Thoughts.

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.

…or rather, merely the desire to stay awake and a bit of excitement to work with what I’ve created.

I started keeping an “ultimate diary” of sorts over the summer as I started to read lots of ultimate blogs, and used it to pool a lot of the knowledge I found most relevant or useful for the purposes of improving my game, or helping make the team as a whole better.

I’m really excited for the team this year, by the way. Dartmouth just keeps getting better and better…part of what drew me to the school was that, unlike Brown (the school I turned down to come here), which already had a well-established, successful program, Dartmouth’s was on the cusp. They’d gone to natties, but they weren’t considered the powerhouse that Brown is. I figured that if I went to Brown, I’d be consigned to B-teamness for much longer than I’d want, whereas if I came to Dartmouth, I’d have a shot at A-team from the get-go; I’d be able to have a meaningful impact, in other words.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I was merely one in a crop of unusually strong freshmen. While I came into Dartmouth knowing full well that I wanted to play ultimate and make it central to my experience (why lie, it was an important part of my evaluation of schools), a lot of people showed up with a bit of disc experience or none altogether but they were encouraged to come out by their upperclassmen trip leaders or whatever, and they happened to be athletic or have pretty good game sense or any other sort of trait that puts you a step ahead of the average ultimate recruit maybe as early as 5 years ago.

I wound up co-captaining the B-team last year, which was a great experience. While I was definitely pretty disappointed over not making the A-team right out of the gate, it definitely served several purposes for me; firstly, it was a reality check–I’m not the shit. Related to this, it gave me something to prove–”need to work on my defense, huh? I’ll show you defense. I’ll make it clear you made a mistake keeping me down.” And I worked on my defense like a mofo last year. Now I’ve turned that which was orignally perceived as a weakness into a source of pride–nothing like creating turns by baiting the layout D, or skying the shit out of my man because he really didn’t have enough separation to get the disc before me.

In any case, I’m playing D-line for the A-team for sure this year. I’m also a VP, which is great; I feel like I’ve been empowered to really have a say in the development of our program here, which is just the opportunity I was looking for, though I might not have known it when I first came here.

That’s what really excites me for ultimate this year, and in years to come: our potential. The 09s we have here are looking great. As early as last spring I’d envisioned this sort of scenario–continuing to get more and more talented freshmen classes, more solid players, boosting the competitiveness of the team exponentially. As opposed to having to develop for a couple years before maturing into a game-changing stud as a junior or senior, we’re going to have more freshmen come in already able to make a huge difference, and more sophomores come off of a year on the B-team with skills and game-sense ready for the big stage.

I love baseball, so I tend to relate lots of life to it; in the case of our program, I don’t think it’s too unfeasable to envision a college team similar in many respects to a big-league club, where you have your experienced veterans and exceptional talents in the majors, on-the-cusp talents developing in AAA, and all sorts of potential stewing just below that in AA, or in ultimate terms, having a great A-team, a rock-solid B-team, and possibly enough players to field a capable C-team.

That all makes sense in terms of numbers, with the way current trends are going (seemingly each year’s class brings out more and more freshmen, and more stick around for the long haul), but what I think will be most critical to our program in the long run is how we develop players. Like the Atlanta Braves, which is perhaps the best model of sports success, top-to-bottom, in history, having talented players doesn’t mean shit if you don’t coach well enough for them to develop properly, and you don’t put them in a positive, winning environment to breed success.

Anybody can get a bunch of athletes with skills on a field. What determines the ultimate (no pun intended) winner hinges more on the team’s ability to execute and perform up to potential, which is certainly hard, and requires a positive environment and lots of leadership, and of course the drive to succeed. One must have the desire to work hard towards the final goal, and must make sure to use the most effective means of training in order to get the best results.

Then it just comes down to performing when it counts, and my opinons on that actually can wait for another post. I’ve got lots of things I want to talk about.