Is College Ultimate "IT?"
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!)
Loading ...Given the recent news of the NCUA (thus far getting an admittedly lesser response than the initial C1 announcement–which is sure to change once the weekend is over), and this particular post by Dusty (even if the blogging has stopped, he’s still worth reading), I’ve been pondering this question over the last couple days.
Is it all downhill after college? Certainly the level of play rises, but the excitement is different there. While I can watch elite ultimate and think to myself, “So long as I keep working, I can do that too,” I think it’s a lot easier for your typical ultimate fan (? maybe I should put “player” here instead) to look at collegiate ultimate and feel more connected/relate more to the game. If we’re looking for a showcase with potentially broad appeal, perhaps college ultimate IS the way to go. In the long run, perhaps packaging and selling collegiate ultimate will lead to the most “success” (here defined as increased public awareness and some semblance of “legitimacy” in terms of more broad-spread recognition as a varsity sport). I really don’t have enough of an education in the way ultimate has grown so far or a good understanding of potential markets to say anything about these developments with any certainty, but it’s certainly an exciting time to be an ultimate player! I’m very interested to see where this period of relative turmoil leads–the bet here is that by 2010 we see a stable system commonly accepted as the norm, but 2009 remains a very clouded picture and what happens this year will determine what becomes “acceptable” in the season following.
Rather than such grandiose notions, my main contemplation has been more personal. Namely, in my post-college-partum depression, will elite ultimate really be something I want to pursue?
It was easy for me to be motivated and work hard in college–I wasn’t working just for myself, but I knew that my own work contributed to the team and that team was something more than simply a team–the team was (and remains) my family. You probably read all of Hector’s goings-ons about Wisconsin, despite he himself being years removed from playing there. It speaks volumes to the pull that the Alma Mater can have, even while playing at the sport’s supposedly highest level.
Is it even close to possible to recapture some of that fire and passion playing with a group of guys who I don’t live with and learn with and stay up much later than is appropriate to play Smash Bros. (the N64 original–Ness and PK Thunder saves 4eva) with? I don’t think so.
I think Dusty is spot-on in assessing the motivations of the two divisions. Club is elite, but college is passionate. Until ultimate as an entity is big enough to support full-time elite players, we absolutely can and should focus on building at the grassroots level, building at the collegiate level.
Whoops. I did say I don’t really know what I’m talking about…I’ll leave it there.
Please feel free to chip in with your thoughts here–apologies to my Aussie readers, I’m not sure how much of this actually has relevance to the way you structure things over there.
Apparently Obligatory C1 Post
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...I’ve already said my piece on RSD:
1) I’m glad I just graduated and don’t have to make this decision
2) I’m glad the boys left behind weren’t picked in this “elite” group
and don’t have to make this decision.
It’s a good time for all of us on the outside, pontificating and
theorizing–outside of a few recurring themes in discussion, though, I
don’t see most of the RSD chatter leading to much. Idle hands and all
that.
Honestly, there’s not too much point in fussing at this point. I could say I hate it, I can say I love the idea, but neither would be a particularly useful opinion in, oh, a month or two, when the series is inevitably altered significantly to make it more equitable. Or at least more workable for the UPA in some fashion or another.
The question should not be: “What do you want to happen,” or “What do you think,” but simply: “What do you think will happen?”
(even that question doesn’t particularly need answering)
I applaud people with legitimate concerns who have raised them, but at this point all that needs saying has been said, commentary has been made, well’s run dry. Everybody just calm down. Embrace the zen, realize that there are things you cannot control, and simply enjoy the excitement.
Idle hands.
The 2008 UPA BoD Election
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...Check out the candidate statements, audio interviews (after you log in–though I had technical difficulty accessing them. Perhaps because I’m in Japan right now?), and the Huddle’s coverage, too.
Who am I voting for? First, a few impressions:
In my voting, these three were the ones who really stood out. It’s really hard for me to choose against Henry, and similarly I feel like Gwen simply HAS to be on the board with her broad experience and what she wants to do with the sport. Additionaly, while I really like Catherine’s ideas, I also have a feeling that a lot of what she will do is either possible outside of board involvement or can still be submitted to the board whether or not she’s on it. So, I’m going with the two people I think most likely to make a difference in what the board DOES, not simply bringing ideas to the mix–Gwen Ambler and Henry Thorne. How about you? Sign in to your account and vote. Honorable mentions (in my book) go to Todd Leber, who has some great, revolutionary ideas, but whose platform has little else of relevance to UPA members (nothing in his experience or his numerous RSD writings suggest he has an interest in anything short of semi-pro ultimate–making him better suited as, for instance, the president of Major League Ultimate rather than a board member of the Ultimate Player’s Association), and Jamie Nuwer, whose interests are very much after my own heart (Sports Medicine and ultimate and where the two meet), and who has done some great things with the Injury Timeout website (PLEASE look at this site! Be a resource for your teammates. The value of somebody with even a halfway informed idea of how to take care of an injured person is invaluable at practices and tournaments alike!)…hopefully she runs again in the next election.
Freshmen
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...Lots of growth at the high school level means lots of colleges are going to see explosions in the level of talent they get from their freshmen.
But what does it mean? How do you get the most out of these guys? I certainly don’t know; I’m just a sophomore. But it’s definitely one of the more relevant questions facing my team at Dartmouth, I think, because as we’re currently structured the learning is good for the inexperienced, and certainly helpful to initiate the freshmen into how things are done at Dartmouth, but I feel like there’s a lot more potential to help players develop and mature even at this early stage.
Right now it seems very person-dependent; a freshman needs to be proactive, picking the brains of veterans about X or Y, which is useful, but not universally applicable to everybody. Pick one veteran, he says A, but another offers B as a more practical alternative. If you don’t talk to both, maybe you wind up learning how to throw a decent forehand but you never really worked on your grip so you wind up without the necessary control for a reliable IO.
I’m certainly not knocking the veteran presence; on the contrary, it’s one of the most beneficial ways to improve, because the veterans tend to have already experienced and thought out what you’re asking about and can save you a lot of time wondering what the ideal dump is simply by telling you what tends to work best in a given situation, based on their experience. I just feel like it’s too diluted, or rather, that as a veteran, the tendancy for people who aren’t captains or asked about a specific topic is to withold information and not volunteer one’s thoughts.
I’m getting a little outside the scope of what I meant to discuss, so I’ll leave elaboration on that topic for later.
So what do you do with your studly, but not-yet-college-level freshmen? It seems there are two routes you can take, really, and I’ve got my opinion on each:
-Put them on the A-team, but have them ride the bench more often than not, only playing them regularly when the game’s not on the line. This makes sense on a lot of levels–you get to experience the big show, you get to hang around lots of talented and experienced players, and you get to see the game the way it (hopefully) should be played. But at the same time, while you get your freshman a lot of exposure, the limited playtime would seem to be a substantial tradeoff, particularly for your handler-types who just aren’t up to snuff yet.
You can certainly have a successful team with this model, that’s not the issue; I just wonder if there isn’t a more effective way to develop players, or more directly, a way to get them more playtime and experience while at the same time allowing them to get the same level of exposure.
-Put them on the B-team, where they’re studs but at a lower level of competition. This isn’t altogether bad, I don’t think, but I’m a bit biased since that was my situation last year. You get a ton of play time, which is a great perk, and playing in a lower-pressure, B-level environment provides much greater opportunity for risk-taking and, I think, developing as a handler. Particularly since I was captaining the team last year, I was always one of a handful of “people in charge” who structured practice, and coordinated the offensive and defensive strategies, which really helped broaden my horizons as far as understanding how the game works and what makes a successful team.
I think it can really make for great development, particularly for the mid-tier talents, as the competition is relatively decent, but not overwhelming, really forcing you to push your game. And it provides a great opportunity to instill the sort of play style you’d like to have on the A-team, in terms of strategy, plays, offensive and defensive sets, etc, with a few limitations (like the fact that most of the solid handlers are at A-level, making deep play a bit riskier at a B-level).
But of course, there are limitations here as well. How do you challenge your top-tier talents? It’s nice to be a stud, but it just makes it harder to deal when players of equal or greater talent come along, and dealing with B-team defenses as opposed to aggressive, A-team ones can lead to laziness in handling and cutting.
So how do you deal with this? The current team model, calling up freshmen who are either exceptionally experienced or your athletic types who can run down hucks and dish out Ds, seems to work fairly well in terms of team success. But one might wonder if they could be better served spending the year (or at least part of the year) playing B-level, where the stakes are lower and what you can get away with is greater, encouraging development more (I think), but only to a point.
It’s an interesting choice, for certain, and I think as a captain who makes these decisions, one needs to weigh team success and individual talent and development carefully.
