Why You Should Focus on Positives
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Loading ...This Wired article about why we sometimes slip up and do the things we’re trying so hard NOT to do hints at the power of the human subconscious and its relation to sport. It’s definitely worth a read, especially if you’re a Neuroscience/Psych nerd like me, and points at two big takeaway points for ultimate.
Wired.com: It doesn’t seem practical to say, “Don’t try to think about not spilling wine on the carpet in a stressful situation,” when being at the party in the first place is stressful.
Wegner: Sometimes you’re stuck. The great leveler is making these processes automatic. In sports, people do things over and over until the action is automatic. It becomes so automatic that you don’t have the same mental process to engage. The whole thing has become unconscious. That only comes with practice.
The person who wants to avoid saying awkward things on the first date — well, by the 30th date, they’re not doing it anymore. They have to just brave it. In sports we know this, but we don’t think of social life the same way.
There’s one big takeaway–you need to hone your skills to the point that you stop thinking about them.
The other takeaway? How you phrase and frame your efforts (more particularly, how you talk and how you think) has a huge effect. Going into a game thinking “I can’t drop a disc” means you’re gearing your subconscious to think about dropping a disc and stopping it–all it takes is a tight moment, some extra stress, to engender exactly the outcome you’re trying to avoid. Thinking “I will catch every disc” doesn’t generate those same connotations. Talk in positives.
Building Chemistry: How Do You Do It?
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...I’m still behind on writing for the blog–a week in China and a weekend trip have eaten into my free time to write. Been doing a lot of thinking though (see blog title).
Today’s question, open forum:
How do you build team chemistry?
To put this a little more specifically: how do you take players who are unfamiliar with each other and get them to a point where they work well on the field?
I think that it follows somewhat with off-field chemistry: guys (and girls) need to be comfortable talking to each other about what’s working and what isn’t.
Social events are good to that end, but more particularly I’m thinking about things like practice/training groups–such groupings can make some artificial camaraderie where it doesn’t exist naturally (as it might between roomates, for instance). If I want my offensive handlers to gel with each other, I definitely want them drilling and playing together–but I want them going to the gym together, doing sprints together, too.
Is that too much? Does an emphasis on groups like that (e.g., persistent O/D line splits in drills, practice, etc) cost the overall team dynamic? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Coaching Thought: Vision
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...This is certainly not unique to coaches, but perhaps the most important thing for any coach to determine is thus: What’s your vision? For the team, and for yourself.
There are myriad ways to go about developing this vision (and I’m sure that many people with the desire to coach already have some ideas), but I think that perhaps the best way to go about it (or at least the way I’d think of going about it) entails the same kind of goal-setting any committed athlete can and should do, though perhaps extended to a broader scale.
It starts with some end goal–as a coach, it may be best to keep this information close to the vest, as a personal desire that exceeds or under-reaches your athletes’ goals (for example, having a goal of making Nationals for a team that’s only made it to Sunday of regionals once) can psych players out if made explicit. Let the players set their own goals and find their own motivations (with or without guidance). But take the time and decide–what’s your definition of “success,” given this team and these players?
From there, (or perhaps before you get to determining an end goal–a realistic assessment can take time) you simply have to evaluate the process you desire. What kind of a role do you envision for yourself? What kind of role do you think is necessary for the team to achieve your (their) goals? If there’s a discrepancy between these two versions of you, some effort in fixing the imbalance there (or changing your perspective) is in order.
What sort of work is necessary for the team to succeed (again, “success” being relative to your goals)? This takes a lot of on-field evaluation, determining skill progressions and training necessities. A lack of experience can make this determination tough (as far as “what is sufficient” or “how much is too much”), but a rough idea is better than no idea.
Then comes the softer side. The nuts and bolts of a team’s success are the on-field skills and the off-field effort, but the grease in the gears is everything else about a team–how’s the social dynamic? What sort of team culture are you encouraging? What kind of feeling or impression do you (want to) leave your athletes with as a coach? How do you motivate when times get tough?
This is going purely off of my anecdotal experience in high school and before more than anything else, but the most effective coaches I’ve had had a clear vision and progression in place. They have a PLAN, and the nitty-gritty of a plan cannot fall into place cleanly unless you have a similarly clear vision to accompany it. That’s not to say the plan is rigid, unmalleable–rather, the plan is the framework from which everything else follows.
If I do wind up coaching eventually, you can be damn sure I’ll be spending a lot of time thinking and planning. Advisors and mentors don’t necessarily need to have a plan, but when you accept the responsibility of a coach I think you have to invest more fully than that.
Coaching Thought: How Much?
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...I think a fundamental question for any coach is simply, “how involved can (or should) I be?
Obviously this varies a bit with circumstance. But certainly you see this at all levels of sport–you have your more laissez-faire “player’s coaches” and your more authoritarian types as well.
Ultimate at a club and college level, at least, seems to lend itself more to the former, simply by virtue of the sport being largely opt-in and the fact that coaches are still relatively new at these levels. Team meeting frequency can be infrequent enough that an authoritarian approach is hard to establish and maintain. I’m pretty positive that this is not the case in high school, where I get the (anecdotal) impression that your Tiina Booths have a much larger degree of control.
I find myself by and large to be a hands-off sort, who thrives more on individual interaction with big-picture guidance than being a strict or micromanaging sort. I’ve been told by at least one person that I have the right sort of laid-back disposition to be a successful coach in women’s ultimate, but I don’t exactly have a ton of experience to corroborate that (and I fear most of the readers here are similarly lacking in experience on that side of the gender spectrum).
That said, what are your own experiences with different coaching styles? Dartmouth’s men has always sort of by necessity had a more hands-off coaching style simply because we’ve never had a coach in Hanover who can regularly make practices–sometimes we have a coach or two for a scrimmage or practice on weekends, and certainly at tournaments, but in many ways the tone is set by the captains rather than any coaches.
What kind of things do you find that you need as a player to thrive that you can get from your coaches (or captains)? What sorts of things really hinder your progress? Do you prefer being left to do your own thing, or do you need somebody to really push you?
Addendum: see a post from the ’06 UCPC on Nathan Wicks’ talk about coaching Brown in their glory days of the early ’00s for more fodder for thought on coaching. I’ll address it specifically at some point soon.
Coaching
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...When my former teammates (well, if you count the women’s team* as teammates, which I do) got wind that my first choice for Med School next year also happens to be their school, I got an immediate reaction:
“!!!
“You can coach us next year!”
My reaction was significantly less enthusiastic. That said, it’s not like I don’t want to coach–merely that the prospect of being in that role for a perennial nationals-caliber performer is a little daunting.
I’ll be putting a bit of thought into this going forwards, and would love to hear feedback from people with far more experience than I on the matter (psst, the Huddle! How about an issue or feature on coaching this spring? Broad strokes and specifics are both welcome resources). Hopefully in so doing I can flesh out a bit of my perspective and philosophy on learning and the game.
Largely it’ll be open questions that I’d like to hear opinions on, so PLEASE chip in.
*it should be noted that Alex Kell ’10 also asked, but we’ll put him under “women’s team.” Dude plays in a skirt, after all.
Drills, strategy, application.
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) 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…
