Defensive Adjustments: A Key to High-Level Success
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Ultimate, like most sports, appears relatively simple at a glance–you look at your elite, championship-caliber squads, and you see lots of absolutely baller ultimate players–of COURSE they’re an elite team; they’re more talented.
In practice though, talent alone is not enough. Strategy is huge, especially on defense–given the largely offensive-advantaged nature of the sport, generating turns is the name of the game. High-level defense relies not only on good, athletic, experienced players, but also on making strategic adjustments to keep the pressure on.
The amount of nuance involved with making adjustments makes it a continual learning process to execute, though the big-picture ideas behind these adjustments tend to be relatively simple.
Keep in mind that while I’m talking about adjustments as a team-level strategy, you can and should be thinking about similar changes within your own matchup in a given point/game/season.
Adjustments have two main thrusts: Changing strategy completely or Tweaking the strategy you already have.
Changing involves a shift from, for instance, man to zone D, or from one zone set to another.
Usually you do this to take away an opponent’s strength–for example, if you’re finding their downfield cutters relentless against your man, a zone D that forces them to slow down and make more/riskier passes might throw them off their rhythm. Changes are also made to prey on an opponents weakness–if a team’s handlers prove fallable, a zone designed to force lots of handler motion might prove effective.
Tweaking is where the real meat of making adjustments comes;usually when I talk about defensive adjustments this is what I’m talking about. In any D this has two components:
- The Mark
- Downfield
These two are very closely related, such that altering one will impact the other.
Adjusting on the mark means a conscious decision to take something away that you weren’t before–with an accompanying concession of something you were previously contesting.
For instance, if a team is routinely using its IO breaks for quick, effective strikes, you might make an adjustment on the mark to consciously cheat more to the open side (or perhaps commit to not biting as hard on pivots to the break side), or otherwise adjust the mark’s positioning to stop the break from going off. This has the tradeoff of making the around break easier; generally you make this concession hoping that a team that loves the IO will struggle to adjust and use the OI, or at the very least you’ll have a better idea of what to expect now that you’re dictating.
Adjusting downfield, you change up your positioning and what space you’re actively trying to take away–in the previous example, instead of adjusting with the mark, you can also adjust downfield by instructing your defenders–particularly those close to the disc, who are prime candidates to receive the IO–to play more closely to their man (more even with the mark rather than flared out into the lane), and to respect the break side cut a bit more since it’s been established as viable. In this example that’s not necessarily a good adjustment to make, as it makes the open side more vulnerable…however, it may still prove more effective than simply staying the course.
I’ll be making a few more posts going in more depth on these sorts of adjustments, and try to get at some of the “why” behind it as well, which is the real meat of the strategy. Keep in mind that as defensive adjustments get more complex, you need a correspondingly more capable defensive squad to carry them out effectively. Even minor adjustments like mark positioning require a certain amount of experience; if you’re going to mess around with straight-up transition marks or other fanciness you likely will need to practice and coordinate these adjustments before you get into tournament situations; otherwise you risk a poor defensive set and, worse still, putting your players in a position where they have to think too much in the flow of a game, hindering performance.
great post topic, have seen a few teams pay more attention to adjusting the offense than the defense (team or person to person)