The Cells!
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Today, we moved our fuel cell information to the blogosphere. Interesting shift, we’ll see how it takes with the team.
I was talking with Socks the other day and we were just commenting about how much progress the program here at Dartmouth has made over the past several years. We had our bid to natties in ’02, and we’ve only continued to improve since, though allocation of bids means we don’t always have the luxury of a third bid to natties.
With any luck, that won’t matter this year, or for the next several years. But I am getting ahead of myself; we haven’t really done jack shit yet, we certainly need to work hard and continually push ourselves and strive for excellence.
But yeah. You look at the fuel cell system; this is a very new thing for us, only been around for a little over a year now. It’s certainly not perfect yet, but that it’s still being developed and can be improved upon is exciting to me, because I get to be a part of that process (or at least bear witness to it).
But it’s a wonderful step in the right direction for Dartmouth Ultimate; just look at it. By having fuel cells, it already allows for the following:
-gets us working together fairly consistently, and with a standard lifting program (which is quite well-designed for ultimate’s essentials)
-provides a means to organize intra-team competition–3v3 in the winter, cell boot competitions, cells combining for scrimmages, whatever.
-provides a context for intra-team competition, however arbitrary–nothing like being able to claim your cell as having the best stats of the team, or having the hardest workers/best hecklers/whatever.
-acts as a filter for tryouts in the summer/fall, as you get to track a given individual’s progress in the context of their cell.
-gets more people involved. People who are in cells have an additional identity and group on the team, which (depending on cell dynamics I suppose) provides a nice group of people for anybody, particularly A-team callup freshmen, to get to know.
-gets more people in leadership roles. It’s too soon to say, but the cell system would definitely seem to be a valuable means to evaluate leadership ability in addition to fitness.
Things I’d like to see it develop to encompass:
-development. It makes a lot of sense to me to get freshmen assigned to cells at some point and having a specific set of people tasked with helping these freshmen get acclimated at dartmouth, on the team, and help them improve as a player, as opposed to the overwhelming resource of the entire team, or the captains.
This isn’t just restricted to freshmen, though. I feel like, especially since we have the blogs, it’d be a great forum for communication on any number of ultimate-related issues, particularly things to help people with their game.
-play-making. I think this is already showing to a point, but I think it’d be cool to have particular cells work on particular plays/play with each other a ton to get some great synergy with cellmates going. It could make a big difference to have that level of comfort, but I suppose this just comes with playing with the team in general as well. I just think it’d be cool to call “red sox + mideast” as a line, having your golden cut or 3/4, whatever, involving members from the same cell who know each other inside and out.
Okay, so I really only had one legitimate thing I want to see with the fuel cells. B-team fuel cells fall under “development” as well; that’s a whole ‘nother thing, it definitely has great potential as a concept, there’s just the matter of really implementing it effectively.
