Defensive Thought: Enter Their Spirit
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Loading ...First, two comments, both related to Parinella’s latest post:
1) There will be at least three (3) ultimate bloggers at Kaimana, as I’m picking up with a Philly-based squad with Dusty, whom you might recognize. Really itching to get back on an ultimate field again, got to run and throw a little in the snow on a visit back to Dartmouth and it was blissful.
2) I’d just like to point out that I was talking about Hard vs. Efficient (in slightly different terms) a good while back.
Along those lines (particularly with regards to “efficient” D), a component of good defense that is rarely talked about, perhaps due in large part to a difficulty with putting it in words, is…well. For lack of a better way to put it, entering your (wo)man’s spirit.
What do I mean? I mean, if you understand your opponent, you can shut them down with ease. If you understand your opponent’s offensive schemes and structures, getting the turn becomes a matter of when, not if.
At a very basic level, you have to understand your quarry’s wants and desires, and to some extent, we all do. We understand that generally speaking, a cutter wants to cut in or deep on the open side, that a handler wants to make an easy pass to the break side but will take the open side cutter, etc etc etc. This dictates the way we teach and execute “normal” defense.
You have to move beyond that simple understanding, however, and learn more specifically if you’re to get the best of good teams. In a sport like (American) football, you call this good scouting, realizing that, for instance, a QB cannot complete passes with any regularity in the wind, and with pressure can be forced into myriad errors by a strong Eagles defense. (I’m not that heartbroken. But oh, Eli.)
In ultimate, this comes across more as “He loves the huck,” “All they want to do is chuck it to headband,” “Not a thrower,” and other simple but effective realizations.
This is useful information. When you recognize what a team’s offense and individuals want to do, at the very least you can force them to their second (less comfortable/consistent) option. That’s the first level. It’s something we attempted to institutionalize in part on Dartmouth last year with some success–dedicating minds on the sideline (more on sidelines at a later time–but know this: they are your best asset as a team) almost exclusively to “scouting” the other team, and we found a decent degree of success with it.
At a deeper level, though, what I mean is dynamically altering the defense you present such that it always aligns against your opponent’s desires. Recognizing that, while your man loves to cut deep, if you’re still with him after a few steps he will plant to come under, and adjusting your defense right as he gets to that point–temporarily conceding the deep you were just taking away, knowing that your opponent has shifted his attention elsewhere–you will be able to be everywhere he wants to be and a VERY frustrating defender.
In a larger sense, having a feel for where your teammates are and what your opponent’s offense is looking for allows you to do similar things–you can concede that deep option temporarily when the O is looking dump, or if you know that the first few stalls of each new possession are dedicated to stopping the continuation huck. That is part and parcel of good defense.
However, the epitome, in my mind at least, is integrating that information along with a reading of your opponent’s desires. If you recognize the lack of a viable deep option, you don’t respect the deep cut. When she realizes this, what will she do? You need to anticipate her looking to cut to the break side, or you need to anticipate her using the threat of the break side in your mind to try and get what she REALLY wants–the open side under.
The Sicilian reasoning game runs deep at times. Strive to always be a step ahead of your opponent mentally, and it will translate into similar margins on the field. At the very least, keep yourself from the blank, following mentality that all halfway decent cutters can exploit. Anyone can take away the first option–it’s recognizing how those options change as the disc and your man moves that allow you to move from a good defender to a stellar one.
A Brief Overview: Catching, Defense, Strategy, etc.
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...Catching
Work to change your catching instincts
a response to the Huddle’s issue on catching
Layout Technique, complete with several pictures
on Head Stability
Defense
the (potentially false) dichotomy between “smart” and “emotional” D (another old one)
mind the Hips
the Outside Shoulder for fundamental team D (but see the comments)
Jumping form, and Skying (I’ll revisit this in more depth someday)
Mobile Marking (and Improving Mobility)
close the Holes in the mark
Spacing on the mark
consider the Periphary
Strategy
Focus and Mental Toughness for your team. See also Talk in Positives, Ways to Talk to Encourage Cont’d Performance for more applied use.
How should you deploy your D studs?
Play to your strengths or their weakness?
Subbing. How would you sub yourself? Make yourself into the kind of player you want to play in tight spots.
Endzone O. How does your team practice it?
Etc.
Phase 3 of the mass-linking is the other aspect of this blog: fitness and training-related info. Check back on Thursday.
Defensive Thought: Peripheral Vision
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...Good defense is a lot more than reacting to your opponent.
Body position, reading your opponent’s hips, staying on your toes, these are all important to enable good D, but perhaps the single most useful piece of information a defender can have is where the disc is and where it’s likely to go next (where the thrower is looking/capable of throwing to).
Shutting down that big deep cut is great, but if you knew in advance that the thrower was looking at the dump, or that the thrower was panicking with the disc in his hands, you can conserve your energy and let your opponent get deep on you a bit without consequence–and better yet, when he realizes his error, you’ll be in prime position to deny a cut that actually IS a threat.
It’s important to try and “check in” on the disc periodically as a defender–this is not hard if you’re covering a passive cutter, who neither engages you when she isn’t cutting nor looks to exploit your shift in attention, but good cutters will punish you for looking away, or simply give you no chance to take a breather and look in the first place.
Generally speaking, I try to balance the need to keep tabs on my man while simultaneously following the disc by using my peripheral vision, or in some cases, my hearing (the “clap” of a disc being caught is as good an indication as any that the disc has moved, not to mention the stall count).
In a situation where you are backing your man, it’s pretty easy to just glance past your opponent. But even when fronting you can position yourself in such a way as to track the disc and your man simultaneously. Fix you gaze halfway between your opponent and the disc. In a downfield situation, this might mean turning your head or body in a way you’re not used to doing (instead of “engaging” your man with your hips you take a slightly more open position). Hopefully the return of the crappy MS paint schematic helps clear it up a little bit–I’ve denoted the defender’s head position with a second line (defense in red, offense in blue).
The sort of position I’m talking about (on the right, compared to basic fronting on the left) is pretty clearly playing a different type of defense than manned-up body D, but it can be just as effective and potentially more so–it does, however, require a greater degree of awareness and proactivity to deny options rather than simply reacting.
My main point is thus: by fixing your gaze between your man and the disc, you keep any drastic change in either’s state in your attention register without too big a sacrifice in the quality of details you receive (assuming you know what details to key in on to play good defense). You won’t see where the thrower is looking, but you should get a sense of the mark’s positioning and if the thrower is pivoted over to look at the dump. You won’t necessarily see where your man is looking, but you’ll still notice his first step. And, you can incrementally shift your attention to one or the other by shifting your eyes much more easily and less obviously than if you turn your head from fronting your man.
Where this really shines, I think, is playing dump defense–being able to see when the throw is coming is a HUGE advantage for the receiver over the dump (when the defender is fronting), and often the defender has to choose between staying close to the target or knowing when the throw is coming. With practice, I’ve found a suitable balance between the two by leveraging my peripheral vision–it’s not 100% effective, you’ll necessarily shift your attention back to your man if he cuts very aggressively and forces you to change your head position, but it does prove useful.
Have you found other good ways to balance your man and the disc? Uses for peripheral vision above and beyond what I’ve described here? Tried it and didn’t like it? Leave some comments and let me know.
Improving Mobility on the Mark
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...OK, so I’ve said you should be mobile on the mark. I’ve said you should work to stay balanced. Great.
How?
Hint #1. Guess what lift the mark shares body positioning with? You got it, the squat.(Hint 1a. You lift on your heels. What do you mark on?)
Hint #2. The squat is a stationary lift. Is marking stationary? Which direction are you moving primarily when you mark? Hey, horizontal (in the frontal plane)!
Hint #3. Core strength enables what is a “reach” for some to be easy for others. Athletes are Athletes for a reason.
Hint #4. How do you teach players to use their legs instead of relying on their reach on the mark? Courtesy of one Peter “Socks” Bonanno, ’08, #88, I’d like to date, he’s really great…we call it the black knight drill. (Yes, I know–Miranda Roth in The Huddle beat me to it already. But I’ve had this written out for a while, and redundancy only reinforces the utility of the thing).
Really simple. Take your regular marker drill…and start channeling Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail (“Just a flesh wound.“). Mark as normal, but put your hands behind your back.
You’re not exactly going to stop a lot of throws here. Try and resist the urge to footblock (too much), and focus instead on moving your body such that you force the thrower to move (fake, pivot, or otherwise) once or twice. Your thrower should start off with fairly basic pivoting and faking just to allow the marker to get used to the notion of moving to follow before making a serious attempt to throw past. Keep the drill relatively honest, no over-the-tops and try to avoid the temptation to take the shot through the big hole left by no arms (make the mark work laterally rather than frustrating her with a quick break past the body at stall one).
Of course, you can scale this any number of ways. Early last year we would start a marker drill with some 5 seconds of Black Knight (with no throw) before allowing the mark to use his hands and the thrower to make his pass, which seems like a nice compromise between learning and practice (the dichotomy coming from the eternal dilemma in which things that might help the team learn more quickly [i.e., dedicated, focused, deliberate drilling, with no consequences] are not as appealing to players as jumping in headfirst and “practicing” or scrimmaging, which is essentially just performance with lower stakes than a real game or tourney).
I think it might have been one of Zip’s Tips (though I can’t find it now) to always push beyond your comfort zone in marker drill; if you’re not getting point blocked or turfing every so often, you’re not expanding your repertoire enough. This applies just as much if not more so for the guy on the mark as the guy with the disc. Figure out your thrower. Experiment with baiting. Choose what throw you’re going to make your quarry take, and deny everything else with extra gusto. Learn.
Marking Thought: Stay Balanced
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...I alluded to the importance of not reaching (by which I mean “over-extending.” Certainly you will use your hands and arms while marking) when I wrote about being mobile. The opposite of reaching is balance.
Balance originates from your core.
Balance means not overextending yourself (don’t get caught reaching!).
Balance means being poised to respond to anything the thrower will, well, throw at you. Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security–stay poised to deny the thrower’s options. (An awareness of where the threats are behind you–dump? streaking cutter deep?–help significantly to this end).
It’s a challenge to develop the mobility, and particularly the discipline to avoid reaching on the mark and to strive for balance. But really, how many point blocks have you seen come from a guy leaning over and reaching? How many pictures have you seen of a thrower breaking a mark who is practically falling over, she’s reaching so hard?
Of course, rules are made to be broken, and you’ll find that the big reach (the layout on the mark, the foot-block attempt) will occasionally work at causing a turn, if for no reason other than the sheer surprise of the thing. Sometimes David Ortiz can steal second because the catcher isn’t expecting the 230(+)-pound DH to be fleet enough to try in the first place. Doesn’t mean it should be your standard. Discipline yourself. Learn by the conventional wisdom so you can cast it aside in the instants where it is most effective.
More on mobility and balance on Thursday.
Marking Thought: Spacing
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...There’s a time and a place for near and far spacing.
Incidentally, the spacing and location of your mark can and should be changing over time. Jackson makes some good points about the utility of spacing between yourself and your mark, so start there:
Are you looking to prevent the break throw? If so, back up. You’re right that you can easily get your arm past a close mark, and by being farther away you’ll have more time to react to pivots, fakes and throws.
However, if you’re looking to put pressure on hucks, then get close. Yes, you might get broken sometimes, but if your defensive strategy is to pressure hucks, while still keeping substantial pressure on break throws, then I think close is the way to go.
Most throwers today will be able to break marks regardless of how you mark. I think that (in general) marking to prevent break-throws is a losing battle. The better approach is to realize that break throws will go off, but by pressuring them, you can increase the chance of a non-perfect throw going off, which gives the downfield defender a chance at a block. Similarly, if you are pressuring hucks, then defenders (who will inevitably be a step or two behind) will have a greater chance at blocking a non-perfect throw. A far mark puts very little pressure on hucks, which makes it very difficult for downfield defense against any team with good throwers
In short:
I’m of the opinion that the best marks apply both techniques throughout the duration of a single mark. As I’ve already said, be active. Even if you’re bouncing around, if you’re not fundamentally altering your approach to marking dynamically, the thrower is sizing up how to beat what you’re showing him–you’re playing his game. Showing the thrower different looks through a point and through a stall count can force them to play your game, assuming you leverage your margin intelligently. I’m also of the opinion that while trying to prevent ALL break throws can be a losing battle, intelligent use of the mark to take away the biggest threat dynamically as the count shifts can be extremely effective. Similar to how you might look to poach off of a cutter who is sitting pat in the stack without threatening to move, if the mark’s position allows breaks that the thrower isn’t currently looking for, you’ll be able to more effectively pressure the throws she is. A very simple example of this is shifting the mark around to take away the dump at a high stall count. When it’s clear that the thrower only wants to hit the backfield for the dump, a mark can find success in conceding easier throws upfield in order to apply more pressure to the backfield option. If you extend that approach to include not only dumps but hucks, inside vs. outside breaks (hint: it’s nearly impossible to throw an IO break past a mark that is a step off), even high vs. low throws, you can present a very dynamic and effective mark. If your entire defense (including your sidelines) is cued in to this as a defensive strategy, the potential applicability skyrockets as downfield can adjust to what the mark is dynamically taking away–if the mark shifts to protect the dump, the defender at the front of the stack can shade to take away the IO option, if pressuring hucks, defenders can front their men more confidently, etc. This extends to more than simply how close or how far you are from your man (how you angle your mark and how aggressive you are are also key), but one of the easier ways to leverage the mark is by simply looking to take an extra step in or out on the mark as the count shifts–perhaps you stay tight on the first couple counts to pressure a huck in flow, and then back off a half-step to contain more conventional break/dump looks and avoid drawing a foul at a high count (I guarantee you your high-level club teams teach this very adjustment as a fact of life–or at least did before the advent of the disc space rule [XIV.B.3] as an additional deterrent). Maybe you start off with a loose mark trap on the sideline of a zone to prevent a quick swing back across the field, and inch in closer to pressure the over-the-top throw attempts after a few seconds. Incidentally, Stephen Hubbard adds some great points about fouling in a comment on the last post, and also brings up the important question (among others): aren’t we just talking about fouling routinely on the close mark? When I say “close mark” I absolutely DO NOT mean foul the thrower. If you’re capable of being mobile, you shouldn’t need to foul. If you have any kind of intelligent defense behind you, you shouldn’t need to foul. If you’re getting hosed by the other team making hucks in flow with no mark and feel the need to foul to stop it…try playing smarter defense and taking away those opportunities in the first place (or make adjustments downfield if you can’t). There’s a wealth of strategic options you can employ on the mark and in concert with the mark, and fouling is really never appropriate. Incidentially, I also find a mark that plays THAT close to be far less effective at stopping any throws (but I also didn’t practice it terribly much–there was a time when we had a “coach” for all of one tournament that encouraged more physical marking and it didn’t sit well with me then). Fouling might win you a few battles, but in the context of the larger war of the game, it is usually not sufficient (teams and players adjust). Experiment with spacing. Think about what might serve you best in various field positions, stall counts, matchups, weather conditions, etc. If you’re a team strategist, consider the vast potential of a team-wide dynamic mark for shutting down a team’s preferred offensive options. For bonus points, consider employing a marking tactic suggested by Ben Wiggins back in Winter ’06: stagger your feet one slightly forward, one slightly back) to facilitate better motion forwards and backwards, as well as to provide a bit more cushioning on a close mark to shield against the IO. This is hard to explain, and the UCPC site is apparently down now, so I can’t link any original materials either. I’ll try and flesh it out a bit more in a later post.
Marking Thought: The Hole-y Mark
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...Patch up the holes in your mark!
When I was first learning how to play, I’d often ‘cheat’ in marker drill by throwing through my mark, rather than around it as the drill intended. At least, I thought it was cheating, until I realized that it only worked on some people.
If you’ve played much you’re probably familiar with the embarrassment that comes with getting broken through the hole under the arm. What leads to this?
Far as I can tell you have to be aware of a couple of things:
1) where you’re holding your arms. If you’re fond of the pteradactyl mark, arms fully extended out, I think you’ll quickly find that you lack the leathery membrane underneath your arm necessary to fly–or to stop throws.
This is a minor point of contention amongst ultimate players that I’ve seen–some people prefer to keep arms extended and/or up, and show a larger, more imposing mark, while some (myself included) prefer to keep elbows bent and hands low (unless you know the thrower to have a viable/effective high-release backhand, etc). Really, I think either can be effective given the right personnel and the right circumstances (a big guy with his arms extended CAN be pretty darn intimidating), but I feel like more experienced throwers will take holes that you show them (which you do by extending your arms) more often than they’ll be intimidated. Assuming you have the coordination and the spacing to react to throws (more on that in a later post), and assuming your thrower is not a rookie, I think the latter option is the better one. Bend your elbows and hide that hole under your armpit.
2) Your proclivity to reach while moving on the mark is an occasionally-overlooked hole. When a marker is beaten and knows it–the thrower has forced the mark into biting too hard on one side, and is winning the race back to the other–oftentimes the mark while, while shuffling, extend and try to reach as far over to the other side to pressure the throw. This can be effective sometimes, but with this extension you create a moving hole in your mark that can be exploited, turning your attempt to pressure an around into an easy inside break.
3) How close you are to the thrower will determine how easily you can be broken through your mark. If you’re riding up on my leg like a dog in heat, I’ll hardly even need to step to get my arm past your body. In such circumstances, a hole you present doesn’t need to be there for long–just long enough for the thrower to get past you. There are few things more demoralizing on the mark than being broken easily while you’re mentally trying to apply a lot of pressure. Be wary of being too close and too aggressive–#2 can combine with a small margin between you and the thrower to leave your mark very vulnerable.
Feel free to chime in with other relevant factors here.
Defense Means "Dictate."
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...Via Lean and Hungry Fitness, check out Josh Mullen to MIT on good defense. In short form, it sums up just about everything that goes into good defense.
Visualize situations, visualize adjustments, visualize taking the micro-charge and staying on the outside shoulder. Then try and apply it.
