Thoughts.

Check out some details on Dr. Thomas Crawford.

Sounds like he’s got some great experience growing an online presence and as a former US Olympic Committee member (Director of Coaching) he’s certainly got experience working with organizations for sports similar to ours.

Time will tell how he turns out, but at a glance he seems like a solid selection by the UPA!

Things the sideline(s–don’t forget to split!) can do:

• Cheer
• Watch (for patterns, for weaknesses, for successes, for clues. For example, Pete’s defender is breathing heavier by the second–yell at him to step up and punish the mismatch!)
• Cue (echoing or initiating mark switches on a force middle defense or dynamic mark adjustments, etc.)
• Guide (the old veteran teaches the young rookie where to stand and when to cut from the wing position in the zone. The captain directs the stack to move closer to the disc after a deep pull in the endzone)
• Recover–both oneself (stud cutter needs some gatorade-water after a couple points in a row) and others (bench-riding rookie brings said stud cutter water on the line so he doesn’t crash playing a couple points)
• Bring the energy level up–see cheering.

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Do you think about your step when you’re throwing?

Not just the mechanics of it (more on that in a later post), but WHERE you step to.

Cara Crouch’s post for the Huddle’s Team USA issue alludes to “throw[ing] from a plane that is not parallel to [the mark's]” for better throwing, and I thought it was important enough to flesh out a bit more.

There are two extremes to your pivot planes; In practice, your pivot* will of course wind up somewhere between the two. The planes are relative to your intended throwing direction, e.g. the dump, upfield:
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The goal will be to have new content every Tuesday at a minimum. This should hopefully give me enough time after weekend tourneys to write up a recap. If I’m doing more than Tuesdays just, Thursday would be another content day, with the rest, likely Mon or Fri, for odds and ends (links about town, blog news posts like this).

Posts will go up at 8AM eastern time when I’m on schedule, as opposed to the prior midnight slot.

In the kuru game at Tajima I was covering a pretty energetic cutter at one point; primary cutter, he cut in after a few stutter steps. Being right with him (didn’t bite on the stutter), and given that I was forcing him under and could see the thrower, I was in a position to

• Make a play on a throw to him and
• See that there was, in fact, no chance he was going to be thrown to…the thrower had already turned to look dump.

While he hauled ass on his under cut, I cruised, well under control. He followed this cut with a clear to the break side–again, the thrower was not looking here (I believe there was a dump to the open side in fact)–no need to respect the cut. Again he hauled, while I cruised.

Two lessons here.
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As of this posting, I’ve said my final farewells at my schools here (FYI–I’ve been teaching in Japan this past year), and currently it’s a whirlwind until I arrive back home in the US on the 24th (and still a whirlwind after that as I’ve got a wedding to attend and Med School starting within 10 days of my return).

I’ve got a post scheduled for tomorrow, but following that I may need to shift to a more irregular posting pattern. This mind doesn’t stop running though, so no guarantees. I WILL keep updating; if I run out of steam on general ultimate skills posts, I will at least be keeping tabs on the NE college and club scene once I’m back coaching/playing in it, respectively. (Incidentally, anybody looking for a writer to report on the NE open [college] scene should give me a holler).

In other news, I made some more minor changes to the site layout:
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Congrats to team USA on bringing home the gold! I can only imagine how great it must feel.

The Huddle has a great link roundup of all the related info, with pictures. Looks like they updated the site’s regular picture rotation with World Games shots too; as good an excuse as any to go back through the archives!

Made a 2-hour trek (hey, a resonably close tournament!) to Tajima for the…perhaps 7th? iteration of the tournament.

Sadly, I could only stick around for part of the first day–myself and a few other Tottori JETs had to book it back home for our sayonara party that evening*–but in addition to being very nostalgic (I had been once before in 2005, when I was studying abroad near Tokyo), it was a lot of fun!
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