Thoughts.

As winter break swiftly approaches for those of us who work at schools, I thought I’d go back over some of my older posts–I have a feeling that with the influx of new readers this blog has seen over the past couple months, it’s likely that some of the stuff I started posting in the summer, when I changed from simply recapping my ultimate experience to (attempting to) share how I’ve learned to play, has been overlooked.

I’m not sure what the best way to work around this and make the blog more archive-accessible is (I’ll likely continue experimenting with format), as my general goal is to make this site a resource as well as a blog (I’d welcome any ideas to that end–blogspot’s whole scrolling-through-pages isn’t terribly efficient, nor is the archive).

So I’ll try and link up some of the posts I think are most useful/relevant, sorted by category. Let me know if you find this helpful. And, feel free to comment with anything you think I’ve overlooked.

Throwing

• Being Quick on the Catch-Throw Turnaround. Not sure, but this might have been the first post about ultimate that wasn’t strictly focused on myself.
• On Balance
• Grip, part 1 (Part 2, the video (much more helpful) here)
• Arm Action (also a video)
• Throw Convincing, Effective Fakes
• Disc Placement (not just throwing to space, but throwing to space with purpose)
• On Hammers and Throwing to Space
• Forehand Hucks (see also Scapular Loading, aka the shoulder jerk)
• The Windup
• A Throwing Checklist for Warmups
• More on Faking (this also reads a little unclearly; I’ll revisit at some point when I can phrase it better)
• Throw Off-Handed; you’ll appreciate your on-handed ones more and have a better perspective to teach from.
• It’s the little things in day-to-day life.
• Throwing with Touch?

Cutting

• Around this time last year I made a post about the notion of “Threat Points” when cutting–this is, more or less, another way to try to phrase what becomes an intuitive sense of how to see and attack space as a cutter. I think the post perhaps comes off a bit esoteric, but maybe it’ll help provide a framework for better explanation.
• In my opinion, one of my most useful posts is the one I wrote this past spring about cutting schematics. As a deprived B-teamer, and later as a budding A-teamer, (and a lazy student) I often spent time in lecture drawing up various situations and playing them out mentally and on paper, from the O and the D perspective.
• Create Space
• The Juke
• It’s Stoppin’(sadly, the UV link I referred to is now broken)
• Making Adjustments (secondary cuts)
• Use Your Opponent’s Acceleration
• More on field sense.
• Being a a primary cutter vs. a fill cutter (keep your man busy)
• Expanding your repetoire
• On endzone cutting

Scattered Thoughts:

1) Several players mention bum-rushing the defender to “get [them] on [their] heels” before making another move. That’s all well and good, but…can that really be a complete strategy? I suppose if you’re the faster cutter, it is (which of course begs the question of ‘why juke them in the first place?’). That statement really triggers my common sense detector though…there ARE defenders out there who aren’t put on their heels so easily. What then? I like to tack on “…or get him to turn
his hips” on the end of most references to “on his heels,” as I think that situation confers the same advantages to a cutter looking to gain separation.

2) I absolutely LOVE Peri Kurshan’s talk of delegating an “end zone cutter” role. Brilliant. Energy efficient, strategy efficient. And if you’re using the “one guy creating an open-side break opportunity” cutting strategy or a similar iso, this makes perfect sense, too. This also seems very easily applied in terms of strategy, which leads me to…

3) Where’s the bona fide strategy talk? I suppose the idea of this issue is more to cull pearls of wisdom for playing, particularly for the individual cutter, but I really feel like this stuff assumes you’re familiar with the conventional wisdom to some extent (or at least, it’s enhanced by such familiarity). Perhaps none of this is new to you, but much of what I write is predicated on the belief that there are people out there who are still learning.

Steve Sullivan’s mention of the “gut cut,” along with the many references to dump and swing O by several authors, alludes to probably the basic/default end zone O for many teams…cuts from the back of the stack towards the cone. On the open side, this means one guy to the cone, and a second shortly therafter in the inside line (the “gut cut”), with another (or perhaps the first to the open side, if he’s quick back) to the break side as the disc is dumped and swung. Sometimes this is a “default,” sometimes this is a set play. Depends on the team.

Other common endzone offenses include some kind of isolation play, which gets all but one of the cutters out of the way to feature a stud with enough space for a decent thrower to get the disc to the endzone somewhere stud cutter can catch it uncontested (this is the sort of situation where a lot of the cutting advice dispensed in this issue comes in handy), and a lot of teams allude to a similarly-minded offense perhaps without the overt isolation to it (front of the stack open-side break throw juke, or a cutter from the back doing something similar in the lane while the rest “keep their defenders busy”).

The final major endzone offense (at least, in my mind; feel free to chime in if you have others) I can think of is the handler-driven O. I don’t mean the simple dump-swing, or even strategies that rely upon a good break from the handler.

I mean full-on dominator style weaving, with lots of give-and-go style moves (as Nick Handler alludes to. By the way, Nick probably brings up the most salient strategy points to consider in endzone offense, for any of you aspiring coaches/play designers out there). Perhaps the give-and-go is less common at the elite level, where dump defenders presumably stop the upline cut with more regularity, but I’ve seen that cut made successfully for a score many a time at the elite college level (often by my teammates over the past years).

This tends to work in conjunction with other strategies–the iso or stack motion lets the cutters work for opportunities, but when you look to dump-swing, an aggressive handler set can look to attack the endzone without help from the cutters with the upline, too. The sort of around-the-back “break” that Ben Wiggins talks about would also be the sort of play I’d characterize as a product of a handler-driven O.

4) My own thoughts on endzone cutting: don’t just apply one of the strategies discussed in the huddle: seek to learn and apply them all. I’ve had points where my endzone cutting has been little more than recognizing my defender’s open-side overzealousness and using a chop-step (or a straight-up opportunity cut) to catch a hammer to the break side wide open, and I’ve had points where I’ve run my defender into the ground from the stack, and I’ve had points where recognizing and exploiting the “open-side break” opportunities led to easy goals. The key is recognizing what’s available to you–when your teammates are aggressively cutting from the back of the stack, try to wait and find your opportunity. When nothing’s doing, consider creating some motion and injecting some energy with the brute-force approach (with appropriate tricks employed to increase your odds).

Individually, cutters today may give themselves two options and make a hot read, but it’s not that hard to pick up from the sideline who the first and second downfield cutters are going to be from the way they set themselves up (or the way the others take themselves out of the way). When not in the play, I often try to mix it up by acting as if I am the primary cutter, but definitely not every time.

Simple, but potent. This is similar to something I’ve done as a cutter for a while now. Cutting is as much about fooling your defender as it is about flat-out beating him, and one man’s cut is enabled by the work of six others making space for him to have a play.

The value of confusing the defense’s expectations is rather large for the offense. Wiggins gets the value of a predictable offense to the defense:

…[Truck Stop has] an extremely efficient offense, but one that basically keeps their players in their strongest positions for the entire game. Advantage; they are always using their strengths (Moldenhauer going deep, Morgan cutting, McComb handling, etc). However, this does make it easier to match up in important, late-game points; you can adapt your matchups to focus on the places on the field that they are going to be.

(And you can poach intelligently if you know who the playmakers are and aren’t).

One strategic notion that I think is very undervalued and underutilized is to use variety in offensive options to keep a defense guessing and continually exploit their weaknesses. Seigs was (and is–any Dartmouth O guys from last year read my blog?) probably the best play-caller I know because he takes efforts to use the variety of options an offense has and uses–just varying the 3-4 (in terms of who’s cutting in a given 7, which 7 are on the line in the first place, who’s the 3 and who’s the 4) on a semi-regular basis allows you to put rested legs on display and potentially exploit the weaker defenders on the opponent’s team. What good does a stud defender do if she’s out of the play?

Similarly, if you’re being covered by Stud Defender or Lane Poacher, keeping her busy thinking you’re the immediate threat when you’re not is a big part of “making space” for your teammates. And the converse–making her think you’re out of the play–can be valuable for setting up opportunity cuts when the look to help elsewhere.

This is especially important in spread offenses, which are designed to create isolations and use the matchups advantageously. If you man knows you’re not in the play right now and can drop off to poach, it’s killing your team’s offense. If you’re not going to set up and act like you’re about to cut, at least force him to keep repositioning or looking to you instead of the play–things like a slow jog to his blind spot, with the occasional start-stop (like you’d see a base stealer do during pitches to throw off the pitcher/catcher)…demand attention, and if it isn’t given to you…go where they ain’t, and get the disc.