Thoughts.

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.

There’s a lot to it, I think, but the principal factors are psychological.

There are a whole number of different thoughts I have on this, all of which I think have merit:

-Getting pumped up for the big game, not intimidated by it.

-Keeping things positive, even when things are a bit off or luck goes awry.

-Have players in their most comfortable roles to ensure success.

-Replicating the same game-time conditions to help ease pre-game stress. (Have a consistent pre-game routine)

-Visualization is key. See yourself being successful in your endeavors before you ever step on the field.

-Train hard, play hard. It’s a lot easier to tell yourself you can outrun, outplay team X if you’ve been busting your balls all winter long getting in shape and working on your skills.

-Stay cool. Don’t force things just because it’s the big game.

-Don’t think, do. I’ll elaborate on this sometime in an entirely new post.

Lots of growth at the high school level means lots of colleges are going to see explosions in the level of talent they get from their freshmen.

But what does it mean? How do you get the most out of these guys? I certainly don’t know; I’m just a sophomore. But it’s definitely one of the more relevant questions facing my team at Dartmouth, I think, because as we’re currently structured the learning is good for the inexperienced, and certainly helpful to initiate the freshmen into how things are done at Dartmouth, but I feel like there’s a lot more potential to help players develop and mature even at this early stage.

Right now it seems very person-dependent; a freshman needs to be proactive, picking the brains of veterans about X or Y, which is useful, but not universally applicable to everybody. Pick one veteran, he says A, but another offers B as a more practical alternative. If you don’t talk to both, maybe you wind up learning how to throw a decent forehand but you never really worked on your grip so you wind up without the necessary control for a reliable IO.

I’m certainly not knocking the veteran presence; on the contrary, it’s one of the most beneficial ways to improve, because the veterans tend to have already experienced and thought out what you’re asking about and can save you a lot of time wondering what the ideal dump is simply by telling you what tends to work best in a given situation, based on their experience. I just feel like it’s too diluted, or rather, that as a veteran, the tendancy for people who aren’t captains or asked about a specific topic is to withold information and not volunteer one’s thoughts.

I’m getting a little outside the scope of what I meant to discuss, so I’ll leave elaboration on that topic for later.

So what do you do with your studly, but not-yet-college-level freshmen? It seems there are two routes you can take, really, and I’ve got my opinion on each:

-Put them on the A-team, but have them ride the bench more often than not, only playing them regularly when the game’s not on the line. This makes sense on a lot of levels–you get to experience the big show, you get to hang around lots of talented and experienced players, and you get to see the game the way it (hopefully) should be played. But at the same time, while you get your freshman a lot of exposure, the limited playtime would seem to be a substantial tradeoff, particularly for your handler-types who just aren’t up to snuff yet.
You can certainly have a successful team with this model, that’s not the issue; I just wonder if there isn’t a more effective way to develop players, or more directly, a way to get them more playtime and experience while at the same time allowing them to get the same level of exposure.

-Put them on the B-team, where they’re studs but at a lower level of competition. This isn’t altogether bad, I don’t think, but I’m a bit biased since that was my situation last year. You get a ton of play time, which is a great perk, and playing in a lower-pressure, B-level environment provides much greater opportunity for risk-taking and, I think, developing as a handler. Particularly since I was captaining the team last year, I was always one of a handful of “people in charge” who structured practice, and coordinated the offensive and defensive strategies, which really helped broaden my horizons as far as understanding how the game works and what makes a successful team.
I think it can really make for great development, particularly for the mid-tier talents, as the competition is relatively decent, but not overwhelming, really forcing you to push your game. And it provides a great opportunity to instill the sort of play style you’d like to have on the A-team, in terms of strategy, plays, offensive and defensive sets, etc, with a few limitations (like the fact that most of the solid handlers are at A-level, making deep play a bit riskier at a B-level).
But of course, there are limitations here as well. How do you challenge your top-tier talents? It’s nice to be a stud, but it just makes it harder to deal when players of equal or greater talent come along, and dealing with B-team defenses as opposed to aggressive, A-team ones can lead to laziness in handling and cutting.

So how do you deal with this? The current team model, calling up freshmen who are either exceptionally experienced or your athletic types who can run down hucks and dish out Ds, seems to work fairly well in terms of team success. But one might wonder if they could be better served spending the year (or at least part of the year) playing B-level, where the stakes are lower and what you can get away with is greater, encouraging development more (I think), but only to a point.

It’s an interesting choice, for certain, and I think as a captain who makes these decisions, one needs to weigh team success and individual talent and development carefully.

…or rather, merely the desire to stay awake and a bit of excitement to work with what I’ve created.

I started keeping an “ultimate diary” of sorts over the summer as I started to read lots of ultimate blogs, and used it to pool a lot of the knowledge I found most relevant or useful for the purposes of improving my game, or helping make the team as a whole better.

I’m really excited for the team this year, by the way. Dartmouth just keeps getting better and better…part of what drew me to the school was that, unlike Brown (the school I turned down to come here), which already had a well-established, successful program, Dartmouth’s was on the cusp. They’d gone to natties, but they weren’t considered the powerhouse that Brown is. I figured that if I went to Brown, I’d be consigned to B-teamness for much longer than I’d want, whereas if I came to Dartmouth, I’d have a shot at A-team from the get-go; I’d be able to have a meaningful impact, in other words.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I was merely one in a crop of unusually strong freshmen. While I came into Dartmouth knowing full well that I wanted to play ultimate and make it central to my experience (why lie, it was an important part of my evaluation of schools), a lot of people showed up with a bit of disc experience or none altogether but they were encouraged to come out by their upperclassmen trip leaders or whatever, and they happened to be athletic or have pretty good game sense or any other sort of trait that puts you a step ahead of the average ultimate recruit maybe as early as 5 years ago.

I wound up co-captaining the B-team last year, which was a great experience. While I was definitely pretty disappointed over not making the A-team right out of the gate, it definitely served several purposes for me; firstly, it was a reality check–I’m not the shit. Related to this, it gave me something to prove–”need to work on my defense, huh? I’ll show you defense. I’ll make it clear you made a mistake keeping me down.” And I worked on my defense like a mofo last year. Now I’ve turned that which was orignally perceived as a weakness into a source of pride–nothing like creating turns by baiting the layout D, or skying the shit out of my man because he really didn’t have enough separation to get the disc before me.

In any case, I’m playing D-line for the A-team for sure this year. I’m also a VP, which is great; I feel like I’ve been empowered to really have a say in the development of our program here, which is just the opportunity I was looking for, though I might not have known it when I first came here.

That’s what really excites me for ultimate this year, and in years to come: our potential. The 09s we have here are looking great. As early as last spring I’d envisioned this sort of scenario–continuing to get more and more talented freshmen classes, more solid players, boosting the competitiveness of the team exponentially. As opposed to having to develop for a couple years before maturing into a game-changing stud as a junior or senior, we’re going to have more freshmen come in already able to make a huge difference, and more sophomores come off of a year on the B-team with skills and game-sense ready for the big stage.

I love baseball, so I tend to relate lots of life to it; in the case of our program, I don’t think it’s too unfeasable to envision a college team similar in many respects to a big-league club, where you have your experienced veterans and exceptional talents in the majors, on-the-cusp talents developing in AAA, and all sorts of potential stewing just below that in AA, or in ultimate terms, having a great A-team, a rock-solid B-team, and possibly enough players to field a capable C-team.

That all makes sense in terms of numbers, with the way current trends are going (seemingly each year’s class brings out more and more freshmen, and more stick around for the long haul), but what I think will be most critical to our program in the long run is how we develop players. Like the Atlanta Braves, which is perhaps the best model of sports success, top-to-bottom, in history, having talented players doesn’t mean shit if you don’t coach well enough for them to develop properly, and you don’t put them in a positive, winning environment to breed success.

Anybody can get a bunch of athletes with skills on a field. What determines the ultimate (no pun intended) winner hinges more on the team’s ability to execute and perform up to potential, which is certainly hard, and requires a positive environment and lots of leadership, and of course the drive to succeed. One must have the desire to work hard towards the final goal, and must make sure to use the most effective means of training in order to get the best results.

Then it just comes down to performing when it counts, and my opinons on that actually can wait for another post. I’ve got lots of things I want to talk about.