Thoughts.

Simple cue, significant results.

Get your weight set on your throwing (non-pivot) foot before you throw.

To put it a little differently, you should be balanced with your weight on your throwing foot during your release. I like to cue a balanced “finish” position (stepped-out, at full extension or what-have-you) on the follow-through, as it encourages stability throughout the whole throwing motion.
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Simple question. What’s your answer when you’re:

• Tossing with your buddy at the park?
• Warming up for your third game on Sunday?
• Walking to work?
• Getting up to go to the bathroom?
• Standing on the line waiting for the pull?
• On the way home after practice?

If the answer is ever “nothing,” you’ve got room to improve your improvement. Better your better.

What are you working on today–right now–to make yourself better?

Sorry for the lack of substantial content lately; first week of classes. Been taking a page out of Seth Godin’s writing of late; working on brevity and a bit of thought provocation, which is convenient since it takes less time to ask questions than answer them (admittedly the pet peeve that leads to the long drawn-out posts I often write–I’ll get back there in due time, hopefully with more read-able content).

I sent this out as part of a longer email to the team today. Good goal-setting makes a world of difference in any aspect of your life, not just ultimate.

Set measurable and attainable goals to work towards. It’s easy to rally yourself to work hard for a few days, a week, maybe even a couple months, but you want to be working towards some ultimate (pun intended) goal. Working without goals is journeying without a map–you’ll get somewhere, but perhaps not where you want to be, and certainly not as swiftly as you could’ve.

No doubt you already have some goals in mind (e.g., “improve my throws,” “get into better shape,” etc). I want you to break those goals down into more bite-sized chunks. Thinking in broad strokes is good, but taking the time to design details will pay off. If your big goal is to improve your throws, commit to making 50 passes every day, or throwing for 10 minutes every day. Instead of working the broad scope of all of your throws, really hone in and focus on putting touch on your step-out flat forehand until you get comfortable with it. Don’t just work to get “in shape.” Work towards adding an extra 20 pounds to your squat, or adding 2 inches to your vertical, or shaving a half-second off of your 100 time. PLEASE blitz me if you’re having trouble quantifying your goals.

Write your goals down. Put them somewhere you’ll see them every day, as a constant reminder of what you’re working towards. Set goals that are reasonable enough that you’ll complete them in time. Set and maintain 3 process goals–3 things entirely in your control and entirely doable (e.g., “throw for 20 minutes every day for two weeks”)–and to continue to set more ambitious goals as you meet your old ones (“throw for 1 hour every day for two weeks”). It’s important that your goals have a timeframe–this will guide your work and provide some motivation. If “add 20 pounds to my squat” is a good goal, “add 20 pounds to my squat by next month” is great. Even if you don’t meet the goal, you’re still working hard and gaining knowledge of what you’re capable of.

I’ve written about goal setting before, give the “goal setting” tag a look if you’re interested in more depth.

This is a fairly old article, but one that bears continual revisiting.

Researchers looked at perception and elite performance and found all sorts of clues that the elite see things more clearly and decisively (and can therefore respond earlier) than novices (I’d suggest Blink if you’re looking for a more in-depth treatment of the matter). They also found that things like field sense are absolutely not innate, and suggest that free, unstructured play is key to getting the experience and developing a broad, flexible sense as opposed to a narrow-minded one. Check out this blog post for a bit on the difference between explicit and implicit learning–remove coaching and especially structure from the equation, and you tend towards the implicit–given that something like “field sense” is rarely taught explicitly (if I asked you to explain “field sense” to me–what to look for, when, what leads you to make one decision over another–would you be able to do it? In a way I could understand and apply?), you need to go the other way.

As frustrating as low-level, amoeba play (or loosely organized summer league, etc.) can be, or as much as you might think your disc-using non-ultimate games (I’m thinking of boot in particular, but schtick counts too in its own way) are not going to help you improve, recognize the opportunity inherent in these games. Try throws and strategies you wouldn’t normally. Experiment with new positioning and decision-making processes. Expand your repertoire and your mind.

What sorts of games do you play to grow?

Was away playing this weekend–recap coming later this week (short version: ’twas awesome).

In the meantime, Vern Gambetta is to the point (and on point): are you happy being good, or are you driven to strive for greatness?

If you’re content, you’re useless. What have you done to get better today?

Means practicing them ALL THE TIME.

If you’re trying to improve your pivot, even your casual tossing around should always include a good, hard pivot. If you’re trying to improve your catching, you should ALWAYS be focusing on attacking the disc when it comes to you.

The key here is to focus–if you’re pivoting lackadaisically when you toss, what makes you think you’ll be able to suddenly pull it together when you’re trapped on the sideline and trying to dump it in a game?

This all harkens back to honing your instincts using deliberate practice–it’s not enough only to toss, or only to run…you need to invest your attention in it. Whether you’re consciously evaluating yourself or not is something of a question (you should not, however, be judging–i.e., “Man, I suck” or “Wow, I’m perfefct,” as either is distracting, a focus on result over process. More on process here), but your body and mind will not be able to make the necessary adjustments, or reinforce the good habits, if it’s not taking in sufficient amounts of information.

So if you’re trying to reinforce, say, a good step out on your throws, you need to be paying attention to stepping out–this doesn’t mean a microscopic focus on the minutae (your body can sense and sort those things out on its own to some extent), but merely that you have the intent to step out, and the intent to do it every time. Take this intent, and track your throws–do they go where you want? Keep focusing on what you want to happen until your body makes it so–or, if you’re a tinkerer, keep focusing on the adjustments you want to make until you likewise have agreement between what you expect and what you get. Repetition reinforces habits. Repetition of poor form or lazy mechanics will reinforce the same…develop good form through attention, and reinforce it with continued, deliberate effort.

Jeters hits on an important notion for developing your repertoire as a cutter (and, by extension, with any other skill involving adjustments), namely the need to develop a decision flowchart to guide your in-game actions (and especially reactions).

Imagine this. You initiate your cut from the horizontal stack, at maximum speed, in the direction of a deep strike. Now, what is your response if …

• … another cutter strikes deep.
• … your defender doesn’t commit, but a poaching defender is in a good position.
• … you reverse your cut but find that your lane has been taken.

… and the list goes on.

What eventually becomes “instinct” on the field is honed through lots of trial and error or prior thought. (Stop thinking when you play).

To aid that sort of thought process (which is to say, to aid visualization), I’d offer that these sorts of deliberations are exactly why I started drawing up cutting schematics in the margins of my notebooks, and I’d also offer an older post on Threat Points^TM for a bit of this thought process with crappy MS paint schematic to boot (that notion is one I plan to revisit and put more succinctly at some point, as it’s a powerful one).

• The Huddle’s latest issue gets at a question (defensive matchups) I’d considered a while back; Seth Wiggins rephrases my thoughts far better than I ever could. The answer absolutely depends on a whole host of other factors, which only makes the question itself more important.

  It’s especially relevant in the context of teams with very lopsided talent pools (your generic 1- or 2-stud college team); you probably want that stud in the backfield to help deep/with poaching regardless of what the other team’s assets are, for instance.

  I also think all the authors neglect one other point in determining defensive matchups: what about on the turn? If your best defender is your best cutter/handler on the turn, and their best cutter/handler turns out to be their best defender, do you really want to hamstring the D’s offense by turning around the matchups like that? There’s also a lot to be said for rotating fresh legs on the other team’s stud and then running that stud into the ground on the turn. Ultimate is always played both ways.

• Open Ultimate. You might remember Dan Cogan-Drew as the guy behind the videopapers on ultimate skills–this appears to be a large outgrowth of that.

  I haven’t taken the time to investigate fully yet but the idea–creating a space for online “courses” in ultimate–seems worthwhile. I’m a little skeptical of getting a full team to use resources I’d post there, were I a captain or coach, but it might be a nice tool to have in the box, especially if the site has longevity (enhancing institutional memory is, I think, a key to creating an ultimate program instead of the occasional one-hit wonder).

• Via Fireworks, a nice bit from Dr. Goldberg about dealing with cheaters. Dr. G gave the keynote at the inaugural Ultimate Coaches and Players Conference, and his lessons then have largely inspired what I believe about performance psychology now–his post alludes very succinctly to these beliefs.
• More writing about elite performance, luck, and deliberate practice. My friend Mr. Crew (who is single and has a huge…flick) makes the excellent suggestion that perhaps it’s not so much the inherent advantage of prior experience that lets players with HS experience thrive in college, but simply that their extra background gets them more attention and mentoring from earlier when they get to college, enabling faster/greater progress.

  Read, and think about how you might inspire, mentor, and motivate your players/peers to strive for more and work harder.

  Relatedly: this is on my to-read list for the near future.

• More on how effort trumps talent. I love Gladwell’s stuff–if you haven’t already, I still very heartily endorse Outliers (as well as Blink–I must confess I haven’t read The Tipping Point yet, though I am familiar with the premise).

  Where are the inefficiencies in ultimate? DoG seemed to hit on one in the ’90s when they started emphasizing possession, but today’s game seems to have evolved beyond that somewhat. Perhaps we’ll just keep laughing at Frank’s motion offense until, finally, an underdog team embraces it an dominates. But perhaps its glory will be fleeting, written off as a fluke or too much work, and remain as well-used as the full-court press in basketball.