Thoughts.

So I spent my summer in Japan, studying the language at a University near Tokyo.

I didn’t exactly have easy access to regular ultimate (I had weekly pickup with a pretty sweet group of international people in Tokyo, but it was a long trek–expensive, too, a good $20 to travel there and back–and there were weekends we traveled and such as a class when I couldn’t go play), so I tried to make up for it with a lot of tossing–a good hour or two every weekday, basically. And when I wasn’t tossing, I was doing reading online about ultimate, with particular emphasis on my throws.

And I had an epiphany about my throws. Really, it’s gotten to the point where I wonder how I ever really threw before I figured out how to really throw.

In any case, I feel like I have a good enough grasp of throwing mechanics that I can almost coach it (well, as well as it can be coached, I guess). Some of the things I figured out about throwing over the summer, listed in order of (I think) importance:

-Wrist snap. It’s important to have it, but what’s really game-changing is the timing of it. A lot of newbie players, I think, throw with their wrist snap drawn out over the course of the throw–that is, you’re starting your snap/release prematurely, resulting in a loss of spin, velocity, and a trend towards instability and the airbounce, all not particularly desirable.
Basically, the way I visualize throwing, it’s all a whipping motion. As far as the wrist is concerned, you want to snap your wrist as hard as you can at the point of release–take all the velocity from your arm motion, multiply it with the wrist snap, and then release the disc. A little hard to follow, maybe, but when applied it’ll improve all your throws.
Along with this, you also have the amount of wrist snap to worry about. The further back the disc and your wrist are, the more power you can transfer into spin and thus the further the disc will fly, generally speaking.

-Grip. As far as having control goes, it really starts with the grip. Most people know better than to use that finger-on-the-rim backhand grip, and the split-finger forehand, but I think a lot of people, especially with forehand, don’t get optimal control from their grip. A good grip is tight, and allows for maximal energy transfer to the disc.
For a backhand, it’s hard to beat the power grip in terms of energy transfer, but because all your fingers are tight against the rim it’s hard to keep the disc in a stable line while throwing, so I prefer keeping the pointer and maybe the middle fingers only bent, and the others are extended along the radius for stability (most of your power comes from the spin around that front finger–this is why the finger-on-rim grip is crap).
For a forehand, there’s definitely a lot you can do with the grip. I see a lot of newer players with forehand grips that are far too loose–you can throw the disc, sure, but because you’re not in control of the disc angle on release you’ve little say in the curvature of the disc. It’s very hard to get touch on a flick with a poor grip. I’m a big fan of gripping the disc tightly by means of the thumb and ring/pinky fingers; the thumb should press so hard that it “dents” the top of the disc slightly, and the bottom fingers can be bent or extended, so long as they clench the disc with the thumb. My grip is good enough to the point that I can remove my two “throwing” fingers from contact with the disc and hold it perpendicular to the ground by strength of my thumb and non-throwing fingers alone. Along with the fingers, where the disc rests in the hand is also important–it should be as far into the recess between the thumb and pointer finger as possible, for a good, tight grip.

-Wrist position. This mostly applies to IO/OI throws. When you want to throw OI, you need to tilt your hand upwards at the wrist, and vice-versa for IO. Along with this, your body position comes into play as well–essentially, your shoulders should be in the plane you want the disc to fly in; if you want the disc to fly IO and you’re throwing a righty flick, you should be dropping your right shoulder so as you throw and your arm comes across your body it’s going from your lower right to your upper left, the same sort of arc you want the IO flick to have.

There’s more to it than that, mostly with regards to hucking, and I’m gonna put it into a separate post.

I rant a lot, but I swear I actually know what I’m talking about…

I love ultimate. It is my passion, it drives me to stay in shape, and all sorts of things besides. But why?

I like ultimate a lot for one main reason (everything else that comes is a result of getting involved with the sport or a corollary of this): I know I can be successful with it.

Ultimate’s a great, competitive sport, mind you, but it’s really not even close to any other given sport I could do in terms of reaching the upper tier; you have athletes training for most of their day to compete for one day or over the course of several days every several months. That’s some serious dedication. Ultimate has people who train simply by scrimmaging every few weeks, with perhaps a few bits of “lifting” or “training” thrown in for good measure that are able to perform quite well.
Would I have liked to been blessed with the body of a fish like Michael Phelps? Yeah, but instead I got this short, small-handed, small-footed thing, which doesn’t even float without something keeping it up (most people float naturally; I sink).
Would I have liked to have been a Steve Prefontaine sort of runner, driven to train and compete at the highest level? Yeah, but I’m nowhere near that motivated to run great distances every single day, and nowhere near good enough to run for Dartmouth’s team.
Would I have liked to have been a world-class triple jumper, hurdler, or sprinter? Yeah, but again, I lack the requisite build to project as something exceptional.

I want to be great at something, particularly a sport; I was exceptional in my high school, but unfortunately I hit a wall of sorts advancing to college (graduating a year early probably didn’t help my case, athletically speaking, either). I needed to diversify, find something else I slotted into better, and ultimate is that thing.

I’d already played a bit in my high school years, summer camp, summer league, so I could already play a bit when I got here at Dartmouth, which gave me a leg on a lot of people. And I’m a good athlete; most schools, the best athletes do their chosen DI sport, so I stand out in that regard as well.

And I can continue to stand out as an athlete in this sport. Unlike my other chosen sports, you have all sorts of skill levels and athletes being competitive, which bodes well for my future–there is no single prototypical ultimate player.

I’m hoping for great things, and planning to work towards them. If I work twice as hard as the next guy, I’m going to be that much better when it counts, I’m going to get better that much sooner, and I’ll continue to elevate my game until I find a ceiling.

Right now there’s no limit in sight…

So the Aness is having tryouts this week with Purple Valley coming up.

Should prove interesting; it’ll be a first taste of sorts for the freshmen of really good, intense play, and once the cuts start being made, we’ll have a pretty good idea of how the team’s shaping up for the coming season.

This year is the beginning. Last year, there were a couple hard decisions for the captains as far as who to take and who to leave, but it could be argued were they not playing favorites to an extent they would’ve had a few more roster spots to fill. I’m not saying that’s bad or good, but this year pretty much every spot will have to be won. Obviously you have your returning talents, but there are far more people on the bubble than spots on the A-team, and after that even you have people who think they’re on the bubble (and likely would’ve been in previous years) but aren’t even that close. We’re going to have a very competitive team, in many senses of the word.

Things are only going to improve, too; I forsee a continuing trend towards awesome freshmen and hard-working freshmen who make themselves threats in a year+ contributing to a program rivaling the likes of Brown, where they have a B-team capable of beating all but the best college teams in the region.

In any case, it’ll be interesting to see what calls the captains make. I don’t envy their position, but that it’ll be so hard to make final calls on who makes the team is a sign of great things to come.

Just gotta keep working towards that final goal. Nationals…

Well, the Red Sox got eliminated earlier.

Damn. Just not the same; we’re not as deep or as strong as last year’s squad.

But look out for next year, we’re freeing up payroll, and definitely going to be working in some talented youngsters by summer. Gonna be establishing a team to be reckoned with for several years to come…

Go Angels! beat those Yanks!

Dartmouth’s getting more and more wired every day.

Today, we moved our fuel cell information to the blogosphere. Interesting shift, we’ll see how it takes with the team.

I was talking with Socks the other day and we were just commenting about how much progress the program here at Dartmouth has made over the past several years. We had our bid to natties in ’02, and we’ve only continued to improve since, though allocation of bids means we don’t always have the luxury of a third bid to natties.

With any luck, that won’t matter this year, or for the next several years. But I am getting ahead of myself; we haven’t really done jack shit yet, we certainly need to work hard and continually push ourselves and strive for excellence.

But yeah. You look at the fuel cell system; this is a very new thing for us, only been around for a little over a year now. It’s certainly not perfect yet, but that it’s still being developed and can be improved upon is exciting to me, because I get to be a part of that process (or at least bear witness to it).

But it’s a wonderful step in the right direction for Dartmouth Ultimate; just look at it. By having fuel cells, it already allows for the following:
-gets us working together fairly consistently, and with a standard lifting program (which is quite well-designed for ultimate’s essentials)
-provides a means to organize intra-team competition–3v3 in the winter, cell boot competitions, cells combining for scrimmages, whatever.
-provides a context for intra-team competition, however arbitrary–nothing like being able to claim your cell as having the best stats of the team, or having the hardest workers/best hecklers/whatever.
-acts as a filter for tryouts in the summer/fall, as you get to track a given individual’s progress in the context of their cell.
-gets more people involved. People who are in cells have an additional identity and group on the team, which (depending on cell dynamics I suppose) provides a nice group of people for anybody, particularly A-team callup freshmen, to get to know.
-gets more people in leadership roles. It’s too soon to say, but the cell system would definitely seem to be a valuable means to evaluate leadership ability in addition to fitness.

Things I’d like to see it develop to encompass:
-development. It makes a lot of sense to me to get freshmen assigned to cells at some point and having a specific set of people tasked with helping these freshmen get acclimated at dartmouth, on the team, and help them improve as a player, as opposed to the overwhelming resource of the entire team, or the captains.
This isn’t just restricted to freshmen, though. I feel like, especially since we have the blogs, it’d be a great forum for communication on any number of ultimate-related issues, particularly things to help people with their game.
-play-making. I think this is already showing to a point, but I think it’d be cool to have particular cells work on particular plays/play with each other a ton to get some great synergy with cellmates going. It could make a big difference to have that level of comfort, but I suppose this just comes with playing with the team in general as well. I just think it’d be cool to call “red sox + mideast” as a line, having your golden cut or 3/4, whatever, involving members from the same cell who know each other inside and out.

Okay, so I really only had one legitimate thing I want to see with the fuel cells. B-team fuel cells fall under “development” as well; that’s a whole ‘nother thing, it definitely has great potential as a concept, there’s just the matter of really implementing it effectively.

Today’s practice went pretty well for me. I was late because of work (and will continue to be late because of it), but showed up in time for some cup drill and scrimmaging.

It’s really nice to get back into zone play again. Not that it went particularly well for me (only played in it a couple points, and quick turnovers led to a regression to man O and D pretty quickly), but it’s good to know we’ll be able to start throwing it in games now.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the way I played. It was really really great to have my foot more or less back up to speed after cutting it at the end of my H-croo tenure a couple weeks ago; cutting, planting, and all the other things one would use the ball of the foot in were all normal. I played some very solid D, generating a couple turnovers highlighted by a point block, and also tracked down some mistake throws from the O as well. One thing I need to work on a bit, or at least, something I need to be aware of, is playing deep in the zone. I don’t have a ton of experience doing it, and I got beat by Timmer deep today, not because he was taller than me, but because I gave him position behind me. I definitely have to keep that in mind if I’m gonna be effective at that position, but it’s not of great concern, since my niche really is in the cup, running around and reading the O like a book to shut down their game.

My O, while not my strong suit, wasn’t atrocious. I must have turfed the disc three times on the same throw–low-release, around backhand. I subbed out and played around with it for a while so I realized what I was doing wrong (wrist angle was too low; with the wrist angle higher, the disc rises upon release instead of failing); I feel pretty good about the decision to make the throw when I did, I just had poor execution, so I’m not feeling too bad about that. I was cutting very well; I don’t know if maybe just having shown up shortly before scrimmaging meant I had more juice in the tank than the rest or what, but I got open in all the right places a lot. And generally speaking my throws were very passable, lot of good passes up the lane. I definitely didn’t hold onto the disc for too lot; I probably erred on being a little too fast, which I’ll likely hone as the season progresses. I mostly did a lot of cutting, particularly midding/fill, which I like a lot.

The team’s O as a whole ran very smoothly. It’s really nice to see the freshmen coming along with their games. I’m really excited for them and their potential, they really don’t realize how great they can be. A year is a long time, and you can improve damn fast with the right attitude. Just gotta make sure we give them the best tools in order to make themselves as good as they can be.

A fine art, though few view it as such. A more common view for many could be any of the following: Nothing new, A sign of the young, overzealous college player, something wonderful, something dangerous, the list goes on. It’s so many things all at once, and I think it’s a marvelous tool to have in one’s repetoire, if used correctly.

But first, a short how-to.

Put simply, a bid is falling with style. Because one wants to reach a disc which is too low, moving too fast at one’s side, or just generally out of reach whilst standing, the bid is used as a means to force the body to move in such a way that the disc is within reach.
Sounds simple, but there are a number of mental blocks and physical blocks that prevent it from being instinctive for most.

The budding bid-happy college player goes through several phases before really reaching the point where the bid is practical for the player and in-game (there may be more, but these are the phases I’ve gone through):

1) Oh man, laying out is so awesome. One is in awe of the bid, and wants to have it. This phase is generally typified by lots of comments when somebody bids, audibly enough for several nearby players to hear, in the hopes that conversation on the topic will yield some insight not yet afforded to the budding bidder.

2) Research. Perhaps a foray into the internet, perhaps simply through Q&A with one who’s been there, one comes to understand some of what goes into a bid–see the disc, know you need to layout, layout.

3) Failed attempts. This could range from wanting to bid but only being able to get on one’s knees before falling, thinking the bid is necessary but hostering it in a given situation, or perhaps as far as jumping and falling willy-nilly at whatever is within range, which is the most dangerous as it can result in poor landings and serious injury. All these things have in common is that it gets a player ready for real-time layouts; the comfort zone is continually expanded.

4) Success. Whether it be simply while tossing, for a D in the zone, or an offensive bid, whatever, there comes a moment where one finds success. One doesn’t necessarily need to catch the disc or get a hand on it to have a successful bid; generally, one has the realization after it happens–holy crap, I just flew.

5) Bid-happy. The budding bidder is at a dangerous point; with the newfound bidding ability, it becomes all too easy to do it whenever one can, as practice/showing off. This leads to many heckles of “gratuitous”, but also is an injury risk. Laying out is not a painless thing; it really requires a mind-over-matter sort of mentality. It’s definitely possible to hurt one’s hips and shoulders with improper form, particularly if repeated, and even with proper form (absorbing the impact with one’s torso) repeated collision can lead to a lot of arm scrapes (I’ve got perpetual scars on my right arm by the elbow) and, I find, at least, back pain due to the unnatural body position absorbing the impact requires.

6) Refinement. Once the concept of “laying out” has been integrated into one’s game, one seeks to improve the usefulness of the bid–laying out at head-height as opposed to foot-height, getting a full extension at full speed, improving timing, etc. This comes from experience–the bid-happy phase, while dangerous, also (hopefully) provides insight as to when it’s appropriate in a game to take the risk of a bid and when you can’t afford to give your man two unmarked seconds after a failed defensive bid–but also comes just from examining one’s game. I find visualization of in-game situations to be very beneficial here; picturing yourself in a number of different situations and getting the layout D in X situation, or thinking better and holstering in Y situation, it all becomes that much more instinctive in real life if you’ve thought it out beforehand.

After that, I don’t know. I’m still refining my choosing of when to bid, as my layout D vs. layout attempts ratio is nowhere near where I want it.

Not the clearest of how-tos, but hopefully you can glean some insight out of all this.

This is an extremely important concept, for any athlete of surpassing ability. It’ll be described in all sorts of ways: execution, having the game slow down for you, being locked in, making it all look easy, whatever.

It’s all just a fancy way of phrasing the reality that the athlete in question has honed their craft to a point where it’s no longer necessary to have to focus on every little detail of their game, and instead can channel all their mental energy into focusing on the situation. This is why major league baseball players spend hours in the batting cage, tinkering with mechanics–get it to a point where it’s second nature, and then you can focus on just hitting the ball, not your left foot position, your grip on the bat, all of that extraneous stuff comes naturally, and for an instant, everything clicks.

That’s why you practice your throws, time after time,–so when you’re on the field during a game and you need to get that forehand huck off under pressure, you can focus on breaking your mark, rather than breaking your mark while stepping out, making sure your grip on the disc is correct, and keeping your wrist position from turning the disc over too much.

But to just generalize with “this comes merely from doing X over and over” would be misleading. It’s not that simple; it requires loads of focus and deadication in practice. Even when you’re just tossing, you have to make sure you’re reinforcing good habits, getting out, getting low, hitting your target in the chest–every time. If you practice without focus, you’ll pay for it in game situations.

Once you’ve applied your focus thusly, it becomes a matter of making it instinctive. If you’ve practiced good form for 1000 low-release forehand throws, you should be able to merely concentrate on your target, and how you want your throw to be while throwing, and have the form come naturally.

Success at the highest level absolutely requires this sort of neuromuscular coordination, to be able to respond with the correct movement and ability as quickly as possible at precisely the right moment.