Zone: Drills
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!)
Loading ...An anonymous commenter calls me out on a lack of drillable/practice-able recommendations. Thanks for catching me, anon–I value actionable info a lot and have been remiss.
To preface: zone, being inherently team-based, is hard to drill and train. It’s not like man D or throwing skills where all you need is a few more people, and I’d even go so far as to say that practicing zone O and D is only useful inasmuch as you’re practicing with the same group you’ll play with–familiarity is a foundation to dependable D and O.
That said, skills like reading a disc and boxing out, marking, and being heads-up as a defender are things you can practice with limited personnel/outside of the context of pure “zone” training, and these are useful for zone situations too.
In terms of drills…there’s something of a “standard” zone drill of running 3 guys in the cup around a circle, forcing the throwers in the circle to repeatedly break through or around the cup in a big convoluted game of monkey in the middle. While this is perhaps useful for the bare basics of how to not get hosed, I think it serves best as a stepping stone to higher-level/more realistic drills–in other words, game situations.
Things like set start and finish points for a scrimmage are perhaps one of the best options for game situation practice. E.g.: start with an offensive line vs. a defensive line in a trap, stop as soon as the trap is broken (or allow a few extra passes for more realism); start with the disc just past the cup, as if on a break through/over it; stop when the defense recovers or is scored on. Reset if the D generates a turnover.
You can impose unique restrictions on this to emphasize certain facets for O or D: for example, you can add/subtract a receiver or defender to work on finding receivers in open space/covering multiple receivers in the backfield or flooding areas to overwhelm a single defender, respectively. I’ve also seen variations where the deeps are removed from the equation, on both O and D, to emphasize side-to-side and short motion to beat the zone.
One thing I haven’t seen, but would love to, is changing the field size–narrowing the field to favor the defense more, or widening it to favor the offense. Creativity is encouraged through restriction, and I’d like to see what kinds of adjustments are made in such situations.
With all of these other adjustments though, the essential thing is to keep getting reps. If you want to, you can scrimmage with limitations, but you’ll keep focus and get more bang for your buck if you emphasize one situation at a time. It’s great that Dorner can bomb a forehand to Sam streaking deep off the turn, but probably a waste of time when you want to quickly reset for the O to try again.
If you want your team to execute on a given strategy repeatedly, give them lots of reps to help recognize situations in which to apply it and experience so they can adjust to what works and what doesn’t. This takes a bit more critical thought on the part of a practice planner, which is why I don’t have too much in the way of specific recommendations.
You might look to ultitalk for some discussion, and I’d also point you to the huddle for some more espousal on the matter of teaching team D (you might also peruse what they have on zone D to inspire your thinking as far as what to focus on).
Any commenters out there have more to add with regards to teaching and drilling zone?
We often have a big large whiteboard at practices (3 times the size of your normal field diagram) on my summer team that captains use both to draw up the afternoon’s schedule, as well as to illustrate.
Especially when implementing a zone, I think there’s no shame in drawing a very simple picture and illustrating the general flow of the D or O.
We also agree as a team on the priority areas of our D (both the whole set and on the mark) and explain to players exactly where the disc cannot be thrown and where a dump or horizontal throw is okay. For instance, the D set may be designed to push one throw, or bait a specific cutter and making this clear to everyone at the beginning of a drill will orient players heads to a more specific goal other than shutting down the O.
If you are looking to teach players about the importance of field position (in relation to the sidelines in zone), I have a drill that I think is really fun. In an endzone (40×25 yards) you play 4 on 4. You get a point every time you complete a set number of passes, say 10. The defensive team uses tries to work the offense into a corner of the endzone and is encouraged to let them throw lots of little throws as long as they are kept “boxed in” or “trapped”. I find this drill helps with some of the concepts that players find more abstract about zone, both O and D.
I’ve always found ‘friendlies’ against locally based opponents the best way to work on zone D!
#6 (Nice Blog by the way),
We haven’t done quite that before at Dartmouth, though we have played much more loosely-organized games centered on simply completing passes. It’s a pretty nice tool (focusing on completions rather than attacking a particular space) to encourage rookies without the skillset to do much more than throw easy completions.
Simon,
I agree on illustrating: In fact, I’d say it’s almost mandatory. Whether it’s done with a whiteboard, discs on the ground, or people standing on a field is a question worth considering–people key in on different things, so the best approach probably uses multiple methodologies to get the message across. Love the point about setting priorities though.
R/D,
Also very useful–the challenge, of course, becomes finding ‘friendlies’ who are not rivals: don’t want to be giving away trade secrets before it counts!