Thoughts.

If you’ve yet to discover it, the The Eternal Battle of Love and Hate is churning out a fair bit of women’s content of late relating to nationals.  Nice to see blogs like this and Movin’ On Up pop up to fill the coverage void.

We need more people to step up and contribute their coverage, and more importantly we need to consolidate it somehow so it presents a cogent view of our sport.  I’m not quite sure how to go about this short of the emergence of another news site with dedicated staffing; my ideal vision has something less rigid and more web 2.0, open and collaborative.  I’m willing to help put in some of the work but at a loss as to what direction to channel efforts into.



Any readers out there have ideas or visions?  Should we just continue to wait for somebody else to blog or write about it, and remain in the dark?

This is a fairly old article, but one that bears continual revisiting.

Researchers looked at perception and elite performance and found all sorts of clues that the elite see things more clearly and decisively (and can therefore respond earlier) than novices (I’d suggest Blink if you’re looking for a more in-depth treatment of the matter). They also found that things like field sense are absolutely not innate, and suggest that free, unstructured play is key to getting the experience and developing a broad, flexible sense as opposed to a narrow-minded one. Check out this blog post for a bit on the difference between explicit and implicit learning–remove coaching and especially structure from the equation, and you tend towards the implicit–given that something like “field sense” is rarely taught explicitly (if I asked you to explain “field sense” to me–what to look for, when, what leads you to make one decision over another–would you be able to do it? In a way I could understand and apply?), you need to go the other way.

As frustrating as low-level, amoeba play (or loosely organized summer league, etc.) can be, or as much as you might think your disc-using non-ultimate games (I’m thinking of boot in particular, but schtick counts too in its own way) are not going to help you improve, recognize the opportunity inherent in these games. Try throws and strategies you wouldn’t normally. Experiment with new positioning and decision-making processes. Expand your repertoire and your mind.

What sorts of games do you play to grow?

Ultimate, like most sports, appears relatively simple at a glance–you look at your elite, championship-caliber squads, and you see lots of absolutely baller ultimate players–of COURSE they’re an elite team; they’re more talented.

In practice though, talent alone is not enough. Strategy is huge, especially on defense–given the largely offensive-advantaged nature of the sport, generating turns is the name of the game. High-level defense relies not only on good, athletic, experienced players, but also on making strategic adjustments to keep the pressure on.

The amount of nuance involved with making adjustments makes it a continual learning process to execute, though the big-picture ideas behind these adjustments tend to be relatively simple.

Keep in mind that while I’m talking about adjustments as a team-level strategy, you can and should be thinking about similar changes within your own matchup in a given point/game/season.

Adjustments have two main thrusts: Changing strategy completely or Tweaking the strategy you already have.

Changing involves a shift from, for instance, man to zone D, or from one zone set to another.

Usually you do this to take away an opponent’s strength–for example, if you’re finding their downfield cutters relentless against your man, a zone D that forces them to slow down and make more/riskier passes might throw them off their rhythm. Changes are also made to prey on an opponents weakness–if a team’s handlers prove fallable, a zone designed to force lots of handler motion might prove effective.

Tweaking is where the real meat of making adjustments comes;usually when I talk about defensive adjustments this is what I’m talking about. In any D this has two components:

• The Mark
• Downfield

These two are very closely related, such that altering one will impact the other.

Adjusting on the mark means a conscious decision to take something away that you weren’t before–with an accompanying concession of something you were previously contesting.

For instance, if a team is routinely using its IO breaks for quick, effective strikes, you might make an adjustment on the mark to consciously cheat more to the open side (or perhaps commit to not biting as hard on pivots to the break side), or otherwise adjust the mark’s positioning to stop the break from going off. This has the tradeoff of making the around break easier; generally you make this concession hoping that a team that loves the IO will struggle to adjust and use the OI, or at the very least you’ll have a better idea of what to expect now that you’re dictating.

Adjusting downfield, you change up your positioning and what space you’re actively trying to take away–in the previous example, instead of adjusting with the mark, you can also adjust downfield by instructing your defenders–particularly those close to the disc, who are prime candidates to receive the IO–to play more closely to their man (more even with the mark rather than flared out into the lane), and to respect the break side cut a bit more since it’s been established as viable. In this example that’s not necessarily a good adjustment to make, as it makes the open side more vulnerable…however, it may still prove more effective than simply staying the course.

I’ll be making a few more posts going in more depth on these sorts of adjustments, and try to get at some of the “why” behind it as well, which is the real meat of the strategy. Keep in mind that as defensive adjustments get more complex, you need a correspondingly more capable defensive squad to carry them out effectively. Even minor adjustments like mark positioning require a certain amount of experience; if you’re going to mess around with straight-up transition marks or other fanciness you likely will need to practice and coordinate these adjustments before you get into tournament situations; otherwise you risk a poor defensive set and, worse still, putting your players in a position where they have to think too much in the flow of a game, hindering performance.

Been working hard lately, with the wonderful weather ¹ and the prospect of playing some good ultimate when I return to the states as motivation.

That said, there are still days where I’m not feeling it. I get home from work and my body says, “meh!” and my mind says, “ehhhh. Just take it easy today.”

In those situations, there are two things that keep me working:

1. Having a plan. This is essential to keep you from dogging it repeatedly–if you have at LEAST a general idea, some goal to strive towards, you’re more likely to get there. It’s easier to say “eh, today will be an off day” when you haven’t already planned it to be a workout day. Plan against your future apathy.
2. At least do the warm up! This is a rule I made for myself a couple years ago (I may have read about it somewhere); even if you don’t feel up for a full strength workout or conditioning set, etc, get your butt off the couch and into the gym. Do your warm-up (I’m fond of the Crossfit warm-up or similar derivation). Feel better? Do the workout. Still not feeling up for it? Take it easy.

At the very least, you’re boosting recovery by getting the blood flowing. Ideally the physical act of getting up and out will be enough to get you over your motivation hump and get you working, even if you opt to scale things back a bit–you’re better off doing something than nothing.

¹As I type this, of course, it’s pouring–rainy season here. Soon to be unbearably hot season.

“All ultimate people are great people. Well, except for the assholes.”

-Matt Love

Location: Okura Beach, Akashi.

Format: Hat tourney Saturday (competition included accuracy and distance throwing as well as on-beach play), team play Sunday. 25 minute (continuous) rounds made for short but sweet games (the girls, perpetually shorthanded, were especially appreciative of the short game times)–games were typically followed by an hour or more bye, so there was plenty of time for hangout/fooding/socializing between games.

Conditions: Warm bordering on hot (20-24 deg C), cloudy on Saturday, sunny on Sunday. Beach was pretty rocky–barefoot playing was a no-go, sadly. Still forgiving enough to bid freely, but the arms and legs would pay the price.

Overall experience: Great!

Saturday I wound up with a squad of Japanese college students (as I’ve mentioned before, the scene here largely revolves around college teams). I showed up late and arrived as teams were already huddled. Opening conversation went something like this:

“Is this team G?”
“Yes”
“Sorry I’m late! I’m Matt, nice to meet you.”
“We were just thinking of our team name…What’s that on your shirt?”
“This? Oh, you mean ‘Dartmouth?’”
“What’s a ‘Dartmouth?’ Mouth, like mouth?”
“Oh! Well, uh yeah…it is but it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s a person’s name…”
“Sounds cool. Alright! ‘Dartmouth’ will be our team name.”

So it was that Dartmouth had its inaugural tournament appearance in Japan. Our 2-1 record was good enough to finish 5th in the tournament, but a poor showing in the accuracy contest sank any hopes of finishing in the top 3 overall. Our foreigner contingent represented pretty well though, with one team sporting a couple of us making it to the finals (out of perhaps 150 players on Saturday, there was just the dozen or so of us foreigners spread about).

After games on Saturday we made the obligatory onsen trip to clean off, hit up a nearby buffet, and then hung out at the beach for the evening with some of the other players–now teammates and friends–and some watermelon. Spent the night in a ryokan near Kobe, channeling some summer-camp sleepover nostalgia sharing a room with the 10 of us for the night.

Sunday we Wondertwin-powered into the form of a Rising Tide:

The smallish roster and being already familiar with each other from having played together in Awaji meant that as a team we gelled pretty well from the get-go, with a little bit of basic strategy talk and subbing (your basic “always have a handler on the field” prescription).

First game we opened up a 3 or 4-0 lead before letting them creep back in late for a 7-6 victory that never felt so close. Second game saw us brush up against some stiffer competition–indeed, the team went on to win the whole thing–and drop a 7-5 game that also never felt as close as the score indicates. Almost all of the Japanese teams had a good grasp of the fundamentals of using the dump-swing and break throws to punish poaching or generate easy motion, but this team had it down even more systematically than the rest, who seemed to improvise more (or maybe we just played better D). At any rate yours truly wound up looking stupid on D a couple times.

Our third and fourth games were also tight, with our last game going into sudden death overtime after we were tied at the end of 25 minutes, but, much like our namesake, we slowly and inexorably rose above. (Our second game of the day obviously occurred during a receding phase).

Rising Tide finished 8th overall, with a 3-1 record and the 1 to the tourney champions. In other words, I think we have a solid claim to second-best team overall.

Other events: Between games/during byes (games are only 25 minutes, remember, so 3/4 games a day means a lot of down time) were various frisbee-related demos: some freestyling here, disc golfing there, a fair bit of dog catch, and some other games of skill, all complete with an announcer to narrate (“Ok, here’s the throw to Rover…can he do it? YES! Nice catch!”), as well as continuous (good) music playing at the fields. It wasn’t just an event for the people who love to run themselves ragged on the field; families could come and enjoy, with there being several food options and games on the side. Saw a few young’uns tossing foam discs around, or throwing at targets, while the families picnicked. Tourney organizers in the States take note–loath as I am to feed associations between ultimate and dogs, there are plenty of options out there to make a weekend of ultimate about much more than simply ultimate.

Highlight of the non-ultimate events was definitely the 「ダイビーングケーチコンテスト」, aka Diving Catch Contest, aka Layout Grab-off. Yours truly did a little showboating before tracking down and catching a nice floater above the head, with a near-faceplant of a landing and a facefull of sand to show for it and little else. For whatever reason we didn’t so much as place despite, you know, actually catching the disc, which some 20 of the 25 pairs did not. Plus we had way more style.

Personally: I felt pretty great all weekend–despite having to deal with a strained quad for much of the week preceding, the short beach fields combined with some day-before muscle debugging (my VMO was too tight and not firing; got it working with a bit of foam rolling and some massage along with some focused mobility work) had me feeling fine all weekend long, the usual after-game and day-after aches and pains notwithstanding.

Played pretty darn well–the short field helped in a lot of ways, as it a) reduced a lot of defense to something closer to handler D, where I’m most comfortable and b) put me in close proximity to all the other players, meaning I had plentiful opportunities to poach, bait and help with good results. Offensively, despite not having really thrown a disc in a month or so, my IO backhand and forehand were both gellin’ (though the flick was a little too zippy at times) and the rest of the arsenal fell in line pretty well too–it helped that Saturday was close to breezeless and Sunday wasn’t too strong either, but regardless of condition it bodes well to see the muscle memory holding up. Having fewer players on the field makes it a bit easier to assess the state of my options with the disc and find space, so I didn’t find myself struggling in the handler role as much as at Awaji (it helped that we defaulted to a straight stack O).

Personal highlights are numerous. I knew I was set for a good weekend when, late in my first game on Saturday, I had a full-extension, fingertip layout D on a swing for the goal, which I immediately followed with an IO backhand break huck to the other endzone for the goal. There was also a span in one game Sunday where I believe I threw a goal (or at least right up to the endzone), and then in the ensuing two points D’d up the first throw and threw the score on the next pass (the first, a poach on an upline pass that led too far; the second, a straight-up denial catch D on a dump attempt), turning a pretty tight game into a comfortable lead in the span of about two minutes.

Altogether, couldn’t have asked for a better weekend getaway. Left on Sunday riding on cloud nine; it’s ridiculous how happy this sport makes me sometimes.

In response to my post on scorekeeping, Chad commented saying he was working on an iphone app to help with score and especially stat keeping.

The beta is now good to go, and he’s looking for testers/feedback. Directions below:

I’ve finally finished a beta of my ultiStats iPhone app. I’m contacting you because I thought you might be interested in helping me out by testing it.

If you’d like to help, I need your device ID. Follow the directions in the paragraph entitled “Adding Beta Testers” in the following link and send me the code (I think it’s 40 digits).

I’ll then send you an e-mail with the application attached and some instructions.

I’m looking for you to find bugs in the program, suggest design changes that might make it easier to use or look better, or even suggest features that I have not considered that you might like to see.

Installing future bug fixes may require you to delete your database, losing all of your stored statistics. Please do not rely on these early releases for long-term stat tracking.

There are many features that I would still like to add, but I need to get this first version out.

If you don’t have an iphone/ipod touch but you know someone who does that might be interested, feel free to forward this to them.

Thanks for your help,
-Chad

His email can be found in the comments of the aforementioned post.

Was away playing this weekend–recap coming later this week (short version: ’twas awesome).

In the meantime, Vern Gambetta is to the point (and on point): are you happy being good, or are you driven to strive for greatness?

If you’re content, you’re useless. What have you done to get better today?

While writing the last post about energy demands in ultimate¹, it struck me that there is a LOT of potential data to be mined just looking at scoring trends, play durations, etc, but the data isn’t there currently–nobody really tracks that sort of thing (at least, not publicly).

We need more descriptive score keeping than the simple “X-X” final total. In much the same way that baseball scores by innings, or tennis has set-by-set counts (or really any sport has at least some temporal division), ultimate needs something more robust to help keep the fan clued in. I’ve broken it down below into a few phases based on ease of incorporation:

Phase 1, (I hope) obviously, is reporting scores at halftime. You get this all the time in written-up recaps; why not on score reporter or tournament result sites?

I’m not saying it has to be done all the time–hell, at plenty of tournaments even final scores go unreported–but at bigger tournaments that have a fan following, it’s the bare minimum to be done to build something of a “box score” and give an at-a-glance view of how the game went. Did team X cruise out to a big halftime lead before blowing it at the end? Did team A stay neck and neck with the #1 seed through the first half and fall back to earth in the second? These are stories that are out there, but often go un(der)reported.

I’m thinking a parenthetical–i.e., Team A 15(8) – Team B 12(2)–would be pretty simple and easy to incorporate into the current SRT structure.

Phase 2 is generating a score report that can really capture the flow of scoring throughout a full game, and I have just the method in mind:

Enter The Hardball Times’ sparklines (I’m amending to scorelines for ultimate’s use).

So much of what makes games into exciting stories is the string of breaks, rises and falls in momentum, or the hard-fought back-and-forth matches, and this metric would capture it perfectly–long gaps in the scoreline denote a string of breaks, whereas the back-and-forth games would have a, dare I say it, beautiful symmetry to their scorelines. Could you imagine how ridiculous the scoreline would’ve looked for Fury’s massive comeback from 10-1 against Riot in the UPA finals last year?²

Even if the scoreline doesn’t make it into mainstream use anytime soon, I imagine it’d be very useful for teams that keep any kind of stats to track their scores (if it isn’t done already)–rather than wonder “did we start off with a 2-0 or 3-0 lead before their zone shut us down?” you can look at the evidence conclusively, and with a few short notes during the game, see concretely what impact your adjustments had on the flow of the game. You could write in the score at set intervals (every 5 ticks for instance) to make it a little easier to track at a glance while still keeping the flow-tracking intact.

The other component I’d like to see go along with this is game time.

Even without shifting to a stopped-time dynamic it’d be possible to track active game duration from pull to last goal caught (or hard cap horn), using a designated scorekeeper with a stopwatch. This would give some indication of, for instance, team A’s offensive dominance with 20-second points while team B struggles to the tune of a minute per score, a prelude to team A’s eventual string of breaks (or team B’s unlikely upset despite the lower efficiency). You might see a break at 10 seconds of play, which would suggest a callahan off the pull or a short turn and quick strike. Even a simple notation of, say, 5-minute play intervals on the scoreline would help to give some idea of how rapid or drawn-out the points were.

Phase 3 moves beyond scorekeeping itself and incorporates stats. This is my baseball bias coming in to play of course, but similar to how at bats are tracked along with hits/runs/RBIs/HRs etc, you could similarly chart points played along with goals caught/assists thrown/Ds (and maybe at a high level, things like hucks and completion % and touches as well). A hockey-like +/-, if refined to account for starting on O or D, would also be a cool stat to see.

Why it’s worth it
Each level takes a greater amount of work to pull off, but each brings with it a greater amount of clarity on “what-happened” syndrome that plagues ultimate today. Outside of following real-time updates, we’re left to get the story secondhand, reading sparse/biased RSD and blog coverage, and unless we know people involved, are generally left unsatisfied. Web coverage is awesome–video feeds, etc–but when you compare the logistics of setting all that up to simply putting a little more effort into score keeping, this is a pretty simple/easy way to boost the profile of tournaments and teams to the casual (and passionate) observer.

What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.