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.