Thoughts.

For those of you who’ve been away from RSD of late, it’s worth noting that Jim Biancolo has thrown together a Greasemonkey script, “Toadless,” that filters out some 70% of RSD, for better or worse (I imagine more than 70% of RSD readers would claim for better).

Check his guide for full instructions.

In response to my post on scorekeeping, Chad commented saying he was working on an iphone app to help with score and especially stat keeping.

The beta is now good to go, and he’s looking for testers/feedback. Directions below:

I’ve finally finished a beta of my ultiStats iPhone app. I’m contacting you because I thought you might be interested in helping me out by testing it.

If you’d like to help, I need your device ID. Follow the directions in the paragraph entitled “Adding Beta Testers” in the following link and send me the code (I think it’s 40 digits).

I’ll then send you an e-mail with the application attached and some instructions.

I’m looking for you to find bugs in the program, suggest design changes that might make it easier to use or look better, or even suggest features that I have not considered that you might like to see.

Installing future bug fixes may require you to delete your database, losing all of your stored statistics. Please do not rely on these early releases for long-term stat tracking.

There are many features that I would still like to add, but I need to get this first version out.

If you don’t have an iphone/ipod touch but you know someone who does that might be interested, feel free to forward this to them.

Thanks for your help,
-Chad

His email can be found in the comments of the aforementioned post.

Quite a lot of commentary to see there.

Yours truly has a long treatise up there; I’d caution against taking a lot of the stuff as gospel though.

My methods for generating those percentages you see was a little different than simply comparing % of answers in each group: to try to control for the different sample sizes (as well as respondent sizes) in each group (whether it’s nationals vs. no-nationals or coaches vs. no-coaches) I aggregated response counts and divided by total number of teams, or players if the question entailed roster counts…essentially creating an average rate for either group, and then looked at differences between these rates. I’d encourage caution to the tune of discounting anything below 10% difference or so as being less significant, but some of the differences are really prominent and that’s the stuff I keyed in on in my opening paragraphs as they’re likely significant.

I worked on this all a few months ago…was channeling my college stats pretty hard but converting the survey responses into something SPSS would be able to work with for rigorous analysis proved beyond my time or pleasure.

All that said, if you want to take a look at the original data set (caution: I didn’t make the sheets with prettiness/usability in mind: probably best reserved for people who enjoy playing with excel) you can download the .xlsx (or .xls if you’re incompatible) here.
UPDATE: I’ve been informed that the data is not for sharing, at the lack of consent of the team captains.You might ask the Huddle for permission if you’re interested in working with the data.

I’d love to see somebody with time, desire, and means hit the data hard(perhaps some of the other Huddle contributors already have and it’s not apparent from their commentary), and I’m sure the Huddle would too.

Been spending some time on the ultitalk.com forums lately (searching for something outside of the RSD monotony), and wrote this in response to a question about training. You might be interested to download the file, if your team is lacking a lifting program or you’re an individual looking for something to work from.

Caution: one size does not fit all. Train smart.

Without further ado:

Genie,

You might be interested in a general lifting program Dartmouth Ultimate followed a few years back–it’s a general strength program, designed not to be too technical (good for a college ultimate team when some people have no lifting experience), and incorporating some plyos and single-leg work to help prep for ultimate play.

The program is designed to be done in six weeks scaling up the weight as you scale down the reps, with three days a week (likely MWF, though TThS would probably work too) and about an hour-hour and a half to commit to working out, depending on how quickly you work. It also tapers down so that you should be at a relative peak by the end of the program (you can cycle back to the start if you want to).

For the record, we always spread the program over 9 weeks (with practice it was too much to lift three days a week), which fit our pre-season winter training leading up to spring break very nicely. The first year we started this program the A team had no significant injuries in the spring season (which was a big difference from prior years, but sample size skepticism should apply here).

My own impression, having followed the program for at least two seasons and maybe another off-season as well; it’s a solid all-around program that will help get you in game shape. It’s not going to make you into a stud by itself, and it’s not going to kill you either (unless you try to do so to yourself very hard).

I’ve uploaded the .xls (excel) file here for download.

Some descriptions are on the second page (book) of the file. [edit: the current download link is an older version without descriptions added - however, the internet is a great source of descriptions and video!]

I’d recommend throwing in some sprinting/conditioning work to go with as others have suggested here (I would recommend against straight “cardio” in favor of good old-fashioned intense interval work in the range of 100-200m, perhaps starting with 400s if you have the willpower and really feel like your endurance is lacking). I don’t buy not being able to do a lot for endurance in 6 weeks–people have gotten “in shape” in less time with enough hard work. (Which is, incidentally, the Most Important Thing with training. Do you want it enough?)

Incidentally, I subscribe to the theory that it’s less “endurance” and more “recovery” that gives you staying power in ultimate–there’s all sorts of breaks on-field, between stoppages from calls to your man just chilling in the stack, and you get to rest between points too–train to go hard when you’re on, and recover quickly when you’re not.