Zub1

How do you mesh your low-income student analogy with splitting your college team into a and b team practices starting in winter? After you answer that, how do you mesh it with BMUs decision to keep practices open?

The Black Market season was from June 6^th to September 12^th, which is 14-15 weeks depending on how you want to look at it.  NUTs fall quarter is 10-11 weeks and Illinois’ fall semester is 16-17 weeks, again depending on whether or not you want to count finals week.

I think a college team can split A and B because they have the luxury of time to do so.  If your goal is to peak sometime in May and you start working in September you have a lot of time to establish a slow methodical and comprehensive plan to get ready.  The way you structure this will give you different marginal returns.

If you try to get into building chemistry too early you risk having glaring weaknesses in your game.  For example a basic thing like resets, which everyone on your team has to know, could get neglected and could lead to your team falling apart in the big games.  However, if you spend too much time trying to lay the foundation then you can never be more than the sum of your parts, by developing “chemistry”.

The marginal return on focusing on the basics will eventually become smaller than the marginal return on working with the players who will actually get playtime, or chemistry.  What isn’t inherently obvious is that the marginal return on chemistry is magnified by how well you laid the foundation. 

I envision it like this:

The blue line spent 10 weeks doing foundational work with their entire program, then in the spring they made cuts and worked on specifics and working together.  Their chemistry bounce was about as efficient as their foundational bounce.  The red line only spent 7 weeks doing program wide basic work.  When they made cuts and switched to a focus on chemistry, like the blue line their “chemistry bounce” was about as efficient as their foundational bounce but they flatlined earlier because at the end of the day only a piece of their team could throw a disc off of the trapside and there is no “chemistry” answer for a deficiency like that.  The red team wins at MLC, the blue team wins at Regionals.

I’ll conclude with a few bullet points:

1.       I think 10 weeks is too short but 16 weeks is too long.  I don’t know what the magic number is, but I know it is inside this range.

a.       This creates a political problem.  In the scope of Black Market there is constant pressure to go all in on “chemistry”, best to just ignore these people.

2.       You’ll notice that around week 14/15 the blue line beat the red line.  Black Market started emphasizing chemistry down the stretch.  I think the blue line is a good representation of when we switched over and the late season growth we saw.

3.       I think the club season is a difficult length, it is too short to fully realize your potential but too long to spend 100% of your time laying a foundation.

BMU - Moving Forward with Fundamentals

“How do we continue to teach fundamentals to an increasingly diverse team in skill and experience?” – Kennedy

Kennedy presents a real issue facing BMU.  If the team wants to continue to market itself as a place that is fundamentals focused, how do you balance the fundamentals work that younger players need while also challenging your top end?  I think Kennedy’s concerns are directly related to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”.

BMU takes everyone who shows up.  It is usually around 40-60 people at a practice.  The bottom 10 struggles to complete flicks in partner passing, the top 10 struggle to quickly turn catching an incut into throwing downfield.  If we target the bottom of the roster then the top group will be in the boredom space, if we target the top group then the bottom will be pushed into the anxiety space.

As a preface I want to clearly take a stance against trying to split the talent into different drills and challenging the better players with more difficult drills.  Just as a low-income child who attends school with high-income students is more likely to succeed than a low-income child who attends a purely low-income school, those who are bad at Frisbee will struggle to succeed without given the chance to mix in with good players.

If we look at this issue specifically through the Black Market lens the road forward is obvious.  We focused on fundamentals, but only on a piece of fundamentals.  The entire season was heavily weighted toward being able to hit resets and complete “possession” passes.  We barely scratched the surface of breaking the mark and hucking. 

There are fundamentals outside of throwing that BMU severely neglected.  Our defensive foundation was poor (as evident by our near inability to guard the other team’s best players and to consistently pressure incuts), we had bad marks, and we struggled with handlers that used their legs.  Offensively we struggled to get open and we cleared poorly. 

Black Market can change the weighting of practices toward a lot of 1v1 cutting, we can break down defensive footwork, we can constantly drill spacing, and we can do a marking drill every day.  All of these ideas were addressed at some point during our season, but most were only discussed once.  If we want our team to be good at something then we need to drill it every practice, or at least every week.  We worked on possession passes every day, what if we moved to a different part of the game.

Great but maybe we feel like owning possession passes is the best use of our time and we want to continue to keep that is the focus.  (Spoiler alert: it is).  Now we have to confront the issue of challenging people within the same fundamental umbrella.  My theoretical solution to this issue – no matter how good you are there is always something you can get out of a drill. 

Take a drill like the one below:

This is a brutally simple drill.  It can be learned just by following someone who knows what they’re doing.  There are lines at each blue dot, when you get to the front of one of the lines you run an out-and-in catch a pass and throw it to the person who is making an out-and-in in front of you, then you get in the back of the other line and repeat. 

If you’re bad what are the things you can worry about?  Catching the disc and throwing it towards the receiver are very worthwhile focuses.

If you’re okay what could you worry about?  Running through the disc, getting balanced on each throw, and trying to hit the outside shoulder of your receiver can make you better.

If you’re good what could you worry about?  Accelerate through the disc, catch one handed, catch every terrible pass, reduce the time it takes you to ready a throw, work on throw and go footwork, throw every pass softly, get as much spin as you can without throwing it hard, make the disc sit.  All of these ideas are just focusing in on the moment of catching and throwing.  What if you brought your attention on the out-and-in?  You could work on driving a hard cut, keeping the cut at an acute angle and the footwork involved, and accelerating out of the cut.

As I go up the skill axis I find more and more things to work on.  This is why I like to use Zubair’s progressive drill idea.  Take a simple drill like the one above, and as a coach/captain outline an incredibly rudimentary goal for the drill. 

1.      Instead of starting with an out-and-in you could just stand and jog at the disc, after catching come to a complete stop, and then deliver the pass.

2.      Turn up the speed at which you run at the disc.

3.      Add the out-and-in.

4.      Dictate the side of the receiver you throw to.

5.      Dictate how the catch should be made.

6.      Push people to accelerate through the disc.

7.      Add a defender to get physical on the out-and-in portion.

As you add complicating factors your better players should become challenged and more engaged.  At some point you will end up leaving the worse players behind.  However, with the right guidance you can cue them to ignore the more advanced cues and just stay on the focuses that put them into flow. 

Catching

At NUT’s preseason team meeting we were outlining the goals for 2016.  We had gotten through the outcome work and were discussing the processes that would get us there.  Yngve said we needed to work on catching and the room laughed.  I imagine that the entire room was thinking, “Yngve’s thinking about someone other than me.”

           

This Saturday NUT played in a one day round robin where we really flexed how much work we have to do in the catching department.  We made every drop in the book – endzone drops, swing drops, incut drops, and huck drops.  If our eyes had to go 1 degree upward our odds of catching fell off a cliff.  If no one was near us we would start looking for the next throw and forget to secure the catch.

I left Wash Park arrogantly looking down on NUTs inability to catch.  Yngve, Zubair, and I drove an hour out to the suburbs for Kennedy’s bachelor party.  The first phase of the bachelor party was some pick up ultimate with a collection of people who have played with Kennedy over the years.  100% of the people in attendance have played in a game-to-go to Nationals and many have played at Nationals.  The quality of players in attendance set the bar of expectation pretty high.  I knew we wouldn’t meet it since we haven’t practiced together in years, but I was never expecting this group to be catching the disc at an 85-90% rate.  The Frisbee gods came down on my ego with a harsh wind of humility.  Here we were, a group of guys who have been playing this game for 8 years and we couldn’t string together more than 6 passes because eventually we would just drop it.

           

In 2011 Matt Pasienski told me that catching improves at an incrementally smaller return every consecutive day you work on it: 

And that it decays at an increasing rate until you stabilize at bad:

After 5 weeks of practice NUT hasn’t done very many dynamic throwing drills.  We’ve been playing a lot of 3v3, 4v4, 5v5 and some 7v7 in order to get the rookies introduced and hooked to the game.  The lack of drills like cut-to, pitt drill, and io/oi box has already taken a toll on our “catching” madden rating.  After just a month of offseason and not practicing the older club players ability to secure a catch has fallen to an embarrassing level.

If 2015 was the year I lost my mind about throwing 2016 will be the year I lose my mind about catching.

Just Editing

When famous directors talk about the process of editing they mention that they never really finish editing, rather they edit all the way up until their deadline.  At some point they just throw up their hands and say, “that’s it, I’m out of time.”  Others will even quip that the deadline prevents them from over-editing.

In 2014 I was getting lunch with Carol.  It was early April, about 4 weeks from Regionals, and I mentioned that I felt like I didn’t know what else to work on with NUT.  I couldn’t see any glaring weaknesses and I didn’t have any plan for something to sharpen.  She swiftly cut down any delusions of completion with NUT 2014 by telling me there is always something to improve on.

The practice before regionals Yiding wanted to have a “fun” practice.  I agreed thinking that another tough practice wouldn’t have helped us out very much, and I thought a “fun” practice would be good for morale.  Minutes after practice Ben and Max told me they hated the practice structure for the day.

Almost a year later before 2015’s final practice Jack Shey asked me if I was going to have a “fun” practice for them.  I told him no.  I tried to outline how I thought that 2015 needed all the time to work that we could get and that I wasn’t convinced another practice would have helped 2014 out.  He responded that he wished he could have had one more intense practice to get ready for regionals.

With the glory of hindsight I am still not sure what we could have worked on in 2014.  Maybe if I had bought 100 industrial fans, encircled the field, and turned the fans on high then we could have been ready to go.

In isolation it was easy to not take Carol’s warning with the weight it deserved, to dismiss Ben and Max as whiners, and to write-off Jack as being bummed about his collegiate finish.  Summing them together and it feels overwhelming.  Even if you feel like you’re team has put together the big pieces and you’ve done the heavy lifting, editing is never finished.

Doer v. Planner

Everyone has a “planner” and a “doer” (Richard Thaler - Misbehaving).

On Monday I went on an 8 mile hike of Mount Si.  4 miles up and 4 miles down, my calves were completely shot.  Tuesday morning I climbed on a plane and experienced the miracle that is human flight.  When I got home on Tuesday my “doer” decides he doesn’t want to work out.  My “planner” wants to stick with the regularly scheduled work out plan.

My doer argues that my body is tired and I should give it time to rest.  He fears that I will hurt myself if I tried to workout.  My “planner” knows that I’ve worked out when tired in the past, he isn’t convinced that I don’t have enough energy to put in some work and he doesn’t back down.

My doer decides to unpack, run some laundry, clean the kitchen, go grocery shopping, and do anything other than go downstairs to workout.

My Dad calls.  He asks if I am crying.  I assume he means because I just got home from Seattle; turns out he is talking about the Cardinals losing to the Cubs.  I cover my conversational tracks.  My doer stretches the conversation.  I like the Cardinals, but how can you be upset about a team who hasn't won in over a hundred years getting a chance?

It is 7:45pm; my doer claims it’s too late to workout.  There is some homework to do and if I go workout it will be late before I can get to it.

My planner has one weapon to wield over my doer, guilt.  He unleashes wave after wave of unrelenting guilt.  He refuses to give in to the doer’s impulsive and shortsighted desires.  He looks forward and say’s two hours from now you’ll be happy you worked out.  He argues that come tryout season you will have wished you worked out more not less.  He pushes the doer deeper into a sea of guilt; the weight of the water crushes the doer.

Guilt drives me down the stairs.  An hour later, pride carries me up.

My Nationals Format

Above are the 16 open teams at nationals sorted by win percentage in "games that matter."  The "Record Finish" is the Finish based on record only, the "Actual Finish" is the finish based on the result of the championship bracket only, (i.e. all preqs losers are given a 9).  There are 3 things wrong with this picture.

1. Patrol through High Five all Finished below Madison through TruckStop.
2. Machine Finished in the top 4
3. Bravo finished in the bottom 8

Since the Nationals format is lame and the cool thing to do is talk about potential new formats I feel like jumping in on the conversation.  My goal of Nationals is to make the tournament as brutal as possible, I want every team to play a ton of games and I want every game to matter.  The idea is how can I drag out an elimination bracket for as long as possible.

Thursday

1.  24 teams qualify for nationals.

2. 8 pools of three.  

Top seed gets to determine the format of the pool.  They choose one of the 6 options below.

	Option 1	Option 2	Option 3	Option 4	Option 5	Option 6
9am	1v2	1v2	1v3	1v3	Bye	Bye
11am	1v3	Bye	Bye	1v2	1v2	1v3
1pm	Bye	1v3	1v2	Bye	1v3	1v2

At the end of this the last place team in each pool is eliminated.  The second place teams play cross overs, winners advance losers are eliminated.  At this point we've eliminated 12 teams and have 12 remaining.

Friday

1. 4 pools of three

Again top seed determines format of the pool, last place team is eliminated and the 2's crossover.  This gets us down to 6 teams.

Saturday

1. 2 pools of three

Bottom 2 in each pool is eliminated.  This gets us down to 2 teams.

Sunday

Championship game.

Summary

If you sweep through the tournament you've played 7 games in 4 days.

If you grind through the tournament you've played 9 games in 4 days.  This would make it possible for a 7-2 team to win the tournament.

It is impossible to have a losing record on any given day and advance through that day.

The worst possible record you can have and make it to Saturday is 4-2.

I love Machine and I am pumped about the results of their Nationals, but any team that finishes 2-4 on a weekend should not be in the top 4.

An email from Chuck

Hi guys,

I wrote about Revolver Sunday and posted it to FB, and I want to bring a few concerns to you both.

Against Michigan last year at Regionals, these things which are present for Revolver were missing for us:

“The leadership meticulously maintains the core values of Intensity, Humility, and Discipline, and as a result, in big games, you can see how much more possibility there is than pressure. How much more joy there is than anger. How much more connectedness there is than separation.”

We were under a lot of pressure, and it was visible. We were upset instead of joyous to play. And our team had expectations of performance which made it seem like a goal was just something that was supposed to happen instead of something worthy of celebration. We were fragmented. We were individuals.

I want us to:

-Be invested in the man, not the player. 

-Be committed to the process, not the outcome (i.e., "it's unacceptable to get beat or lose" is the wrong message). 

-Recommit to the H in IHD. When we started with these values in 2012 we needed to shift away from H and focus on confidence/swagger. Now we have achieved some good momentum and success as a program, and I think we need to come back to Humility.

Right now, there are some damaging beliefs that have crept into our minds. I’ll use last year as an example:

1. We believe we "should" win some games (e.g., Michigan).

2. We believe that Champe needed to play great for us to win big games (e.g., replace Champe with Spielman/BK)

3. We believe that only Nationals or winning (or no turnovers or getting a block) is acceptable.

These ideas exist on many teams, even high-caliber teams. All of those ideas contradict Humility. Let me explain for each.

1. We don’t deserve any wins, and we’re not focused on wins. We have the opportunity to earn it every time we step on the field. That’s it. We come to each game humble, and we respect our opponents and always believe in our teammates. ALWAYS BELIEVE, NEVER TURN AGAINST. ESPECIALLY WHEN OUR BROTHERS MAKE MISTAKES.

2. No individual is needed on the team. No specific performance by an individual is needed either. On a healthy version of NUT, no one needs to do anything in particular for us to win. The wins will come to us when we stick with our values and stay committed to each other. Last year, Champe was under a ton of pressure because the team believed he needed to play great. This can’t work for us. We will always lose big games with that belief because the pressure will simply keep growing until we break.

3. It is none of our business what the results of our efforts are. We are committed to each other, and we are committed to the process. We get better every time we are together, we give honest and clear feedback, and we stay committed to each other. Captains/coaches need to keep the tone positive no matter what because being negative IS ARROGANT. We don’t know what is supposed to happen, so when we get upset with what’s happening, we are essentially saying that we DO know what’s supposed to happen and that this isn’t it. We don’t play God. We don’t commit to a result. We commit to each other and the process. That’s it.

I’m hammering this because I see these thoughts poisoning our team, and these are the exact same thoughts that were here in 2012 when I started coaching NUT. We worked hard to get rid of them, and I think we should work hard to keep them gone.

Revolver has won the biggest tournament of the year (Nationals/Worlds) each of the last 6 years using this philosophy. It is a good one.

You are the leadership of the team, so I want to get your buy-in or hear your thoughts. I defer to you on the direction for the team and am available to work on this if you want.

Love,

Chuck