Freshmen
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!)
Loading ...Lots of growth at the high school level means lots of colleges are going to see explosions in the level of talent they get from their freshmen.
But what does it mean? How do you get the most out of these guys? I certainly don’t know; I’m just a sophomore. But it’s definitely one of the more relevant questions facing my team at Dartmouth, I think, because as we’re currently structured the learning is good for the inexperienced, and certainly helpful to initiate the freshmen into how things are done at Dartmouth, but I feel like there’s a lot more potential to help players develop and mature even at this early stage.
Right now it seems very person-dependent; a freshman needs to be proactive, picking the brains of veterans about X or Y, which is useful, but not universally applicable to everybody. Pick one veteran, he says A, but another offers B as a more practical alternative. If you don’t talk to both, maybe you wind up learning how to throw a decent forehand but you never really worked on your grip so you wind up without the necessary control for a reliable IO.
I’m certainly not knocking the veteran presence; on the contrary, it’s one of the most beneficial ways to improve, because the veterans tend to have already experienced and thought out what you’re asking about and can save you a lot of time wondering what the ideal dump is simply by telling you what tends to work best in a given situation, based on their experience. I just feel like it’s too diluted, or rather, that as a veteran, the tendancy for people who aren’t captains or asked about a specific topic is to withold information and not volunteer one’s thoughts.
I’m getting a little outside the scope of what I meant to discuss, so I’ll leave elaboration on that topic for later.
So what do you do with your studly, but not-yet-college-level freshmen? It seems there are two routes you can take, really, and I’ve got my opinion on each:
-Put them on the A-team, but have them ride the bench more often than not, only playing them regularly when the game’s not on the line. This makes sense on a lot of levels–you get to experience the big show, you get to hang around lots of talented and experienced players, and you get to see the game the way it (hopefully) should be played. But at the same time, while you get your freshman a lot of exposure, the limited playtime would seem to be a substantial tradeoff, particularly for your handler-types who just aren’t up to snuff yet.
You can certainly have a successful team with this model, that’s not the issue; I just wonder if there isn’t a more effective way to develop players, or more directly, a way to get them more playtime and experience while at the same time allowing them to get the same level of exposure.
-Put them on the B-team, where they’re studs but at a lower level of competition. This isn’t altogether bad, I don’t think, but I’m a bit biased since that was my situation last year. You get a ton of play time, which is a great perk, and playing in a lower-pressure, B-level environment provides much greater opportunity for risk-taking and, I think, developing as a handler. Particularly since I was captaining the team last year, I was always one of a handful of “people in charge” who structured practice, and coordinated the offensive and defensive strategies, which really helped broaden my horizons as far as understanding how the game works and what makes a successful team.
I think it can really make for great development, particularly for the mid-tier talents, as the competition is relatively decent, but not overwhelming, really forcing you to push your game. And it provides a great opportunity to instill the sort of play style you’d like to have on the A-team, in terms of strategy, plays, offensive and defensive sets, etc, with a few limitations (like the fact that most of the solid handlers are at A-level, making deep play a bit riskier at a B-level).
But of course, there are limitations here as well. How do you challenge your top-tier talents? It’s nice to be a stud, but it just makes it harder to deal when players of equal or greater talent come along, and dealing with B-team defenses as opposed to aggressive, A-team ones can lead to laziness in handling and cutting.
So how do you deal with this? The current team model, calling up freshmen who are either exceptionally experienced or your athletic types who can run down hucks and dish out Ds, seems to work fairly well in terms of team success. But one might wonder if they could be better served spending the year (or at least part of the year) playing B-level, where the stakes are lower and what you can get away with is greater, encouraging development more (I think), but only to a point.
It’s an interesting choice, for certain, and I think as a captain who makes these decisions, one needs to weigh team success and individual talent and development carefully.
