90% Culture / 10% Drills

Yngve is driving Zubair and me home from Kennedy’s bachelor party, obviously we are discussing Frisbee, less intuitively we are discussing program building.  Zubair makes a statement: any team can be good as long as they are doing the right drills.

I have no issues with the face of this argument.  There are an absurd number of teams that are planning their practices the day of practice, or worse during the warmup, or worse yet not planning them at all.  There are teams spending a lot of time running “randy moss” huck drills or just scrimmaging for three hours (cause you know: “chemistry”) and calling it a practice.  Other teams are still splitting up into handlers and cutters in order to practice the sets separately, even more terrifying are the teams who never practice their sets because “Frisbee is too unpredictable and having sets doesn’t fit the sport.” 

Of course these teams can be improved by running better drills.  Drilling the more routine/common throws and catches, defining and drilling sets, and developing drills that target defensive mechanics are all going to make these teams better.  My issue with this perspective is that it undervalues the importance of culture.

Take a team with some older guys who easily fall into negativity or pout or complain about their teammates.  They act this way because this is what they knew as freshmen.  When this team runs a Randy Moss Huck Drill the individuals will get to show off, they will get to demonstrate that they can throw the disc further than anyone else or that they can sky anyone else.  When this same team tries to run an IO box to 100, they will be forced to succeed or fail as a team.  They will confront their own inadequacies.  When “routine” 10 yard passes start getting turfed or dropped and they’re only in the 40s what is going to happen to this team?  Are the older guys going to start to get down on their teammates?  Of course they are!  I can already hear the whiny “come on’s”, the complaints about “so-and-so” keeps dropping the disc, and the “how does a turf like that happen?”

Before you know it the older guys start to question the value of the drill, “this is stupid”, “a waste of time”, “why do we have to sit here all day while a few guys keep ruining it for the rest of us?”  Then the drill fails.  It was obviously the right drill, they struggled mightily with it, but the egos of these older players assigned the blame to the bottom of the roster and wanted onto “advanced topics” and lease the bottom of the roster behind.  This team can barely string together unguarded incuts but theyreturn to scrimmaging for 3 hours because they “really need to develop their chemistry.” 

Tangent:  My favorite irony in all of this is that the same team will go to a tournament, botch a few routine plays, and then in the huddle say something incredibly dense like “it’s throws and catches boys!”  If it’s “throws and catches boys” then why are you spending so little time on “throws and catches”?

Sure this team needs the right drills, but before they can address the issues of technical skill they need to address the framework of their culture.  They need to address their inflated egos with humility, they need to pick up the bottom of their roster with positivity, they need to accept the massive returns that discipline in fundamentals yields on the W/L column, and they need the intensity to work on these things every single day.  If you give them the best drills in the world but they just act like jerks toward one another then what was the point?  Until they can address these issues and become a supportive and encouraging group, then what is you even doing?