Thoughts.

…or rather, merely the desire to stay awake and a bit of excitement to work with what I’ve created.

I started keeping an “ultimate diary” of sorts over the summer as I started to read lots of ultimate blogs, and used it to pool a lot of the knowledge I found most relevant or useful for the purposes of improving my game, or helping make the team as a whole better.

I’m really excited for the team this year, by the way. Dartmouth just keeps getting better and better…part of what drew me to the school was that, unlike Brown (the school I turned down to come here), which already had a well-established, successful program, Dartmouth’s was on the cusp. They’d gone to natties, but they weren’t considered the powerhouse that Brown is. I figured that if I went to Brown, I’d be consigned to B-teamness for much longer than I’d want, whereas if I came to Dartmouth, I’d have a shot at A-team from the get-go; I’d be able to have a meaningful impact, in other words.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I was merely one in a crop of unusually strong freshmen. While I came into Dartmouth knowing full well that I wanted to play ultimate and make it central to my experience (why lie, it was an important part of my evaluation of schools), a lot of people showed up with a bit of disc experience or none altogether but they were encouraged to come out by their upperclassmen trip leaders or whatever, and they happened to be athletic or have pretty good game sense or any other sort of trait that puts you a step ahead of the average ultimate recruit maybe as early as 5 years ago.

I wound up co-captaining the B-team last year, which was a great experience. While I was definitely pretty disappointed over not making the A-team right out of the gate, it definitely served several purposes for me; firstly, it was a reality check–I’m not the shit. Related to this, it gave me something to prove–”need to work on my defense, huh? I’ll show you defense. I’ll make it clear you made a mistake keeping me down.” And I worked on my defense like a mofo last year. Now I’ve turned that which was orignally perceived as a weakness into a source of pride–nothing like creating turns by baiting the layout D, or skying the shit out of my man because he really didn’t have enough separation to get the disc before me.

In any case, I’m playing D-line for the A-team for sure this year. I’m also a VP, which is great; I feel like I’ve been empowered to really have a say in the development of our program here, which is just the opportunity I was looking for, though I might not have known it when I first came here.

That’s what really excites me for ultimate this year, and in years to come: our potential. The 09s we have here are looking great. As early as last spring I’d envisioned this sort of scenario–continuing to get more and more talented freshmen classes, more solid players, boosting the competitiveness of the team exponentially. As opposed to having to develop for a couple years before maturing into a game-changing stud as a junior or senior, we’re going to have more freshmen come in already able to make a huge difference, and more sophomores come off of a year on the B-team with skills and game-sense ready for the big stage.

I love baseball, so I tend to relate lots of life to it; in the case of our program, I don’t think it’s too unfeasable to envision a college team similar in many respects to a big-league club, where you have your experienced veterans and exceptional talents in the majors, on-the-cusp talents developing in AAA, and all sorts of potential stewing just below that in AA, or in ultimate terms, having a great A-team, a rock-solid B-team, and possibly enough players to field a capable C-team.

That all makes sense in terms of numbers, with the way current trends are going (seemingly each year’s class brings out more and more freshmen, and more stick around for the long haul), but what I think will be most critical to our program in the long run is how we develop players. Like the Atlanta Braves, which is perhaps the best model of sports success, top-to-bottom, in history, having talented players doesn’t mean shit if you don’t coach well enough for them to develop properly, and you don’t put them in a positive, winning environment to breed success.

Anybody can get a bunch of athletes with skills on a field. What determines the ultimate (no pun intended) winner hinges more on the team’s ability to execute and perform up to potential, which is certainly hard, and requires a positive environment and lots of leadership, and of course the drive to succeed. One must have the desire to work hard towards the final goal, and must make sure to use the most effective means of training in order to get the best results.

Then it just comes down to performing when it counts, and my opinons on that actually can wait for another post. I’ve got lots of things I want to talk about.

Related posts:

1. Tryouts
2. The Cells!
3. Freshmen