Throwing Thought: Develop a Checklist
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Loading ...We say lots of stupid things on an ultimate field.
I can tell you until the cows come home that you need to take more care when you throw in the wind, but if it were so simple as simply saying to yourself, “let’s throw better in the wind,” it wouldn’t be a mantra amongst college teams in New England year after year.
What really needs to happen, is that people need to develop a checklist of tweaks to their throws that can be applied to varying degrees in various circumstances to ensure good throwing.
What do I mean? I mean things like:
- stepping out
- flicking the wrist harder
- gripping the disc harder
- tilting the nose of the disc downward slightly to keep the lip from being exposed to the wind when throwing upwind (“staying over the throw,”)
- tilting the disc upwards slightly to avoid the turf (“getting under the throw,” though this is more often an error than a correction in my experience)
- throwing from a lower release point (“getting low”)
When my throws suck, I run through my checklist–are my throws working differently than I wanted because I’m swinging my arm (“hooking it” on an arc) instead of coming through in a straight line ? Is it something as simple as needing to grip a little more tightly?
Learn to debug your own throws. And learn how to teach other people to debug theirs. Part of my pre-game routine is tuning my throws for the day’s conditions (the day’s conditions include my own condition), running through a mental checklist that includes all of the things mentioned above. If it’s windy, I put a lot of effort into adjusting my tilt to compensate during warm-ups, so I don’t have to think about it when I catch a swing pass and only have a split-second to decide whether to throw the continuation or not.
When you get comfortable debugging the mechanics of your throws, think also about things like how the weather is affecting touch, how gusty it is (as I alluded to in my post about hammers, consistent wind can be accounted for–gusty wind, being harder to predict, can wreak havoc. Recognize which throws are less havoc-prone in these conditions), and even things like how your cutters are running today and how you expect the defense to match up (do you want to err on throwing with more float for your receiver to sky for, or with more lead for him to run on to/bid for? Do you laser the pass to the in-cut to minimize the window a defender can make a play, or do you lead with float to give your receiver time to catch and set up his continuation throw more effectively?). How confident are you in your ability to place a throw with touch?
Run through your checklist, fix what you can, recognize what you can’t, and adjust your in-game decision making accordingly.
