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.