Thoughts.

There are myriad ways to go about developing this vision (and I’m sure that many people with the desire to coach already have some ideas), but I think that perhaps the best way to go about it (or at least the way I’d think of going about it) entails the same kind of goal-setting any committed athlete can and should do, though perhaps extended to a broader scale.

It starts with some end goal–as a coach, it may be best to keep this information close to the vest, as a personal desire that exceeds or under-reaches your athletes’ goals (for example, having a goal of making Nationals for a team that’s only made it to Sunday of regionals once) can psych players out if made explicit. Let the players set their own goals and find their own motivations (with or without guidance). But take the time and decide–what’s your definition of “success,” given this team and these players?

From there, (or perhaps before you get to determining an end goal–a realistic assessment can take time) you simply have to evaluate the process you desire. What kind of a role do you envision for yourself? What kind of role do you think is necessary for the team to achieve your (their) goals? If there’s a discrepancy between these two versions of you, some effort in fixing the imbalance there (or changing your perspective) is in order.

What sort of work is necessary for the team to succeed (again, “success” being relative to your goals)? This takes a lot of on-field evaluation, determining skill progressions and training necessities. A lack of experience can make this determination tough (as far as “what is sufficient” or “how much is too much”), but a rough idea is better than no idea.

Then comes the softer side. The nuts and bolts of a team’s success are the on-field skills and the off-field effort, but the grease in the gears is everything else about a team–how’s the social dynamic? What sort of team culture are you encouraging? What kind of feeling or impression do you (want to) leave your athletes with as a coach? How do you motivate when times get tough?

This is going purely off of my anecdotal experience in high school and before more than anything else, but the most effective coaches I’ve had had a clear vision and progression in place. They have a PLAN, and the nitty-gritty of a plan cannot fall into place cleanly unless you have a similarly clear vision to accompany it. That’s not to say the plan is rigid, unmalleable–rather, the plan is the framework from which everything else follows.

It’s very easy to fall into this trap–after spending most of my freshman year developing into a solid defensive player, playing my sophomore year as a D-line starter, I shifted my attention to becoming better offensively during my junior year.

I became a much better offensive player–that year I was one of the primary cutters on our O-line–but I also lost my fire on defense, the Kill Mode. I don’t know that I’ve ever quite gotten it back, frankly.

A friend of mine had a similar experience, only instead of general D and general O, it was setting a lethal mark and shifting focus to becoming a great handler that took him from superlative to something still good, but less.

Obviously this varies a bit with circumstance. But certainly you see this at all levels of sport–you have your more laissez-faire “player’s coaches” and your more authoritarian types as well.

Ultimate at a club and college level, at least, seems to lend itself more to the former, simply by virtue of the sport being largely opt-in and the fact that coaches are still relatively new at these levels. Team meeting frequency can be infrequent enough that an authoritarian approach is hard to establish and maintain. I’m pretty positive that this is not the case in high school, where I get the (anecdotal) impression that your Tiina Booths have a much larger degree of control.

I find myself by and large to be a hands-off sort, who thrives more on individual interaction with big-picture guidance than being a strict or micromanaging sort. I’ve been told by at least one person that I have the right sort of laid-back disposition to be a successful coach in women’s ultimate, but I don’t exactly have a ton of experience to corroborate that (and I fear most of the readers here are similarly lacking in experience on that side of the gender spectrum).

That said, what are your own experiences with different coaching styles? Dartmouth’s men has always sort of by necessity had a more hands-off coaching style simply because we’ve never had a coach in Hanover who can regularly make practices–sometimes we have a coach or two for a scrimmage or practice on weekends, and certainly at tournaments, but in many ways the tone is set by the captains rather than any coaches.

What kind of things do you find that you need as a player to thrive that you can get from your coaches (or captains)? What sorts of things really hinder your progress? Do you prefer being left to do your own thing, or do you need somebody to really push you?

“!!!

“You can coach us next year!”

My reaction was significantly less enthusiastic. That said, it’s not like I don’t want to coach–merely that the prospect of being in that role for a perennial nationals-caliber performer is a little daunting.

I’ll be putting a bit of thought into this going forwards, and would love to hear feedback from people with far more experience than I on the matter (psst, the Huddle! How about an issue or feature on coaching this spring? Broad strokes and specifics are both welcome resources). Hopefully in so doing I can flesh out a bit of my perspective and philosophy on learning and the game.

Largely it’ll be open questions that I’d like to hear opinions on, so PLEASE chip in.

The implications of this alone are significant, but he goes a step farther and talks about changing said programming–with Korean Air, they changed the culture of communication in the cockpit by enforcing English use, as the Korean they had defaulted previously (which, much like Japanese, has in-built status considerations for speech) was encouraging imbalanced power dynamics where the younger copilot would not question the elder, even if he knew the other was in the wrong (which led to a spat of preventable plane crashes back in the ’90s and before).

How do you change an ultimate team’s culture? Specifically, how do you create a culture of work (and, eventually, success), from a team culture that is more laid back? Certainly a large part of it is eliminating the vestiges of the anti-work culture, and this is perhaps the most difficult feat to accomplish. Generally, when you’re talking about getting rid of the slacker (or taking the slacker out of the player) you’re talking about potentially butting heads with your peers, your friends, your teammates. For this reason, I’m inclined to think this change is not one that is easily done overnight–instead, it’s a process that can take many years to achieve fully.

Plant the seed of hard work and perseverance in the young, impressionable minds. Get a batch of bright-eyed freshmen to buy into the culture of work, and while you might not see immediate payoff, perhaps when they’re seniors they’ll have worked hard enough to take a team to nationals. (Perhaps not). Making an impression takes a strong example–as tough as it may be to get, you need strong, hard-working leadership. It may not be possible to get everyone, but if you have an established core of hard-working veterans, that can and will resonate with young players who may be searching for just this outlet. Of particular importance is a team’s senior leadership–outside of a team’s captains, it’s these guys, the vets of the vets, that set the tone, and make the biggest impression on your freshmen.

The goal is to reach a tipping point with your hard workers where so many people are working so hard, the guys on the fringe will have no choice but to fall in line (or fall by the wayside).

It’s not easy. In particular, players need to see payoff for their hard work–obviously winning more games is a plus, but a big win like a strong showing at regionals (or perhaps just making regionals–your goal should be specific to your team’s situation) will go a long way towards creating a culture of success. Once players see that hard work leads to more success, it will become easier and easier to ask that of your teammates going forwards.

At least, this is what I think (and have seen). I think the biggest legacy any group of seniors can leave is the impression they make on their underclassmen. You can’t do it all yourself–you have to create a culture, a team system, that continually breeds success. Anyone can contend for a year–it’s making a Program that really takes work.

In this instance: becoming an expert. I’ve heard it said (yet another short snippet I want to attribute to Zip, but can’t verify) that you need to perform a throw 10,000 times in order to master it (e.g., 10,000 forehands), which is perhaps an ultimate paraphrasing of the 10,000 hours rule–for the uninitiated, this states simply that in order to reach an expert level of proficiency at something–ANYTHING–you need to invest about 10,000 hours into experience/practice/whatever you want to call it.

Gladwell hammers this point home with a few examples, perhaps most notably with Bill Gates (his high school had access to computers for programming work before most COLLEGES had anything, allowing him to be one of few with a huge head start on the programming skills progression), and the Beatles (who apparently played a ludicrous number of live, all-night performances in Hamburg, Germany, before they ever hit it big). In both instances, he refers to the times when they were able to gain an exceptional amount of experience in a relatively compressed period of time–for Gates, his high school years; for the Beatles, Hamburg–as crucibles for them reaching the magic 10,000 hour mark.

The connection with ultimate is easy to see here. How do you get your 10,000 hours? There’s a reason growth at the college level was (and is) so explosive–perhaps the best crucible for any aspiring ultimate player out there is to be part of a team in college.

When else can you simply call a friend and be throwing within 10 minutes? When else are you FREE enough to spend all your daylight hours out on the green, tossing back and forth lazily? When else do you have such easy frequency of practice, tournament, game experience? (you might counter with “high school” here, and that’s fair).

I’m not saying you can get to 10,000 hours in 4 years. But compared to, say, club ultimate, where practices are pretty infrequent and players generally have full-time jobs and no throwing buddies a stone’s throw away, college is a time you absolutely MUST seize if you want to go from a player to a baller on the ultimate field.

Obviously the idea extends beyond simply preparing for ultimate (academics have a similar crucible in college and grad school if you’re willing to embrace your subject matter, for instance), but this is, after all, an ultimate blog.

If you’re still in college, or better yet, yet to arrive at one, make sure you make the most of your time there. You never know when you might spend your following year working full-time in a country where the majority of people who do know frisbee (and there aren’t that many in the Japanese countryside) think, “with a dog?” and opportunity to learn is less. Don’t take your chances for granted.

*I definitely recommend the book. If you’ve read his other works, he takes more of the wide-lens, population-based approach that typified The Tipping Point, but still has his usual style of fleshing out larger stories with specific incidents. Especially if you’re still young and wondering about what you might want to do with yourself in the future, this book might give you a better idea of what you’ve got and how you might identify opportunities when you meet them. As an ultimate player with an interest in psychology, I’d also recommend his book Blink, which explores decision-making, specifically the unconscious variety (real-time decision making on the field, anyone?).

2) I’d just like to point out that I was talking about Hard vs. Efficient (in slightly different terms) a good while back.

Along those lines (particularly with regards to “efficient” D), a component of good defense that is rarely talked about, perhaps due in large part to a difficulty with putting it in words, is…well. For lack of a better way to put it, entering your (wo)man’s spirit.

What do I mean? I mean, if you understand your opponent, you can shut them down with ease. If you understand your opponent’s offensive schemes and structures, getting the turn becomes a matter of when, not if.

At a very basic level, you have to understand your quarry’s wants and desires, and to some extent, we all do. We understand that generally speaking, a cutter wants to cut in or deep on the open side, that a handler wants to make an easy pass to the break side but will take the open side cutter, etc etc etc. This dictates the way we teach and execute “normal” defense.

You have to move beyond that simple understanding, however, and learn more specifically if you’re to get the best of good teams. In a sport like (American) football, you call this good scouting, realizing that, for instance, a QB cannot complete passes with any regularity in the wind, and with pressure can be forced into myriad errors by a strong Eagles defense. (I’m not that heartbroken. But oh, Eli.)

In ultimate, this comes across more as “He loves the huck,” “All they want to do is chuck it to headband,” “Not a thrower,” and other simple but effective realizations.

This is useful information. When you recognize what a team’s offense and individuals want to do, at the very least you can force them to their second (less comfortable/consistent) option. That’s the first level. It’s something we attempted to institutionalize in part on Dartmouth last year with some success–dedicating minds on the sideline (more on sidelines at a later time–but know this: they are your best asset as a team) almost exclusively to “scouting” the other team, and we found a decent degree of success with it.

At a deeper level, though, what I mean is dynamically altering the defense you present such that it always aligns against your opponent’s desires. Recognizing that, while your man loves to cut deep, if you’re still with him after a few steps he will plant to come under, and adjusting your defense right as he gets to that point–temporarily conceding the deep you were just taking away, knowing that your opponent has shifted his attention elsewhere–you will be able to be everywhere he wants to be and a VERY frustrating defender.

In a larger sense, having a feel for where your teammates are and what your opponent’s offense is looking for allows you to do similar things–you can concede that deep option temporarily when the O is looking dump, or if you know that the first few stalls of each new possession are dedicated to stopping the continuation huck. That is part and parcel of good defense.

However, the epitome, in my mind at least, is integrating that information along with a reading of your opponent’s desires. If you recognize the lack of a viable deep option, you don’t respect the deep cut. When she realizes this, what will she do? You need to anticipate her looking to cut to the break side, or you need to anticipate her using the threat of the break side in your mind to try and get what she REALLY wants–the open side under.