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.