Black Market

From my perspective Black Market is not a team, not a program, but an idea.  The idea being that if you are looking for a place to get better at Frisbee we can find you one.   I think the origin of this idea will vary depending on who you talk to about it.  For example I am confident that my perspective will vary widely from Sidrys’s, Kennedy’s, or Adam’s. 

To fully convey the way I see this Black Market idea I will need to start at the top.  In Chicago, Machine takes the first cut.  Machine doesn’t have any reasonably close elite open or elite mixed teams to compete with.  In theory Machine gets the top 25 guys in Chicago, in practice they get the top 25 from Illinois/Iowa/Indiana and sometimes even Wisconsin.  I think Machine does well in terms of taking the best players available to them.  This is important because as soon as you allow your club develop into a “fraternity” where returners are given preferential treatment to new/young talent you have maxed out the potential of your club and can only experience contraction in the future.

Every year the tier two peons of Chicago like to get worked up and pick on some of Machine’s roster picks.  In our view there is “excess weight” on the roster, but in reality this “excess weight” is pretty good at Frisbee.  Good enough to make it not obvious that we “are better” than them, and good enough to significantly impact the tier two landscape when they finally do get cut from Machine.  Picking on the bottom of Machine’s roster as much as we want won’t change the fact that Machine gets utility out of their entire roster at an extremely high level.

What happens after Machine makes its filter is where Chicago starts to get difficult to keep track of.  Haymaker was the first tier two team.  They were founded by a group of players that wanted to get some experience so that they could threaten for a roster spot on Machine.  After a year (maybe it was two) that Haymaker team was able to put people on Machine.  Haymaker had the inside track to solidify themselves as the clear number two in Chicago; all they had to do was take number 26-50 in Chicago.  Unfortunately they started ear marking roster spots for returners.  Ear marking roster spots hampered their ability to be flexible and reactive to the growing tryout pool of Chicago.  With this dynamic in place they made two critical mistakes.  First, they cut Greg Slover.  Cutting Greg Slover looks egregious today and it was incredibly dense back then.  Second, they took away Dan Williams and Luke Johnson’s play time going into the series in favor of “veterans” (read: our friends).  Slover went ahead and created Beachfront, Dan and Luke bailed to form Natives.

As an aside: I think I am hard on Haymaker because I wanted them to do what I want rather than what they want to do.  They conscientiously chose to create a club team where they could play with their friends.  Just because I wish they had solidified a #2 in Chicago doesn’t mean that that is what they wanted.

At this point Chicago had four teams Machine, Beachfront, Haymaker, and Natives.  Machine continued to dominate that first selection, Beachfront, Haymaker and Natives continued to gravitate towards ear marked roster spots.  It is frustrating to try out for a tier two team because you have no idea how many roster spots are open (usually it’s only like 2-8), and even if you perform better than a vet you won’t get chosen because that guy’s roster spot was never in jeopardy. 

In the frustration of all this “cliqueness” and “earmarked roster spots” there were some people seriously pushing for the tier 2 teams to come together, take the best talent, clearly establish a #2 in Chicago, and compete for a spot at Nationals. (Something Haymaker could have done years ago).  I am going to skirt over the push for a #2 as much as possible.  This was an annoying/trying/exhausting/frustrating experience that didn’t work.  There is a lot to talk about when it comes to this but in the end one question remains for me “is this worth trying to do?”  Currently my answer is no.  The casualty of “the push” was Natives, who was twisted and distorted in Chi Club and finally died in a heaping pile of garbage. 

A group of players in the suburbs, at the time they called themselves Mufasa, decided they wanted to start trying to be legit and get better.  They pulled players from the mixed landscape (a world I will never comprehend) and from the ashes of Natives/Chi Club.  Their biggest win was getting a burnt out Kennedy to decide not to return to Machine after taking a year off.  This created a big draw for a lot of Illinois alums, myself included.  (I was ready to quit after the ChiClub experience but the attraction of Kennedy was enough to get me to practice, but not tournaments, with Black Market last summer).

The Chi Club collapse also created a vacuum on the northside.  It was temporarily filled by Bear Jordan, and this year is filled by Bounty Hunters.  Bounty is headed up by some passionate Frisbee people and although they are in year 1 I think this club has the potential to stick around.

Step back again with me.  Imagine being a college player.  Your college teammates and alums are pushing you to try out for club.  Since Haymaker and Beachfront finalize their roster before Machine (completely idiotic imho) you have to take a gamble; do you go for Machine or do you go for Haymaker and Beachfront?  If you’re good enough for Haymaker/Beach they will have the full court press on you to commit right away.  If you aren’t good enough they will hang you out for a couple weeks before cutting you, at which point wouldn’t it have been more desirable to try out for Machine and get the experience of playing with the best for a couple of weeks?  This gamble, which often coincides with a massively critical time of development for many Frisbee players, can be hedged knowing that after all the dust settles you can just show up to Black Market.  Practices are open at least until sectionals.  The roster isn’t finalized until sectionals and if numbers are there Black Market will just bring two teams to everything.

In year 1 of Black Market Kennedy, Wiesbrock, and Chris O’Hara were the captains.  Kennedy kept talking about how he wanted to help people develop and get better, yet they were splitting up the o and d lines to practice different things, there was no emphasis on fundamentals, the handler and cutter sets were loosely defined, and the moment that capped my 2014 descent to madness was at club sectionals when we were teaching people the vert endzone set.  Was this a joke?  Were we seriously incapable of organizing and structuring a practice plan that could have avoided to need to explain the vert endzone at sectionals?  I spent a lot of time trying to explain what a “progressive practice” was to Wiesbrock.  I tried to talk about how to structure a throwing plan not only in the scope of a singular practice but over the scope of the entire season.

So why have I broken my vow to never captain a Frisbee team ever again?  It dawned on me that rather than trying to convince the captains to captain how I would, I should just captain how I would.  I am also very attracted to the potential structure of Black Market.  Structurally Black Market has the potential to go all in on the “development” idea.  Beyond a heavy emphasis on fundamental work this means that we are going for the “let’s be okay at a bunch of things” instead of the “let’s be good at something” philosophy.  (Yes, I do think you have to pick).  A results oriented team is incentivized to go for the “let’s get good at something” plan, but since Black Market is trying to establish its primary goal as helping people get better, on-field results get thrown to the back burner which frees us to talk about something different every practice.  This theory materializes itself in me getting up on a soapbox and giving a lecture every practice about a different Frisbee idea.  Lastly, since results are of no concern to me I can just forge ahead with a new idea, no need to pump the breaks if it isn’t setting in for some people, just keep going, keep throwing a new idea, keep challenging people to see and think about a different part of the game.  Summing everything up, Black Market is an inclusive club that ignores results and is acutely focused on the fundamentals of the game.  This is what attracts me to captaining the team

As I write this I realize that Adam asked me to come up with a mission statement.  I might go with what I just wrote:  Black Market is an inclusive club that ignores results and is acutely focused on the fundamentals of the game.