Drills, strategy, application.
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Loading ...So there’s some discussion about trends in strategy in ultimate.
Interesting stuff, for sure. I especially liked one of the comments about ‘resistance’ as a means to gauging progress.
When I was co-captaining the B-team last year, we always started practice the same way–at least 10-15 minutes of marker drill, and a bit longer than that doing dump drill. Simple, yet effective drills, and I definitely think they paid off–by the time we got playing in sectionals, we were regularly using dump-swing-continue O as opposed to the force-it-up-the-line mentality with decent success. We certainly were able to beat a fair number of low/mid-level A-teams and were not often outclassed, save against the upper-level teams in the region.
We did a lot of other drill-type stuff, and I think the proof is in the pudding so to speak, in that a lot of the guys on the team were able to improve a lot fundamentally and became much better players as a result.
I definitely feel like there’s a lot of benefit to be had from devoting a significant portion of practice time to skills development rather than straight-up scrimmaging. It provides a great opportunity to really hammer down a specific part of one’s game, and on the B-team in particular it was a good opportunity for players of varying skill levels to work at their own pace–the hardworking guys can work together and push each other, while in a scrimmage it’s not always the case that all 7 guys are fully invested in their play, or are as capable as one would like. That said, scrimmaging is very necessary–there’s plenty of strategy and chemistry to develop, and it’s a lot more fun and keeps people coming back out to play, important to the B-team in particular.
With regards to Dartmouth ultimate, keeping a focus on the essentials of good team play (the mark and dump-swing) is always a good idea, for both levels. The B-team should perhaps spend a bit more time on it, but I think there’s ample evidence from the fall season that says the A-team likewise needs to invest time as a team to working on the mark and the dump. I like a lot of what we did otherwise in terms of drilling though–a lot of what we do, even in scrimmages, revolves around working with a specific set of circumstances–D team starts with the disc on a sideline rather than receiving a pull, some of the man D drills we do.
I wonder if we can’t improve the effectiveness of the drills further though? Idris talks about teaching a sort of improvisationality to the players, which is an interesting contention. We do a lot of drills that are fairly rigid and simple in their setup and execution. I definitely feel like there’s a benefit to be had from these drills, and we don’t necessarily need to change them, but I wonder if there aren’t perhaps variations or new setups we can incorporate to make drills more like real, game-time situation. Drills more like the drill we did a while back to work on our three-cutters dump scheme, where the person with the disc has multiple options to evaluate and decide upon.
I don’t know. Just an interesting topic to keep in mind down the road…
As you know, I read the blogs semi-religiously and have been thinking about the same questions.
One drill I think we certainly ought to do more is the 7-man offense with no defense. That drill, when we did it that one day, exposed many errors and very much helped us to improve our spacing. Also, it allows for the improvisation that Idris writes about.
Another drill we did with DoG that would work well is 2 v. 2 cutting drills. They’re virtually the same as our 1 v. 1 cutting drills, but you have to work with another person.
In general, I like the practice of scrimmaging right off the bat. Game to 5 or less. Gets the juices flowing and reminds us what we are ultimately trying to do well.
Yeah, starting off with a short scrimmage is a nice way to start things off.
re: defense-less offense, it can work well at times, but I’d like to see it with a passive defense put in. I can certainly visualize having a defender against me, but I think it’d make it a bit more realistic while still allowing us to work on the O. Though I suppose you lose the flexibility of choosing which way to cut to an extent that way…
2v2 cutting sounds interesting. Are your defenders restricted to just covering their man, or is switching also part of the equation?
The defenders decide beforehand whether to try to cover their men 1-on-1 or switch…
Many people have mentioned in the surveys so far that we ought to work on switiching. I wanna teach a clam for 1 throw to use on dead discs, too.
definitely would be useful to have more switching.
clam off dead disc sounds interesting. It’d be pretty lethal if you could have it be seamless off a turn out of bounds as opposed to a setup off a timeout or a play call, both of which would have the other team on alert.
Interesting proposition…
We definitely need to figure out some way to hide it…
Yeah. Maybe it’d be best if it were something that sounds typical but we’d know to be a play call, say, having the person on disc yelling to the stack “who’s got last?”
Positions would likely need to be set beforehand. You could probably organize it fairly effectively along our usual handler/cutter/fill calls, with say, two handlers and the uncalled as 0,1,2, your 3 and 4 playing the same positions, and the fills as 5 and 6.
Or structure it around the fake premise, with somebody responding to take last and become the deep in clam and perhaps setting the other positions based off of where their man is in the stack.
Just throwing ideas out there…
Yeah, we can mess around with it, figure something out.