Thoughts.

Frozen Disc of Death, what can I say…

I had a good time. Great time, even. Got to play with my class, which was really really nice. I’m loving the 08′s chances for sweeping classwars (finishing second only to the 06s amongst Dartmouth teams through no fault of our own)…

Anyhow, I played just fine, generally speaking; the weekend as a whole was a good confidence booster. The level of play is far lower than what I’d encounter playing at your average A-team tourney, so I wasn’t really getting pressured on the mark or cutting outside of the occasional Exceptional Player that would keep me honest. But I don’t think it was a bad thing at all in terms of practice; I got to work on my mark a bit, forcing more than a couple less-than-ideal throws that often ended in turns, got to work on my help D (we worked that really well by mid-saturday, it was a beautiful thing), getting many a sky on D, and got to work on my throwing a bit too, with some really nice hucks (also a few poor executions and poor decisions, but overall not bad). Wasn’t looking to play all that seriously, and I didn’t need to for most of the time, though I turned it up a notch every now and then.

It was really nice to be able to be a B-level stud again, tooling on the unfortunate masses (one of the highlights of today was a girl teasing “so how does it feel to sky a girl?” after I D’d her as last back. I opted for the neutral “Well, somebody had to” rather than “it feels good, real good.”). I did get carried away sometimes in terms of trying to make too many of the plays (though in my defense, I was making the plays more often than not), but it’s all in good fun.

The biggest highlight of the weekend, though, was being able to see, catch up with, and sky my old counselor, Dusty, of Pike fame. He’s got a monstrous forehand huck, I was studying his form a bit but I feel as though I’m lacking the requisite strength to throw that far at the moment. Lots of good heckling, when playing each other, when watching the other play different teams, and some decent conversation about this and that (with this being ‘ultimate’ and that being ‘frisbee’).

So much ultimate this weekend…a little burned out from all the play, but that won’t stop me from going out to practice. Need all the play time I can get…

Co-ed practice today, lots of fun. I got to make a bunch of swilly looks and throwaways without consequence, working on my in-game throws a bit (though it’s hard to practice for real-game situations when you’re just making swilly hucks in a game 90% of the people aren’t taking seriously).

Anyhow, Frozen Disc of Death tomorrow. There will once again be an all-08 team (though we’ll see how numbers shake out on Sunday), which’ll be a blast, and more importantly, I’ll get to match up with Dusty (that Pike guy mentioned in an earlier post) and show him a thing or two I’ve learned in the 4 years or so it’s been since I saw (and played against) him last. Should be a lot of fun.

Lifted a bit today–good stuff, got a lot of upper body work done, and my favorite, the wrist curls, as well.

After that, though, was yoga. SO good.

I don’t care who you are, you can benefit from yoga. As our instructor pointed out today, when you think you need to stretch a tight muscle, the reality may simply be that it’s too weak and feels sore all the time as a result. Improvement comes as a result of strengthening AND stretching, words for the wise indeed.

And Yoga’s definitely one of the fastest ways toward both. Particularly in terms of flexibility, I was feeling the stretch in areas I didn’t realize existed, and got some great stuff to do for the ever-important quads and sublimely-important hip flexors.

Incidentally, I read in a strength/improve your vertical! blog the other day that the hip flexors are one of the primary factors in speed running and power in jumping, and also one of the easiest areas to make sure is functional–a good warm-up and some static stretching can go a long way towards reducing the friction cold hip flexors generate, slowing you down.

And that’s it for tonight’s rant.

I played B-team last year, and while it was a great time and I did develop a bit, I feel like there was definitel more progress to be had as a player on the A-team (not that I didn’t enjoy the extra play time and limited stud status I had on the B-team).

Cuts have been made again this year, and I feel like the B-team players are again getting shortchanged. We’ve been focusing a lot on A-team development, with all the new players we have (by Socks’ count, something like 60%-ish of the team were not A-teamers last year), and as a result, haven’t been playing mixed with the B-team much, which is currently one of the best sources of development for our B+ players, the guys with dedication and ability that just didn’t make the cut (man, is it hard to make the cut). I’ve had several conversations with people already just expressing frustration or disappointment at being unable to improve at a rate they’d like to.

So how do we work around this?

Obviously you can just have more mixed practicing/scrimmaging…drilling together and the like. Particularly at this point of the season, when the A-team is effectively done playing as a collective until the spring (barring one winter tourney), it makes a lot of sense to get as much development for the B-team as possible. The winter’ll be here soon, and unless you’re really close to Leverone it takes a fair bit of commitment, of “buying in” to the ultimate crowd to see a good B-team turnout. This is particularly important for the freshmen–we need to make sure we get as many invested in playing ultimate and dedicating themselves to improvement now, before the winter comes and the chill winds and lack of consistent practice time leave freshmen vulnerable to other activities and interests taking root and pulling them away come spring.

That works to an extent; with A-quality handlers, cutting options improve tremendously, and the measuring stick for a man defender, mark, really all aspects of play, increase when matched up against an A-teamer. But simply relying on A-team players to be playmakers will only result in having B-teamers who are good at playing with people better than them. You also need to cultivate responsibility and talent in at least some of them for the team to be successful, and I think the best way to really generate that sort of situation would be with a B-team coach.
It makes a lot of sense. It could be as simple as having a couple A-teamers talk strategy and contribute wisdom from the sidelines, though I feel that having a “authority”-type figure would be much more powerful. Even if it’s only in a limited role, I think having somebody who’s in a position of power and really legitimized experience–even the captains could work in this aspect to an extent, though they’re busy with the A-team–looking at the B-team players, evaluating them, and really guiding their development to an extent–would make a big difference.

Perhaps that’s a bit too ambitious of me though. This sport’s really not up to that level of coaching and sophistication. More simply, we could do something akin to what the women are doing with throwing partners, where you have somebody who’s experienced relative to their partner(s) working with and teaching a B-team player, really investing in their personal improvement. Personally I really like being able to toss with somebody, or just be chatting with somebody about ultimate, and being able to point out, hey, if you focus on wrist position when you huck flick it’ll really help keep it from taking a trajectory you don’t want, but I’m not going to walk around instructing everyone I see–it’s just too much, you know? But in a limited role I think most people on the A-team could have a positive impact on the development of the Bness.

I guess that’s part of why I started blogging. It’s really helped me a ton reading stuff on RSD and in blogs about various aspects of play, really got me thinking, and I can only hope to be as helpful to somebody else who’s curious and has the desire to improve.

Yeah. Today sucked.

It was cold, and it rained. I don’t mean like, “oh, look, it’s raining, how nice,” rain, I’m talking the “ah crap, I didn’t know it was gonna rain–and why’s it so goddamn cold!” rain.

Needless to say, practice was interesting. Most of practice was spent either a)lacking feeling in my hands/attempting to close them with little success or b)shoving my hands down my pants in an effort to warm them up. We ran man D drill for a bit, which wound up revealing some really, really helpful insights into positioning and cutting–I hadn’t realized it, but particularly having the deep cuts starting on the break side, rather than parallel with the thrower, would often be the difference between whether I would throw on a deep look–it’s a much easier throw to make in terms of getting it by the defender. So that was good.

My cutting still needs a shitton of work–I do a good job with continuation or opportunity cuts, because those generally give me some direction as to what I want to do–but when I cut in general beyond that I tend to let my defender dictate too much. I need to cut with more of a plan in mind, generally speaking, so there’s something to work on.

We scrimmaged for a bit as well, but that was mostly a shitshow before we gave up due to the cold. Brr. But a hot shower soon ensued, and made everything far better.

Then dinner–why the crap does nobody eat at Food Court after practice now? I mean, yeah, we get done sooner, but still–and then brown writeup with a bit of tossing in the hall of Streeter with Socks mixed in. I had an epiphany about backhand; the way Cabo holds his backhand–with the wrist really rotated towards the body so the disc is under the forearm rather than an extension of it–it really adds a lot of extra spin, and I find really helps my feel for backhand be more natural, which is really nice. Something else to work into my standard repetoire over the next several months.

Other than that…had a good lifting session yesterday, felt it a bit today but in a good sore way, not a painful sore way, which is a good sign. Ran out to practice, which was clutch–it got me good and warm before we even started, and it got the blood flowing to help with recovery from yesterday’s session. I figure I’ll run T Th mornings, and run to practice M W F, with lifting T Th as well, maybe some extra stuff Saturdays depending on what’s going on.

I’m really excited to train and get better. I keep saying this, but really just thinking that every little bit I do, whether it’s improving my game, training, or whatever, is that much more that I’ve got on every other ultimate player out there, making me better, it really gets me going.

Not having homework likely helps too, fewer distractions and all that. I’m a happy man, let me tell you…

I got thinking about this topic a good while ago. I was blitzing back and forth with a friend of mine who plays for Pike–probably the closest thing I’d have to a mentor in the sport of ultimate, he was one of the first good players I saw, and pretty much inspired me to really get into ultimate. Who knows why–maybe I figured if I got as good at ultimate as him, I’d be able to score more points with the ladies, as most of my thoughts seemed to trend that way in some form or another at that age (though now I can’t really see the sense in appealing to 14-16 year-old summer campers as a college student…). There’s a chance he’ll be up to Dartmouth to play in Frozen, which would be sweet as I haven’t seen him in several years, though I haven’t heard from him on it yet. But I digress.

Anyways, at one point he alluded to a veritable treatise on How Pike Plays Ultimate, composed by the team’s captains. Something ridiculous like 24 pages, talking about all sorts of things, specific things players on the team should look for in a given situation, etc. It struck me as a bit strange, but also really intriguing. I mean, something like that’s gotta be guaranteed to make you a better player, right, all that elite-level team strategy…I haven’t seen it, but the concept would seem to be applicable to things with Dartmouth, at least to an extent.

I mean, particularly with all the new stuff we’ve been learning, and trying to run a good, East-coast O, we’ve been working on a lot of new zones, new looks, new plays–all great stuff, but also a bit overwhelming; missing practice can set you behind the curve a good bit. We’ve still a lot of work and development to do with our team playbook, so to speak.

This is where the concept of a “team ideology” comes in. I’m just talking about simply having things well-defined–this is how we run our ideal 2-3-2 (or 2-4-1) zone, and sometimes we’ll mix it up with x or y. This is the ideal way we’d run a dump-swing-continue. This is what we’d want our ideal first in the stack to be doing and be looking to do and capable of doing. This is what we want for our ideal set-up for a deep cut. This is our ideal stack positioning…and so on. Ideally it’d be written down or otherwise cemented in some form or another so that we can refer back to it (and make adjustments as necessary). For basic concepts, at least, it would seem to make sense–rather than having a bunch of players all operating of their own accord within the framework of offensive scheme A or B, (not that that’s a bad thing) give them clearly-defined roles with specific objectives. I feel like having this sort of discipline can make the gelling process easier as a team, as rather than having to get a feel for each and every person to really know how to play with them, you’ll already have a good idea how people play. Of course, people will still do their own thing, but the more you can control for the more potential to be effective there is, I think.

The whole thing is partly just me liking to have things in a place that’s well-defined that I can refer to, liking the certainty and authority of having things put down like that, and I’m sure there’re players on the team that would simply shake their heads and ask “why?”

But I feel like it’d be useful. In any case, I’ll be doing it in some form or another here.

In other news, I went for my first run today! First time in a good long time, it felt great, let me tell you. I’ve come to realize what a difference the bit of extra weight I’ve put on has made–once my legs reacclimate to the slightly increased body weight I should be able to play much more athletically more consistently. I’ve had short bursts of the good stuff I know I’m capable of, but with consistency in mind, I’m definitely gonna look to keep getting my ass in shape. Also had a good lifting session. Gonna mix up the training scheme for a week or two and see if I can’t develop some of the areas the ultimate program doesn’t really focus on as much, mostly upper body. I’ve always loved having good wrist and grip strength, as I think they directly translate to throwing and catching ability, and lately my shoulders have been lacking, so I’m hoping to get some military press/lat pulls and the like to strengthen those a bit more too. We’ll see how it goes.

Days keep getting shorter and shorter…

Today’s practice was highlighted by my ability to get out to it on time! A pretty big deal, really, it’s nice to not have to take a dangerously dark bikeride back from every practice.

Anyways, we put a ton of emphasis on dump-swing-continue O, as well as the mark, and I think we really made a lot of progress. Our marking in general has a long, long way to go still (it’d be a good idea to make this a point of emphasis over the winter–only takes three and a disc to drill), but the dump-swing, even in just the limited time we put into it, made for some very pretty O.

I tell you, when we get that down pat, get our marks in order so we can really put pressure on opposing team’s O, we’re going to be for-fucking-midable. I’m really excited for the winter training, and when all the dues pay off in the spring. I’m inclined to think of my high school swim team–I went to a small private school, and despite our small pool of talent to draw upon relative to the second-tier of public schools we competed against, we worked our asses off every day in practice, and we worked the right things, with a huge emphasis on quality over quantity (though quantity also came)–proper stroke form, good technique in every aspect of the race, and of course lots of hard sets emphasizing the bodily systems most relevant to swimming–and it paid off in a big way, as we won class B in our section every year I swam with the team, and did it an unpreccedented fourth consecutive time last year.

The things that really stick with me from that are this: first, that we always believed (rightly so) that we were working harder than any of the other teams out there, and second, that all the training we did would pay off in the end. My coach loved to use the analogy that winter training is “money in the bank;” you make small deposits every day, and they add up, collecting interest until you make one big withdrawal–for us, when we taper down for sectionals and everybody drops a second, two seconds, more–and we dominate.

My coach was also known to say that “a kick in the ass is a step forward.” Also very applicable. While swimming and ultimate obviously are a bit different, the same mentality applies. We work hard this winter, and really devote ourselves to pushing the envelope with our training, as well as by focusing on skills and technique improvement, and we’ll come out of all of it much stronger, much faster, and equipped with the tools necessary to allow us to take the path of least resistance to the finish.

I’ve got some other thoughts about the team, but those deserve their own post. Hopefully get something in soon. As far as how I did personally today, I felt pretty happy with how I played. A couple minor things I need to tweak, as always, little things with my man D and cutting, but both were a bit better today. Little by little…

Pretty good weekend. Lot of play, lot of good games, high-quality (or at least, not low-quality) competition to work on our game on. We went 3-0 on day 1, highlighted by a victory over Harvard in which they score the last point after hard cap to lose by a point (really weird way to end a game), 12-11. Day 2 saw a pretty good steamrolling of Tufts, and then an epic semis game with UMass Zoodisc where we were down 9-4 at one point before going on a 7-2 run to tie things up for universe before they scored again. A bit disappointing to have lost, but really not a disappointing game at all in my mind–we were down early and seemingly out, but we stuck to our guns (or perhaps more accurately, found our guns and started using them) and really swung momentum in our favor. It’s exactly the sort of mentality we need to keep in that sort of situation.

As an aside, I’ve been reading Buster Olney’s Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, and part of what was discussed as an attribute of the late 90′s Yankee dynasty was their utter, unrelenting confidence, the sense that, no matter the circumstance or opponent, if the Yankees were in a position to come back and win it, they would find a way to do it. The sort of chemistry and sense of team they had obviously played a role in their success; and it’s that sort of feeling that I think we’re capable of having on Dartmouth’s team as well. We just have to play hard, keep our heads up, and play our own game, and there’ll be few things that’ll keep us down.

Personally, I felt great over the course of the weekend. Came out flat in our first game against Roger Williams, a trait I think is common for Dartmouth in general, but after getting sufficient warm-up, proper adrenaline flow, and realizing that part of the soreness came from running up and down a slanted field, I played pretty well. Finally feeling like I’m getting a feel for Cabo, getting better about switching as a wing (after getting beaten several times in the first game), and running forces as the mark, which is good. Still lots of improvement to be had, but I wasn’t ineffective, generally speaking.

Only had one D on the weekend, I think, but it was a pretty sweet one by most recounts. I was a bit worried I was beaten on the play but I didn’t give up and wound up getting the D, which was sweet. Otherwise on defense, I had a pretty solid mark, didn’t get broken that I can remember, and though I did get beaten a couple times in man generally I held my own. I do need to work on my positioning though, particularly when I’m tired and can’t move quite as quickly as I’d like (though this’ll also go away with better conditioning; I’m real excited to train this winter).

Offensively, well, I had one turn on the weekend, and really it could almost count as a D as I mis-played the situation and wound up skying my teammate. Still don’t know why I didn’t just play conservative and look to get the mack, but we were playing Brown B so it wasn’t as crucial that we value the disc in that situation I suppose. Other than that, well, on Saturday, all of my touches (aside from the one turn) were either assists or scores, and on Sunday I only had a couple non-scoring touches (I caught a score or two), so I had pretty solid ratios despite a low touch count (such is the fate of D-line cutters). I do need to work on my cutting a bit though; several instances where I didn’t get the O going as a first cut or wasn’t doing great generating flow occured that I can remember, though I generally cleared out pretty quickly. I guess working on the cutting, and also just running all-out, too, as that made a big difference in a couple points where I was all fired up.

All in all, pretty good weekend, personally and from a team standpoint. I know some people weren’t happy with their play, but I think ideally we can focus on the positives, that we played well as a team and stepped it up when it counted, rather than get bogged down in the negative of a particular throw or missed catch.

Good
Improvement
Decision-making (in a limited role)
Fired-up play
Mark
Sky-ing in a couple instances

Needs Improvement
Cutting (as always)
D positioning, particularly when tired
Not skying own teammates
Conditioning