the bank account.

31.  Be willing to go lifting with anyone who is looking for a buddy

a.       Sometimes you wake up early to lift with your best friend and then snackman texts you in the afternoon looking for a lifting buddy, sometimes you have to go.

32.  Attempt to get 100% attendance at mandatory practices

a.       If you aren’t going to practice then what is you even doing?

33.  Attempt to get 100% attendance at optional practices

a.       If you aren’t going to practice then what is you even doing?

34.  Answer ridiculous questions from everyone

a.       I’ll steal Chuck’s opinions here.  Sometimes people ask questions just so that you think they’re smart.  They don’t even care about the answer they just want recognition that they asked a good question.  For example “why are we running a four man cup instead of a three man cup?”  “What’s the point of letting people clear to the forceside?  Won’t they get in the way?”  “If something is open should I throw it?”  “If they get passed the front 5 guys in our zone what do we do?”

35.  Deal with complaints about everything

a.       Why do we only run man?

b.      This drill is stupid?

c.       Why are we practicing so early in the morning? (said at an 11am practice)

d.      We didn’t work on hucking this practice!

e.       Why do we run four lines?  It’s only like 1 throw a minute!

f.       We are practicing on Valentine’s day?

36.  Constantly remember that you were elected by your peers, they gave you your power, act accordingly

a.       Another direct shot at Kennedy.  Often he would address the team as “you” rather than “we”.  It was always either Kennedy’s way or the highway.  Some might say that his relationship with Jess was the point in which Kennedy eased up and became easier to work with, others might say that Kennedy chilling out had a lot to do with 2013 getting to Nationals.

37.  Analyze what the other team is doing, and identify a way to work against it

a.       I’ve already addressed this

38.  Run drills

a.       Duh…?

39.  This is not an exhaustive list, anything else that comes up along the way needs to be dealt with efficiently by the captains

a.       Obligatory post so that Michael Pohling didn’t get further confused.

That’s the list as it is today.  One of my favorites got culled.  “Be prepared to lose 10 IQ points.”  I don’t know when this one got culled, but as much as it sounds like a joke it’s a very serious comment.  When you’re captain you get second guessed all day every day.  Suddenly every decision you make is criticized by whisperers in the dark.  When you think going to Easterns is a good idea and everyone is kicking and stomping their feet because you’re being an idiot and not thinking it through, or when you think that running gassers is a good idea and everyone rips on you for scaring away the rookies.  Even after 8 rookies from your captaincy make it to their senior year and get 13^th at nationals, most of them big contributors, you’ll still be teased for being an idiot.  When you’re captain it is inevitable that your team will think you’re an idiot at some point.  What you have to keep in mind is that you probably spent a couple days thinking about something and they spent all of 6 seconds knee-jerking to it.  Take your time, make a choice, believe in it, and most importantly don’t panic.

Being a captain requires a huge effort.  The frustrations of power v. the plebs is magnified by the fact that you’re trying to lead your peers.  However, it is worth it.  Good luck to the captains of 2016.

A Forceside incut

When I say something at a team meeting or a practice Yngve gives me grief because I “said something vague about …, and no one knows what you’re talking about.”  My initial reaction is always anger derived from frustration.  I accuse my audience of being idiots and incapable of critical thought.  Somewhere in my personal fuming BK usually points out “they don’t know what you know.”

So here’s a post on something I think is painfully and brutally obvious: “forceside in-cut”. 

First, allow me to establish what a “force-side incut” is.  The thrower is the orange dot at the bottom of the schematic.  There is a purple line, “the mark”, showing the defender who is putting a “mark” on the thrower.  This mark is “forcing” our thrower to throw to the right side of the image, or a “forehand”. 

In order for the thrower’s teammate, who is at the top of the schematic, “the cutter”, with no defender in sight, to be able to get open for the thrower he can either run “deep” or up the page and toward the endzone, or he can go “in” and run down the page and toward the thrower.  If he selects to go in, he can either go in on the “force-side”, this is the right hand side of our diagram, or he can go “break side”, this is on the left hand side of our diagram.

Say we elect to make a forceside incut. We have an infinite spectrum of angles that we can take in order to make a good cut.  I attempted to draw this spectrum with a few choice green arrows, the red arrows show where the spectrum has ended and you are now in the territory of making a workable cut.  Let’s step through this left to right.  The red angle on the far left shows the cutter running straight at the cutters back.  This cut is atrociously bad; there is no reasonable throw a thrower could give us that would make this cut an option.  Exploring this further, the mark is able to take away a piece of the field.  The shape of what the mark takes away looks like a V extending out of his spine.  An elite mark has a V with about an 80 degree angle, a good mark has about a 60 degree angle, and a terrible mark has about a 15 degree angle.  Even if the mark is terrible, the red arrow on the left is running straight into this 15 degree V.  See below:

The green arrow to the far left is the first good in-cut angle.  The cutter is running at a spot just barely to the left of the marks left hip.  He is showing his thrower a straight cut, and although this is a narrow alley to operate in the thrower has a chance here. 

This spectrum continues with infinite possibilities until we get to the furthest right green arrow.  Look at the thrower, extend a horizontal line from the thrower to the sideline so that this imaginary line and the sideline intersect perpendicularly.  The intersection point of these two lines is where the cutter is trying to go.  See below:

The red line furthest to the right represents an in-cut that is too flat, or a “wide throw”, that is also a bad cut.  These are easy for defenders to “under cut” and get a d on, and they are difficult throws to hit.

Now that we have a universe of cuts, we can talk about how to throw to them.  Let’s use the schematic below:

Again we have our thrower at the bottom and our cutter at the top.  The cutter is currently making a cut, this is a freeze frame, and the green arrow shows us his vector.  The thrower is going to see this cutter, get excited and try to whip it right into his gut.  What stinks about this is that this is how our eye works.  If you ever get the chance to go skeet shooting the instructor will tell you to let your eye track the skeet and then just shoot.  In the Patriot Mel Gibson tells his sons to aim small and miss small, meaning aim for the button on the red coats jacket, and when you miss you’ll still hit his chest.  Unfortunately for us, Frisbee’s travel slowly, we can’t point and shoot at what we see we.  We have to throw at what we know.  The thrower knows where this cutter is going, he can throw a soft, tightly spinning, slight roll curve pass along the blue arrow that the cutter can run onto.  He is not going to “fire this one in there” he is just going to softly sit it into space, again tight spin, slight roll curve, traveling slowly, and he is going to let his receiver catch it.  What’s a roll curve?  See below:

A good curve is a curve that gets the disc out in front of your receiver and then curves back into him.  What I’ve drawn here is a roll curve; a roll curve is thrown away from your body and then rolls back in.  What I’ve drawn below is an invert; an invert is thrown across your body and then comes back.

 

In the original schematic:

For every single one of these cuts our thrower wants to throw it early and put some roll on his throw.  Below is another drawing:

The yellow dot is our thrower’s hand; the lines coming out of the yellow dot are examples of different amounts of roll curve.  Our thrower is throwing a forehand into the page.  The red line represents a flat pass (spoiler alert: choosing a flat pass has never been a bad idea), going up from the red line we increase the amount of roll curve we put on our throw.  Connecting these two diagrams, as we go from left to right along the green incuts we need to go bottom up in the diagram of roll curves.  The wider a cutter is going, the more you’ll have to throw it in front of him and the more roll curve you’ll need.  The narrower a cutter is going, the less you’ll have to throw it in front of him and the less roll curve you’ll need.  In all of these situations an invert will send the disc away from your receiver, that’s bad.  

Why did you lose?

“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.” - John Wooden

Using Wooden’s criteria I would define NUT’s 2015 season as being successful.  Unfortunately I still have to answer those brutal questions: What happened?  Why did you lose?  At the surface these questions bother me because they beg for an excuse and excuses are for those who invest short.  An excuse is a mechanism that allows you to pass off ownership of a difficult situation and helps you sleep at night right now.  Owning a defeat shines a bright light on your weaknesses and deficiencies, pin points where you came off the rails, and stands as a beacon of how you can be better tomorrow.

But the questions still exist and the askers are waiting not so patiently for you to answer them; what happened? Why did you lose?

I believe we have a choice of perspective, both of which make excuses; there is no way around this:

1.      Give the credit to the winner:

Credit belongs to the winners for winning.  MSU beat NUT because they crushed us in the air, they pinned us on the downwind sidelines, and they helped their throwers out by making tough catches, all three factors were amplified in the wind and MSU won. 

2.      Take credit for losing:

Credit belongs to the losers for screwing up.  NUT lost to MSU because we didn’t win any jump balls, we didn’t complete passes off of the trapside, and we dropped a lot catchable passes, all three factors were amplified in the wind and NUT lost.

Although the points are identical the perspective here matters.  As a team when you “take credit for losing” you disrespect your opponent.  Imagine winning a game of ultimate and afterward overhearing the other team say things like:

·         If it wasn’t so windy we would have won

·         If we didn’t choke against their zone we would have won

·         If (player x) didn’t screw up we would have won

These are frustrating things to hear because even after beating them in a fair game they refuse to acknowledge what you’ve done.  They see themselves as the better team and write off your accomplishment as a mistake, the kind of fluke game that would have gone the other way nine out of ten times.

Not only is taking the credit for losing disrespectful to the opposition I think it works to hamstring a team’s ability to learn from the defeat.  The most accessible example I have are the Illinois v. Iowa games from 2012.  In 2012 Illinois lost to Iowa three times, each by a score of 15-9.  The Illinois kids would walk away from the games saying things like “if Iowa had played man defense we would have crushed them,” or “we choked against their zone we can crush it next time.”  Shockingly Illinois would lose over and over again.  We would belly laugh about how our team was great against zones because we had Ryan Smith, but we’d perform atrociously against zones¹, and then we would make ourselves feel better by saying that in a no wind game would smash the other team.  We never learned and we paid for it in the end.

Alternatively we could have said things like “they trap us really well on the sidelines,” “once we turn it they pick up and get going very quickly,” “they are set up for good angles on our cross field throws.”  With this kind of mentality we start viewing the Iowa zone as something to work through, something to learn from, rather than an asterisk over some losses.  Without a control group I am left only with speculation.  If we respected Iowa’s zones, if we had tried to learn from it rather than wave it off, if we had stopped using it as an excuse and owned it as a deficiency in our game would we have been better equipped to finish the game-to-go against MSU?

Moving back to NUTs perspective: we could walk away thinking “there’s no way that guy will sky us 6/6 times again”, “there’s no way we’d give up 2 breaks at the end of the game again”, “there’s no way Hair will lay out for no reason on universe again”, “we’re better than those guys and we’ll show it next time.”  Or we could own that we were the worse team, that MSU smashed us with their sideline trap and that we can’t beat that guy in 1v1 jump balls.  Then we can start working through these issues, we can become better throwers, we can buy into the need to swarm jump balls, and we can be better because of it.

^1. Iowa (15-9, 15-9, 15-9); Tufts (bageled in the first half); EIU (lost in quarterfinals of regionals); MSU (lost in the game to go)