Thoughts.

What’s on my radar lately:

• For those who are unfamiliar, ultimatehandbook.com is a solid resource for the beginner ultimate player (I remember reading it during my frosh year in ’04-’05). Their flash plays are a cool and innovative way to teach, and they’ve finally opened up the resources for public use!

I’ve no experience with flash, but I’ve been wanting to play with this for a while and plan to try my hand at creating some plays over the coming months.

• For those who were unaware (i.e.,don’t use RSS), Dartmouth’s Mr. Kim (no, not the new president–he’s a Dr., after all*) appears to have repaired his ego enough to sustain a blog again.

• Stephen Hubbard on trusting your teammates. It’s hard to describe, but important to understand.
• The US Worlds Team has been announced. Congrats Gwen! (Don’t think there are any other team members who read this…) Incidentally, you can find some recountings of the West and East tryouts on the blogosphere.
• The UPA recently revealed new proposals for the College Series, and are looking for feedback. I haven’t checked any of it out yet but I’ll likely write up my thoughts when I do.

*Have I mentioned this is where I’m going for medical school? Really excited. Exclamation point. !

Been updating the other blog, so I don’t have anything new today–but check out this RSD convo about rules quizzes. A good resource for anyone–you might also combine it with the UPA rules blog for further 11th edition fun.

Learn it, do it, own it.

Want to be an elite ultimate player? Learn how to play good handler defense.

First, for those of you who looked forward to my fitness-related musings: while I’ll likely still make posts here as I see fit on the matter, I recently joined up with in-the-works ultimate website scooberville as a contributor and am going to be shelling out a bunch of articles relating to ultimate fitness and training as the site gets up and running this spring. For any aspiring ultimate writers(/editors) out there, they’re still looking for writers and you can likely contribute on just about anything. Hit up Talton if you’re interested in any capacity (or me if you’re just looking for details & a list of potential topics).

With the repeated attempts and failures to sustain an ultimate news/content site in the past few years, my hope is that by getting in on this one early I can help establish something more sustainable.

Second, relating to fitness and training–Vern Gambetta recently made a couple posts on evaluating a training program which are valuable guides for your thought, if (as usual) rather broad. Worth a look–does your training program make sense? Does your team’s?

Consistency.

You hear about it plenty with regards to ultimate, usually something like “if you can consistently complete a forehand/backhand to an open cutter, throwing ability will not keep you from playing elite-level ultimate.”

How do you get it? You know where I’m going because you’ve already read the title.

This is something I’ve mentioned offhandedly before–honing your skills to a point where they become unconscious–but this cannot be restated enough. It’s only when you get to a point where you don’t have to think about what you’re doing that you can really thrive. When throwing a forehand is as natural to you as walking (ok, perhaps nothing is quite THAT natural, but you get the idea*), you’re in a good place. How often do you stumble when you walk?

You really need to develop a mental state for performance. Part of that is avoiding distraction, and “distraction” includes what you do with your body. If you HAVE to think about your throwing technique while you’re doing it, can you really expect it to hold up under game-time pressure? If you need to think about your footwork mid-cut, are you really going as fast as you possibly could?

Levels of Competence

I believe it was in a book about Bruce Lee (if I had anyone who I’d say was a personal role model for me, he’d be the one) that I read the following about skills progression–specifically for martial arts, but the parallels with any physical activity are evident:

• As a beginner, your instincts are bad, unwieldy, inefficient at best.
• As an intermediate, your instincts are still bad, but you know what’s proper and can correct. (There are multiple intermediate stages, with “knowing you’re wrong” and “knowing what’s proper” and “being able to correct” each their own, discrete stage).
• At an advanced level, you again return to your instinct, but the old, inefficient ones have been replaced with the precise and the honed**.

It was due to this belief that Lee’s original school of Jeet Kune Do‘s first and final ranks were both symbolized by an empty circle (your intermediate ranks were a progression of the yin-yang).

Many people reach a high level of intermediate proficiency–able to consciously will themselves to perfection of a sort–and get complacent, missing the pinnacle: true unconscious competence.

That’s where you want to get. Every time you step on the field, you want to operate unconsciously. You don’t want to have to think about your footwork. You don’t want to have to think about your grip. Your thoughts and energies should be focused purely on recognizing your situations and responding appropriately–no logistics of how to get there, merely intended destinations. Many a D set has been thrown that succeeds simply by taking players out of their unconscious selves and forcing them to think. Don’t help out your opponent by doing it to yourself unprompted!

Developing Unconscious Competence

How do you develop this kind of unconscious competence? Well, it ain’t easy, but there is some transferal between tasks (usually you regard it as “talent” or something similar when a player seems “naturally good;” natural is a good word indeed, for these individuals are almost always allowing their body to take over, getting out of their own way–and I can guarantee you they went through the process of learning to let go at some point. Whether they realize it or not). Again, I’ll mention driving (esp. stick) as a nice example of an opportunity to learn to let go. I’m currently learning how to play guitar–instruments are another great analog.

Relevant reading: SciAm Mind’s*** latest on How to Avoid Choking Under Pressure, page 2:

“Let’s say you’re trying to play the piano. If you were relying on your motor memory”—just letting it fly—“your motor command would automatically read out the next note in about 50 milliseconds.” But consciously monitoring your performance brings this superfast sequence of motor commands to a screeching halt, resulting in a choking incident of epic proportions. “The feedback from the first note takes 100 milliseconds just to move from your cochlea up to your brain. So if you’re saying to yourself, ‘Okay, I just finished the C, now I have to go on to the D,’ you’re going to have problems.”

This sums it up perfectly. In order to become a good musician, athlete, public speaker, you have to learn to let go, to let your body simply DO. You have to hone your body’s skills to a point where you can let go with confidence.

If you can develop a regimen or strategy to learning this skill, you can continue to apply it elsewhere, too.

Deliberate Practice

The foundational building block of all unconscious competence is deliberate practice. I don’t mean deliberate, as in, you have the intent to practice, but rather in the sense that you do everything you do with purpose. You should always be working towards a goal, honing a skill, refining, testing, repeating. repeating. You sure as hell can’t expect to make all your passes in a game if you can’t do it when you’re simply out tossing, right?

The deliberateness comes into play when you’re not content to just toss, but instead choose to toss with preconditions–you only throw from a full-extension pivot, you only throw after a fake, etc. And then, being deliberate at those things is another layer on top of that–is your full-extension as far as you can make it? Can you get to that point and also keep your balance, throw convincing, effective fakes, not pull a hamstring? When you throw fakes, are you working mechanically on the fake itself, or are you moving beyond that, visualizing a game situation and a covered defender (poor conditions, an aggresive mark) causing you to make that fake? Seeing the ensuing change in conditions that enable the one you do throw?

Visualization is the bridge between deliberate practice and effortless performance. You work on your throws deliberately, get the hang of throwing a forehand with touch…then, you stop thinking about how you’re throwing and instead start thinking about where you’re throwing. You picture a cutter. Does the throw still go where you want it, how you want it? What if you picture a mark up against you, defender tight your receiver’s hip? Can you place a pass where it won’t be D’d? If yes…can you do it again? And again? And again? Get to that point, and you might be ready for primetime.

Developing the mindset for mental toughness and applying it in-game is another component of being successful, particularly when the going gets tough, but you can go a long ways towards getting there if you can learn to simply


Stop.

Thinking.

It’s a long race when you’re chasing flow****. As they say in Japan, ganbatte.

---

*to be completely honest, your best comparisons for throwing a frisbee would be with other activities which involve a high degree of coordinated movement of the arms combined with stabilization through the core and a significant transfer of power from the lower limbs, as well as involving a dynamic component to projecting an implement–which make things like basketball shooting, baseball pitching/throwing, tennis ball hitting, or football throwing your truer comparisons. (Adding in the extra factor of a rotational component trims the list farther). Looking for some cross-disciplinary reading to do for ultimate? Look in that direction. Looking for some off season cross-training? You could do a lot worse than the same (I especially recommend a sport like squash, which incorporates a lot of the same sorts of lunging and one-handed motion that throwing does).

**this is otherwise known as the point in which you become a killing machine. Lee worried about some joker challenging him on the street (or one of the stunt men during a film shoot), because his instincts were honed such that in a real fight he might not be able to stop himself from, at the very least, seriously injuring his opponent.

***as I exclaimed to a friend on first discovery: “it’s like somebody made a magazine just for me!” I eat this stuff up. Highly recommended for anyone who cares to understand humanity better.

****fast forward to the last 5-8 minutes for the good stuff.

I love Michael Lewis. You’ve likely read Moneyball–people credit James, Beane with developing new statistical approaches, but guess who wrote the book that made it a common concept?

At any rate, there has been a little discussion recently concerning the use of statistics in ultimate, and a comparison with basketball’s newer stats has been made. It’s not the scores made, assists, blocks that define a player’s value, but something beyond that.

Lewis swoops in again to shed some light. Read this article with a mind for ultimate–how are you selfish? How are you part of the system? How do you help your teammates get better?

Perhaps you’re familiar with Himeji Castle? They have a field just inside the first gate which is apparently open for public use.

And so it was that I played in front of Himeji castle yesterday. I’m really sore and out of shape (but it’s a good first step towards Kaimana). Pretty decent group of people, I’d say half natives half expats (numbers enough for 3 teams), pretty good time. Certainly not at the level of a good high-level scrimmage or practice, but I’m happy for any ultimate at this point.

Other stuff:

• If you haven’t heard yet, there’s been a new restructuring of the college series this year, a precursor to more permanent change. Sounds like an exciting time to be a college player, all around. More teams is definitely a good thing in this case.
• Bagel Fodder Ultimate has a nice bit of prose up if you’ve got the appetite.
• The underrated ready stance. This dovetails nicely with a post I made on winding up (or rather, minimizing it) a while back.

First, two comments, both related to Parinella’s latest post:
1) There will be at least three (3) ultimate bloggers at Kaimana, as I’m picking up with a Philly-based squad with Dusty, whom you might recognize. Really itching to get back on an ultimate field again, got to run and throw a little in the snow on a visit back to Dartmouth and it was blissful.

2) I’d just like to point out that I was talking about Hard vs. Efficient (in slightly different terms) a good while back.

Along those lines (particularly with regards to “efficient” D), a component of good defense that is rarely talked about, perhaps due in large part to a difficulty with putting it in words, is…well. For lack of a better way to put it, entering your (wo)man’s spirit.

What do I mean? I mean, if you understand your opponent, you can shut them down with ease. If you understand your opponent’s offensive schemes and structures, getting the turn becomes a matter of when, not if.

At a very basic level, you have to understand your quarry’s wants and desires, and to some extent, we all do. We understand that generally speaking, a cutter wants to cut in or deep on the open side, that a handler wants to make an easy pass to the break side but will take the open side cutter, etc etc etc. This dictates the way we teach and execute “normal” defense.

You have to move beyond that simple understanding, however, and learn more specifically if you’re to get the best of good teams. In a sport like (American) football, you call this good scouting, realizing that, for instance, a QB cannot complete passes with any regularity in the wind, and with pressure can be forced into myriad errors by a strong Eagles defense. (I’m not that heartbroken. But oh, Eli.)

In ultimate, this comes across more as “He loves the huck,” “All they want to do is chuck it to headband,” “Not a thrower,” and other simple but effective realizations.

This is useful information. When you recognize what a team’s offense and individuals want to do, at the very least you can force them to their second (less comfortable/consistent) option. That’s the first level. It’s something we attempted to institutionalize in part on Dartmouth last year with some success–dedicating minds on the sideline (more on sidelines at a later time–but know this: they are your best asset as a team) almost exclusively to “scouting” the other team, and we found a decent degree of success with it.

At a deeper level, though, what I mean is dynamically altering the defense you present such that it always aligns against your opponent’s desires. Recognizing that, while your man loves to cut deep, if you’re still with him after a few steps he will plant to come under, and adjusting your defense right as he gets to that point–temporarily conceding the deep you were just taking away, knowing that your opponent has shifted his attention elsewhere–you will be able to be everywhere he wants to be and a VERY frustrating defender.

In a larger sense, having a feel for where your teammates are and what your opponent’s offense is looking for allows you to do similar things–you can concede that deep option temporarily when the O is looking dump, or if you know that the first few stalls of each new possession are dedicated to stopping the continuation huck. That is part and parcel of good defense.

However, the epitome, in my mind at least, is integrating that information along with a reading of your opponent’s desires. If you recognize the lack of a viable deep option, you don’t respect the deep cut. When she realizes this, what will she do? You need to anticipate her looking to cut to the break side, or you need to anticipate her using the threat of the break side in your mind to try and get what she REALLY wants–the open side under.

The Sicilian reasoning game runs deep at times. Strive to always be a step ahead of your opponent mentally, and it will translate into similar margins on the field. At the very least, keep yourself from the blank, following mentality that all halfway decent cutters can exploit. Anyone can take away the first option–it’s recognizing how those options change as the disc and your man moves that allow you to move from a good defender to a stellar one.