Thoughts.

If I asked you the question,

“What do you look for in a good handler?”

Your list would probably look something like this:

• good throws
• good hands (catching)
• quick
• good hucks
• breaks
• good decisions (doesn’t turn the disc over)

I’ll offer that, while there is some requisite level of competence required in some of these areas (I’m thinking “good hands”) to be a handler, you can actually do a LOT without anything close to a complete skillset.

The most important thing for any handler (or really any player with the disc in his hands) to know is:

• his/her own limitations

That’s all. Can’t huck it? Maybe learn the fake, but don’t sweat it. Always turfing your IO? Shelf it. Always throwing the disc away? Maybe you need better teammates to catch your visionary throws. (I’m kidding). Not quick enough to shake ‘n bake your man in two steps? Master the fine art of positioning and timing, instead of dancing in the lane.

Right there with knowing what you can’t do is knowing what you CAN. Maybe you don’t have a money flick bomb, endzone-to-endzone, but when you get the disc on an upline cut you can put it to Fred where he’ll rip it down 80% of the time. Maybe your IO sucks, but if your mark is overplaying it you can make a beautiful leading around pass.

Play to your strengths!!! Maybe your team asks you to do more than you’re capable of or comfortable with right now. Instead of simply trying (and failing) to live up to those expectations, think about how the things you WANT to do and CAN do can jive with those same goals. If you’re a handler without game-changing throws, but you can move quickly and get open, instead of trying to make that short IO break pass the coach keeps preaching you can instead focus on dishing the disc to the first open man you see as soon as you get the disc and get back to where you’re the most dangerous–moving. If you’ve got big hucks and little else (including good judgment on when to throw and when to hold), consider talking to your cutters and establishing some preferred receivers you can be comfortable throwing to (and make sure the rest know not to make that cut for you, so you’re maximizing completions).

I’m sure you’ve had experiences where you’ve run up against guys and thought, “I/we are so much better than them, can do so much more,” and then get your ass whooped. You can do a lot with a little if you know how to use it. Before you get caught up in all the stratagems, running a ho-stack or a clam because everyone runs one, try running it from the other side–what can you do well? In what setups, or simply “how,” can you best utilize this skill or ability? (Or instead of the positive definition you can look at the negative definition–given your limitations, how can you most avoid overextending yourself?)

Nobody has it all. You can be a great, well-rounded ultimate player, but there are bound to be areas where you feel less confident. Sometimes you’ll bump up against those limitations–but it doesn’t have to be by design! The best offenses are structured to play to their strengths, to feature their talents. Certainly, progressing in your skills and abilities is something to work towards, but when it counts,

Know yourself.

First, for those of you who looked forward to my fitness-related musings: while I’ll likely still make posts here as I see fit on the matter, I recently joined up with in-the-works ultimate website scooberville as a contributor and am going to be shelling out a bunch of articles relating to ultimate fitness and training as the site gets up and running this spring. For any aspiring ultimate writers(/editors) out there, they’re still looking for writers and you can likely contribute on just about anything. Hit up Talton if you’re interested in any capacity (or me if you’re just looking for details & a list of potential topics).

With the repeated attempts and failures to sustain an ultimate news/content site in the past few years, my hope is that by getting in on this one early I can help establish something more sustainable.

Second, relating to fitness and training–Vern Gambetta recently made a couple posts on evaluating a training program which are valuable guides for your thought, if (as usual) rather broad. Worth a look–does your training program make sense? Does your team’s?

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.

Just a couple notes on some housekeeping I did around here (if I can’t play ultimate proper, I’ll at least play with my ultimate-related blog):

• Swapped out the BananaCut widget for a simple RSS feed. Had gotten complaints a while back that the widget caused slowdown; this is a simple solution (though it maxes out at five articles).
• UPDATE:Just added a link at the top of the sidebar to all the “Overview” linking I did in December. Should hopefully be obvious to any newcomers and make the site a bit more accessible as a resource.
• Changed my “More Thoughts” links on the main blog page from a java-based insertion on the page to a simple link to the post page. Yes, this is an effort to increase the number of page views I get. No, I’m not planning to host ads on this site (by the way, did you know firefox with adblock plus will get rid of any and all ads on the internet?). It’s because…
• I’m looking for more feedback from you. Trying to get data on page views for a per-article basis (previously I’d only see what articles were being linked to by other people, not so much what you’re reading) is a simple way to do it; the other you’ll see below every post I make.

  If you read a post and think, “I want Mackey to write more on this topic,” click the corresponding radio button at the bottom of the post. If you think “I don’t really care to hear Mackey write about this,” click the other one. Quick, anonymous, easy? It’d be cool if you RSS folk would click through and click a button too if something really tickles your fancy.

  Originally wanted to add more options but iframes apparently don’t play nice with blogger (even though it’s their tool!) so we’re keeping it simple for now. Anyone with programming expertise that might care to chime in here, feel free.

And of course, leave comments! I’m always open to e-mail. I’ve gotten a few suggestions to tackle the zone question, and that’s been stewing for a while…would love to hear any other ideas, too.

I love Michael Lewis. You’ve likely read Moneyball–people credit James, Beane with developing new statistical approaches, but guess who wrote the book that made it a common concept?

At any rate, there has been a little discussion recently concerning the use of statistics in ultimate, and a comparison with basketball’s newer stats has been made. It’s not the scores made, assists, blocks that define a player’s value, but something beyond that.

Lewis swoops in again to shed some light. Read this article with a mind for ultimate–how are you selfish? How are you part of the system? How do you help your teammates get better?

Word to the wise:Even if Japan IS a lot closer to Hawaii than most of the contiguous States,

…you still need your passport to fly there.

Technicalities and finances prevented a late rescheduling, and my winter just got a whole lot worse. Rest assured, blogonauts, the tournament will be aptly recapped by the others.

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.

Or was, if you live on the other side of the int’l date line like me.

#33 turns 22…and I likely won’t be posting today. No promises either way though.

In related news, if you ever get the chance to eat Okonomiyaki, do so. The sauce alone makes it entirely worthwhile.