Thoughts.

Consistency.

You hear about it plenty with regards to ultimate, usually something like “if you can consistently complete a forehand/backhand to an open cutter, throwing ability will not keep you from playing elite-level ultimate.”

How do you get it? You know where I’m going because you’ve already read the title.

This is something I’ve mentioned offhandedly before–honing your skills to a point where they become unconscious–but this cannot be restated enough. It’s only when you get to a point where you don’t have to think about what you’re doing that you can really thrive. When throwing a forehand is as natural to you as walking (ok, perhaps nothing is quite THAT natural, but you get the idea*), you’re in a good place. How often do you stumble when you walk?

You really need to develop a mental state for performance. Part of that is avoiding distraction, and “distraction” includes what you do with your body. If you HAVE to think about your throwing technique while you’re doing it, can you really expect it to hold up under game-time pressure? If you need to think about your footwork mid-cut, are you really going as fast as you possibly could?

Levels of Competence

I believe it was in a book about Bruce Lee (if I had anyone who I’d say was a personal role model for me, he’d be the one) that I read the following about skills progression–specifically for martial arts, but the parallels with any physical activity are evident:

• As a beginner, your instincts are bad, unwieldy, inefficient at best.
• As an intermediate, your instincts are still bad, but you know what’s proper and can correct. (There are multiple intermediate stages, with “knowing you’re wrong” and “knowing what’s proper” and “being able to correct” each their own, discrete stage).
• At an advanced level, you again return to your instinct, but the old, inefficient ones have been replaced with the precise and the honed**.

It was due to this belief that Lee’s original school of Jeet Kune Do‘s first and final ranks were both symbolized by an empty circle (your intermediate ranks were a progression of the yin-yang).

Many people reach a high level of intermediate proficiency–able to consciously will themselves to perfection of a sort–and get complacent, missing the pinnacle: true unconscious competence.

That’s where you want to get. Every time you step on the field, you want to operate unconsciously. You don’t want to have to think about your footwork. You don’t want to have to think about your grip. Your thoughts and energies should be focused purely on recognizing your situations and responding appropriately–no logistics of how to get there, merely intended destinations. Many a D set has been thrown that succeeds simply by taking players out of their unconscious selves and forcing them to think. Don’t help out your opponent by doing it to yourself unprompted!

Developing Unconscious Competence

How do you develop this kind of unconscious competence? Well, it ain’t easy, but there is some transferal between tasks (usually you regard it as “talent” or something similar when a player seems “naturally good;” natural is a good word indeed, for these individuals are almost always allowing their body to take over, getting out of their own way–and I can guarantee you they went through the process of learning to let go at some point. Whether they realize it or not). Again, I’ll mention driving (esp. stick) as a nice example of an opportunity to learn to let go. I’m currently learning how to play guitar–instruments are another great analog.

Relevant reading: SciAm Mind’s*** latest on How to Avoid Choking Under Pressure, page 2:

“Let’s say you’re trying to play the piano. If you were relying on your motor memory”—just letting it fly—“your motor command would automatically read out the next note in about 50 milliseconds.” But consciously monitoring your performance brings this superfast sequence of motor commands to a screeching halt, resulting in a choking incident of epic proportions. “The feedback from the first note takes 100 milliseconds just to move from your cochlea up to your brain. So if you’re saying to yourself, ‘Okay, I just finished the C, now I have to go on to the D,’ you’re going to have problems.”

This sums it up perfectly. In order to become a good musician, athlete, public speaker, you have to learn to let go, to let your body simply DO. You have to hone your body’s skills to a point where you can let go with confidence.

If you can develop a regimen or strategy to learning this skill, you can continue to apply it elsewhere, too.

Deliberate Practice

The foundational building block of all unconscious competence is deliberate practice. I don’t mean deliberate, as in, you have the intent to practice, but rather in the sense that you do everything you do with purpose. You should always be working towards a goal, honing a skill, refining, testing, repeating. repeating. You sure as hell can’t expect to make all your passes in a game if you can’t do it when you’re simply out tossing, right?

The deliberateness comes into play when you’re not content to just toss, but instead choose to toss with preconditions–you only throw from a full-extension pivot, you only throw after a fake, etc. And then, being deliberate at those things is another layer on top of that–is your full-extension as far as you can make it? Can you get to that point and also keep your balance, throw convincing, effective fakes, not pull a hamstring? When you throw fakes, are you working mechanically on the fake itself, or are you moving beyond that, visualizing a game situation and a covered defender (poor conditions, an aggresive mark) causing you to make that fake? Seeing the ensuing change in conditions that enable the one you do throw?

Visualization is the bridge between deliberate practice and effortless performance. You work on your throws deliberately, get the hang of throwing a forehand with touch…then, you stop thinking about how you’re throwing and instead start thinking about where you’re throwing. You picture a cutter. Does the throw still go where you want it, how you want it? What if you picture a mark up against you, defender tight your receiver’s hip? Can you place a pass where it won’t be D’d? If yes…can you do it again? And again? And again? Get to that point, and you might be ready for primetime.

Developing the mindset for mental toughness and applying it in-game is another component of being successful, particularly when the going gets tough, but you can go a long ways towards getting there if you can learn to simply


Stop.

Thinking.

It’s a long race when you’re chasing flow****. As they say in Japan, ganbatte.

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*to be completely honest, your best comparisons for throwing a frisbee would be with other activities which involve a high degree of coordinated movement of the arms combined with stabilization through the core and a significant transfer of power from the lower limbs, as well as involving a dynamic component to projecting an implement–which make things like basketball shooting, baseball pitching/throwing, tennis ball hitting, or football throwing your truer comparisons. (Adding in the extra factor of a rotational component trims the list farther). Looking for some cross-disciplinary reading to do for ultimate? Look in that direction. Looking for some off season cross-training? You could do a lot worse than the same (I especially recommend a sport like squash, which incorporates a lot of the same sorts of lunging and one-handed motion that throwing does).

**this is otherwise known as the point in which you become a killing machine. Lee worried about some joker challenging him on the street (or one of the stunt men during a film shoot), because his instincts were honed such that in a real fight he might not be able to stop himself from, at the very least, seriously injuring his opponent.

***as I exclaimed to a friend on first discovery: “it’s like somebody made a magazine just for me!” I eat this stuff up. Highly recommended for anyone who cares to understand humanity better.

****fast forward to the last 5-8 minutes for the good stuff.

Use it before, during, and after you throw. Build an awareness of it.

Torso includes, but is not limited to: your core and your shoulder. Optional: include the hips.

That is all.

(Cu & T) (Fitness)

Catching

Work to change your catching instincts

Types of layout grabs

Receiving Under Pressure

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

Spacing

toes, toes, toes

the Outside Shoulder for fundamental team D (but see the comments)

Mental Training for Layouts

Anticipa-a-tion

Jumping form, and Skying (I’ll revisit this in more depth someday)

Why Marks Matter

Mobile Marking (and Improving Mobility)

Defense means “Dicate”

close the Holes in the mark

Spacing on the mark

On Balance

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.

The Importance of the Dump

Endzone O. How does your team practice it?

Process vs. Outcome Focus

Etc.

Cultivating Focus

Read the Inner Game of Tennis

Ultimate is a Biathlon

Observation & Imitation

Phase 3 of the mass-linking is the other aspect of this blog: fitness and training-related info. Check back on Thursday.

(D, Ca, St & etc) (Fitness)

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

I’ll leave it at that for now; I’ll round it out over the next week with an overview of the rest of the ultimate skills/strategy stuff and the copious postings related to fitness.

A little busy at work (need to prep a class on Christmas) and a little starved for inspiration of late…but check out this RSD thread on throwing with touch I posted in a couple weeks back.

My opinion is already there, but there appears to be some dissention. What’s yours? How did you learn about throwing with touch? How have you taught (or would teach) others?

I usually tell rookie throwers to think about throwing to a point on the field, rather than passing on a line that includes said point (ie, throwing to space), and that at least goes towards taking the laser out. Please chime in with your own experiences.

Love the Huddle’s latest stuff.

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).

One thing that almost every author hit on–know your teammates, know your thrower. The rest will flow from knowing your thrower, and from your thrower knowing you. It’s when things get tight that chemistry really shines, and more often than not, things get tight in the endzone.

Having trouble gripping your forehand? Have you ever used chopsticks? Did you know that you can hold them in such a way–with your thumb pinching the bottom stick against your ring and pinkie–as to closely simulate holding a strong forehand?

The school ID you use to swipe for your meals? Ever consider the similarity of an ID card to a frisbee when gripping and throwing backhand fakes while you’re waiting in line? I have. I do it all the time. I do it subconsciously with all manner of object–put something in my hands, stand me up, and make me wait, and within 20 seconds I’ll be throwing fakes. They’ll have more or less exaggeration depending on context–if I’m standing in front of my class of 20+ Japanese students while they work on the latest English paper, I forego the object and disguise the steps in my pivot as pacing around the room and keep my shoulder motions subtle, but with intention and a little bit of visualization.

These motions are as natural to me as anything else I do.

You can go to practice and throw for half an hour before warmups, you can toss on the green every day for an hour…I’ll take that, and add on all those odd idle minutes throughout the day. If I can move, I’ll practice the fakes. If in class, I’ll make cutting schematics when the lecture gets boring.

Walking to class? Going up or down stairs? Throw a little attention towards your footwork when you change direction on your turns. Think about planting and stopping quickly at the bottom if you like to hurry down the stairs. If you’re really into it, carry a disc with you. Get to know your frisbee, become its friend, and it’ll treat you well in turn.

Opportunities are endless. A little creativity and you’ll find them everywhere. Incremental actions in aggregate will make a profound difference in your game.

Yeah, yeah, throwing and catching. Fundamentals aside, here, let’s talk about one step up–the dump. Absolutely essential as a building block for any offensive strategy (even if you Huck and Hope, you’re going to make some dump-like passes to set that up at some point).

It doesn’t take a team strategist to figure this out. Dumps give you a reset on the count, and, when leveraged correctly, are a WEAPON. Anybody who played against Dartmouth last year (particularly our D line) can attest to the lethality of the dump if you fail to contain it. Conversely, a team that dumps poorly is going to give up its fair share of short turns, and if you can’t dump with competence, then these same dumps will lead to a slower, more predictable (read: easier-to-defend) offense.

You know the whole analogy about how the running game sets up the passing game in football? With ultimate, the dump game similarly sets up the rest of the offense.

There are tiers of dumping. How comfortable are you?

1. The “get a reset” dump. You look dump at high stall, and have to rush a throw. OR the dump cutting is ineffective (you have a “dancer” who doesn’t get open by much, and takes 4 seconds to do it). Either way, the throw winds up more or less shovel passed to the receiver, who gets the disc somewhere within the vicinity of 2-5 yards of the thrower (and likely coming toward the thrower or moving straight back). No advantage gained, merely a new count to look upfield and insist that somebody “CUT!”
2. The early/competent dump. Note that those two terms tend to be synonymous. The decision to dump the disc is established early in the count more often than not (before stall 4 or 5–this will vary depending on your team’s offensive philosophy), and/or the dump cutter has an easy time getting separation from her defender. In this situation, the pass is usually made to a receiver in stride, perhaps going upline with the defender trailing (“power position,” anathema to all defenses–the thrower has a free shot deep, with momentum from the run to put it even farther), or likewise going backwards–in either case, the defender is not in a position to stop the next throw, which sets up a dump-swing style offense or a deep offense (hence the “running game” of the dump sets up the “passing game” going deep or side-to-side). This is the level of dumping which most good teams have; I’ve seen many a team that works the upline dump VERY competently, setting up a very powerful deep offense. Less common these days is the team that really works the width of the field, but your Harvards and Dartmouths will still flash this style with some effectiveness.
3. The skillful dump. Taking the competent dump one step further, this is dumping not just for a reset, and beyond the dump as a building block for your offense. This is the point at which the dump becomes a FEATURE of the offense–the degree of thought and setup that goes into the positioning ensures that (almost) every dump puts the receiver in a position to further the offense. This is the sort of thing that Frank of RSD fame would often go on about with his ambidexterity rants and the like. Being able to run the give-and-go, for instance, not just as a every-so-often technique, but as the basis for your offense (see Minnesota and their often super-quick resets and movement–I don’t know that I’ve ever worked so hard on defense for so little gain), makes it a very potent tool, and can absolutely destroy teams unprepared to deal with it (which is, interestingly, becoming more and more the norm as teams fall into the glamour trap, opting for the big plays and the big players over the big fundamentals).

It’s all about raising the level. I don’t care who you are, you’re not going to go very far without at least competent resents (and you’re not going to thrive unless you can raise it a step beyond that–or you happen to so outclass your competition otherwise that you can make up for it).

If you’re a burgeoning team–high school, club, college–you MUST emphasize the fundamentals. You might key in on the flashiness of it all, the big hucks, the huge plays, but keep in mind that more often than not 90% of the highest-level games are anything but–just good fundamentals, solid cutting, hard defense, and GOOD RESETS. Model yourself after the “boring” parts–the plays that look easy, because they’ve been practiced and polished to seamlessness–and you’ll more often put yourself in a position where the flashy plays actually make a difference, instead of becoming a footnote in your recap of the blowout loss to stud team x.

More on fundamentals next week.