Ceilings

My previous post is intimately related to this one.  Anyone can make the A team, anyone can be valuable to the A team.  The road is long and tiresome, but the map is clear.  Obviously everyone is starting a different level and everyone will have to travel different distances, but in the words of dear Walden, “as long as you care enough you can make it.”

When a young whippersnapper who is lacking in athleticism (his gait is small, his mobility is poor, his strength is low, he isn’t explosive) it is easy to feel sorry for him, it is easy to say, “he will have to work so hard just to catch up,” “his ceiling is pretty low,” and it is easy to use these thoughts as excuses to never even try to make it.

He will have to work so hard just to catch up:

Saying this allows me to sympathize with him for not even trying, it allows me to be the nice guy that feels bad for me new friend.  It allows me to steal from him and opportunity to experience pushing himself.

I often wonder what people mean by “he has to work so hard.”  What is the image of “work so hard” that they have in their mind?  I think that putting in 12 hours a week is enough to make incremental improvements throughout a college career, I think that if you routinely budget this amount of time then you will improve all the way through your senior year.  Is 12 hours a lot?  I would never ask someone to be in the gym for more than an hour and a half.  I would never ask someone to go the gym more than 3 times a week.  Are my expectations still too high?

His ceiling is pretty low:

This one is great.  Vandervoort used to argue that you don’t want kids who played high school ultimate because they’ve already peaked and they aren’t going to improve very much moving forward.  This is a joke.

No 18 year old has peaked.  No 23 year old has peaked.  If you think that people are capable of playing a sport for 3 years and maxing out, then I’m not that interested in being friends with you.  I feel strongly that the lowest ceiling I have ever seen is still high enough to be valuable to a college Frisbee team.

Just because your ceiling is low doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.  Just because my ceiling is lower than someone else’s doesn’t mean I can’t be better than that person.  I think that there are many teammates who have had higher ceilings than me, but I’ve still been the better Frisbee player.  (I wish I had the guts to name names).

Even considering someone’s ceiling is a waste of time.  The only reasonable action to take is to try.  Try to get little better every day.  Try to squat .5x times your body weight, then .66x, then 1x, then 1.5x, if you make it this far go for 2x.  You can add an inch every single week of your college career and by the time you are ready to graduate you will not have made it to your ceiling.  This isn’t a reason to not try.

Back to my boy Sahaj:

Recently Sahaj did some film study of Justin Lin and Bobby Ley, he said he learned a lot but the one comment he had was, “they’ve been playing Frisbee for years, and I’m not going to get to their level.”  I told Sahaj that I get that, and that is completely fine, but that isn’t an excuse to try.  You can still learn things from good players; you can still strive to be better and to emulate them.  My boy Sahaj understands that he isn’t done until he is at their level, which he might never get to, which means he might never finish.  My boy Sahaj gets it because he is a thug.

The Blueprint

The road to becoming more athletic:

Times per week:	Activity:	Minutes per activity:
2	Squat	30
1	Deadlift	15
2	Plyos	20
1	Sprint	40
4	Throw	40

This sums to 5.25 hours of time outside of practice.  Add in 6 hours for practice and it takes a whopping 12 hours a week to become a valuable Frisbee player.  You're in college, you have as much time as you choose to have.

Ego

Ego

Ego is blind

Ego is arrogant

Ego is unfounded

Ego is unable to learn

Ego doesn’t make mistakes

Ego is never the responsible for failure

Ego is better even if it loses

Ego is already the best

Ego is suffocating

Ego is poison

Ego is loud

Ego

If I were to put one word to every season that is considered a “bad” season, that word would be ego.  Ego is death to a team. 

Ego is the mid-regionals club team that is worrying about “advanced topics”.

Ego is the club player who thinks he is above college drills and drilling the fundamentals.

Ego thinks he would be the best player on a national’s college team, if only he had tried harder in high school to get into a better college.  Ego is the best player in the region but no one recognizes it because it is in a small program.  Ego is too good for his college team.

When ego loses it doesn’t accept defeat.  Ego points at its teammates and blames them for holding it down.  Ego points at the other team and knocks them for getting lucky.  Ego assumes it will win that game 9 out of 10 times.  Ego says “if.”

·         If it wasn’t so windy I would have won

·         If we hadn’t dropped that pass in the endzone I would have won

·         If they didn’t call that foul I would have won

·         If they hadn’t made so many lucky catches I would have won

·         If they hadn’t gotten away with so many travels I would have won.

Ego fouls when he gets beat.  Ego calls travels he doesn’t see.  Ego calls fouls that didn’t happen.

Ego is not welcome in my dojo.

Competitive

You’re playing basketball with your college roommate.  You’ve got about two inches on him and you won the first game by a few points.  His feathers are ruffled and he’s starting to get angry but he agrees to a second game.  The second game starts and you make the unfortunate decision to block a shot.  He is so mad, he yells about how you’re only good because you’re tall and he storms away.  You stay and shoot around a bit before heading home, showering, and hitting up the café.  Your roommate comes up and apologizes, he explains how he is “so competitive he couldn’t play anymore,” he tells you that he didn’t want to let his competitiveness turn him into a jerk so he stopped playing.

You’re trying to get to know a girl.  The two of you are hanging out playing some scrabble, the game is still in its infancy but you’ve managed to lay down some pretty good words and you have a lead.  She quits right there.  She tells you that she is so competitive she doesn’t want you to see her lose.  She doesn’t want you to have a negative image of her, and she is so competitive she doesn’t want to play.

You’re trying to organize a game of capture the flag.  Your boy stares you right in the face and says, “I’m too competitive to play, I don’t want to be a jerk so I’m not going to play.”

Yo bro, you aren’t competitive you’re a sore loser!  When did being a competitive become synonymous with being a sore loser?

Competitive:  having a strong desire to compete.

Sore Loser: one who does not take defeat well, whereas a good sport means being a "good winner" as well as being a "good loser".

A competitive person wants to compete regardless of winning of losing; they just want to feel the thrill of competing.  A sore loser is a jerkface when they lose and they don’t want people to see that.  A sore loser doesn’t even want to compete because the risk of losing is too high.  A competitive person doesn’t care if he/she is going to lose, they’re just amped up for some good ole competing.

It infuriates me because being competitive should be a good thing.  A competitive person should be fun, they should be up for playing whenever, and they are the reliable 7^th for when you only have 6 to go to a tournament.  I understand that sore losers recognize the weakness within themselves, I understand that they are so disgusted by themselves that they must cling to another word, and so they have chosen to ruin and cripple the beauty that is competitive.  My message to these people: Stop demeaning the value of competitive by confusing it for being a sore loser.

The sore loser is the one who doesn’t want to go to Easterns because he thinks the team is going to lose every game.

The competitor is stoked he gets to play at the best regular season tournament of the year.

The sore loser doesn’t want to finish regionals after being eliminated from Nationals.

The competitor is fired up to play one last game with his team.

The sore loser doesn’t try out for the local elite club team because he has no chance of making it.

The competitor appreciates every second he gets to play against the best players in his city.

Yng-Fu

Yngve is the guy that I can never agree with, or maybe we are always agreeing and just saying it differently, or maybe neither of has any idea what the other one is trying to say.  Everything is an argument.  The nature of my relationship with Yngve, has forced me to reconsider my own personal canon and question whether anything should be canon at all. In such a young sport is it even possible that we know what the best way to approach the game is?  Is it safe to lie something down and say this is good, or should we be questioning any and every preconceived notion.

When it comes to Yngve I do not have things that I’ve learned.  I have things that I discovered I do not know.  The hardest part of not knowing something is that we don’t know what it is that we don’t know.  Yngve is the guy who asks so many questions and pokes so many holes in the ideas I lay down that he has shown me many things that I do not know.

1.       “You said something vague about…”:

Every time I try to make a point or express a sentiment, Yngve tells me what I said was vague and hard to grasp.  He tells me that it doesn’t really mean anything to him and is not solid or relevant to him and that if he were one of the sophomores listening to me he would have just nodded along but had no idea what I was trying to convey.

I rush when I speak.  I have this theory that everyone’s attention span is the length of a goldfish and so I work to say one or two ideas in as little words as possible.  I want to just throw something clean, concise, and sticky.  The problem is that it isn’t sticky at all because I made it too concise.  I tell people to drive their hucks but they have no idea what a driven huck is, I show someone where to position on handler defense but they have no idea how to get to that spot during a scrimmage, I tell people to spread out but they have no idea where to spread out from.

My goal for moving forward is to spend more time talking.  I’ve erred on the side of saying too little for too long, I am going to go back to saying too much and trying to find the middle ground.

2.       How to create buy in:

Yngve is the master of buy in.  My own voyage of ultimate has been through the lens of “I want to play ultimate”, “I want to play sports”, “I have pride so I am going to try hard regardless of team culture.”  It always shocks me when people say they aren’t having fun at practice, or that they don’t feel motivated, or they don’t really care about trying to be competitive at regionals.  I am surprised and caught flat footed when people say these things to me and I have no method for how to react or comfort them other than to question their manhood.

Yngve knows how to make people want to be there.  He has a way with taking those who have given up on themselves and bring them back into the fold.  I think it has something to do with Yngve’s own trip down the road of potentially quitting.  Regardless of what it is, his success next to my struggle at it has revealed a gaping hole in my ability to get people to want to be there.

Give me someone who wants to get better and I can go to town, challenge me to get someone to buy into a team and you might as well have them walk away from the team now.

3.       Jersey’s Matter:

It is my opinion that whatever I am wearing I will try as hard as I can.

It is Yngve’s stance that a bad jersey design reflects poor leadership.  A failure by leadership to design a jersey that the team would want to wear is a strong indicator that leadership is out of touch with the team and incapable of getting the most out of their team.  A bad jersey yields lackluster results.

Chuck Coast

Shortly after interacting with Luke Johnson I met Chuck.  I think Luke primed me well for Chuck and when I heard Chuck’s philosophy’s I was eager to embrace them.  Chuck told me that everyone coaches the body, lots of people coach the mind, but no one coaches the spirit.  I was eating it up.

1.       IHD:

An alternative title for this section would be “Have a touchstone”.  Teams need something to fall back on.  When the going gets tough or when the challenges seem unsurmountable, a team needs something to check in with and fall back on in order to ground themselves for the next push.  When a season starts to stretch long and patience begins to wear thin, a touchstone can you bring to what matters and what you’re actually trying to accomplish.

For Chuck IHD is the touchstone.  Intensity, Humility, and Discipline are three words that bring him into the moment and remind him what matters and where he is going.  IHD is the answer to every question, it is the guiding light showing you where to go.

2.       Belief is a muscle:

Belief is a muscle that needs to be exercised.  Belief can be your biggest and strongest muscle if nurtured properly. 

Chuck’s idea behind belief is not just “I believe I can win” it was more along the lines of “I believe in what we are doing”.  As I’ve written earlier winning is hard and is often a product of variables that you can’t control.  So when Chuck talked about belief, he was trying to get us to focus on what we could control and to believe that that would be enough to get us to where we wanted to be.

Belief creates buy in, it makes it easy to support a struggling teammate, and it makes it easier to work through personal struggles.  If you’ve got 24 guys who believe in the way you play ultimate, if you and 24 friends are picking up someone in a slump, if you have 24 guys encouraging you to keep working then it’s easier to actually accomplish those things. 

If I believe that my team is getting better every single time they step on the field then stomaching, growing, and learning from a 1-8 record at Warm-Up is easy.  If I believe in Champe and Yiding to work through setbacks and become even better players from it, then watching them blow a 4 break lead against Notre Dame is easy.  If I know that the team believes in me then it is easy for me to give them everything I have, it’s easy for me to make time for them in my schedule.

The thing about belief is it’s always rewarded.  Always.

3.       Touch:

Alright I will admit that I first learned that great teams touch from Kevin Garnett.  The second time I saw Chuck he gave me a big ole bear hug.  Chuck was all about making a connection with a hug or as simple as a hand on a shoulder.  Touching creates a connection, regardless of how manufactured that connection may be it is powerful.

The next time you have a bummed out teammate try putting on hand on them and saying something from the heart.  It’s uncomfortable for about a second, but as they drop their defenses and allow you in the power of your words get magnified.  Touch them, watch them be uncomfortable and shift around for a second, watch them relax, pull them close and tell them you believe in them, then you will see who they truly are.  Some will shyly smile, others will nod, others will say thanks, and Adam Wright will start punching you while trying to hide his face so that you don’t know how much he appreciated you reaching out to him.

The Book of Luke

During college Luke Johnson was that guy on North Park that almost tanked Illinois at sectionals in 2008.  He was a stud, the best thrower in the region, and if he got hot North Park could follow.

My first club experience out of college was with Natives, a Luke Johnson run squad.  As I’ve expressed before, it was a very dark time for me, and the positives came out of playing with Natives was big for me in terms of staying with ultimate.  Luke Johnson was the guy that spun ultimate and put it in a light that made a black and blue image of ultimate appear white and gold.

I only have one thing that I learned from Luke.  I think this is fine, because it has had a profound impact on my life.  I talk about relentless positivity outside of ultimate, I use it during job interviews, and I use it with my family.  I am not going to dilute the impact relentless positivity has had on my life by including two other lesser value points.

1.       Relentless Positivity:

Luke’s formula for having fun is having fun = hard work + relentless positivity.  Prior to Luke I knew what hard work looked like, but I had always employed negativity and being mean as a way of “toughening up” my teammates or encouraging my teammates to “be a man”.  In my mind it was all about being hard and giving people a hard time until they toughened up.  The problem with ultimate is that everyone who plays ultimate was raised by liberal parents who never told them no as children, so the brand of motivation that revolves around “toughness” and “grit” doesn’t work on these people.  What works is relentless positivity.

Finding ways to shine a positive light keeps people together, it keeps their spirits up, and it keeps them bought in.  Casting negative lights depresses ultimate players, it makes them want to quit, it makes them less inclined to try.  Being relentlessly positive builds up the self-esteem, it improves their sense of self-value, and it’s a fantastic way to get the most out of them.

I remember using relentless positivity on the middle school girls’ basketball team that I was coaching.  Obviously they ate it up, they loved it, and it made them have more fun with the game.  Then I decided to bring it with me to ultimate, and it had a shockingly similar effect.  In summary, ultimate players are middle school girls.

On a more serious note, negative energy is a poison.  It is unproductive, evil, and nearly impossible to escape.  Bringing relentless positivity into your life is the lifehack for being able to stop and appreciate the roses.  People want to be built up, people want to see where things are going well, they want to see where they are improving, they want to know what  their impact is, using relentless positivity can help you as a leader show them the value in themselves.  Once they can see the value they bring, it’s then easier for them to focus on that and to maximize the impact of their positives.  It’s easier for them to take pride in their positives if they know what their positives are, and when everyone on your team has pride in what they do then you’ve become a dangerous team.