Saving Sectionals

So with the fall series about to get underway, I’ve been thinking about how to approach Sectionals.  For many club teams in most sections, Sectionals may offer a good game or two on Sunday, but generally there are a lot of blowouts.  How can you keep days like that from being a complete waste of time?  Wiffleball, Yumball, flutterguts, DDC, bocce…?  All good ideas.  Drilling between games?  Running suicides?  Scrimmaging?  It could work.  It depends on your team.

What I’m wondering about though is how to make the games themselves more worthwhile.  Now, if you don’t have a “worthy fucking adversary,” there’s only so much you can do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get something out of it.  What are good areas to focus on when you outmatch your opponent in every way?

Defense

On defense, if the other team is gonna cough up the disc in 2 passes no matter what defense you throw at them, then it’s probably not that helpful to work on your clam.  Not saying you don’t throw it, but understand you’re not getting tested.  Some defensive things you can work on and/or stress as points of emphasis:

Individual skills.  I like to stress staying focused against weaker opponents.  Pride yourself on keeping your pulls inbounds, getting down on every pull, not getting broken, etc.  Don’t get lazy about switching too much.

Team skills: Again, this can be tough if the other team is terrible.  One of my favorite things to work on against weak opponents is transition defenses.  To help this out, focus more on the transition (i.e. finding matchups quickly) and less on applying pressure with your cup.  Maybe even count out loud, and yell out, “Go man!” when you transition to queue the other team to start cutting.

Offense

Offense is generally easier to work on, and the weaker opponent just means it’s somewhere between a walk through and a scrimmage.

With individual skills, again, try to stress staying focused and not being sloppy.  Can you just get open by running past your slow, overweight defender?  Sure, but pride yourself on still cutting from motion and maximizing gains.

Spacing is great to work on against weaker opponents.  Don't crowd the disc, work to get swings all the way across the field instead of just 25 yards, etc.

Team concepts: Break flow offense, especially the continuation.  Fast break offense.  Set plays.  I like instituting a rule for a half like, “we will always fast break if the disc is on the field proper.”  Or “we always set up and run a play.”

These are just some ideas for team leaders to consider when approaching Sectionals... just don't forget the bocce ball set.

Phases of Learning - Synthesis

To carry on my thoughts on learning progression, I mentioned 3 phases to learning technique.  If you do a bit of reading on these concepts, you’ll come across different names and different numbers of phases.  When you get beyond those 3 phases, the next step in learning is synthesis.  As one masters a skill and understands a concept, they can then extend those lessons to other scenarios and venues.

If you understand the release angles and corresponding flight paths of a hammer, you can extend those principles to any upside down throw you see or make up.

If your understanding of zone offense goes beyond, “when the disc swings, popper 1 cuts to the line, popper 2 cuts across the middle,” to the point where you understand how to create 2-on-1 matchups and pick on the defense’s weak points, you can extend those principles to any zone strategy and even extend those principles to other sports that feature zone defenses.

That’s the synthesis phase of learning.  What hinders our reaching a higher level of game IQ in our young sport is a lack of coaching and critical thought about how we play.  The simple lack of time working on our sport impedes the depths to which we can learn it.  So we teach the basics.  We (hopefully) tell people where to throw, where to cut.  How to throw, how to cut.

Invest the time to tell people why to throw there and why to cut there.  Teach the Whys.

Why are we running this drill?  Why are we running this play?  Why are we swinging the disc?  Why are we forcing flick?  Why are we running a ho?

We have limited practice time, so it's important for coaches to KISS (keep it short and simple), but plant the seeds for critical thought.  Don't overload a learner with nuance they can't handle or make use of.  It's best to go through any exposition during the drilling phase when you want to encourage the learner to think about and reflect on what they're doing.  But if we take that extra step, a few of our athletes will take it a few more, and maybe our sport will take a few steps forward as well.

Phases of Learning

Had to repost this from Dusty's blog.

This has driven me nuts my entire club ultimate career.  Dusty's link to the above article on coaching reminded me of something i wrote back in the day and made me dig up an old end of season feedback email i wrote.  Pike sent out an end of season survey, which i thought was a great idea.  Here's an excerpt from one of my responses.  This was small part of a very, very long email that included positive and negative feedback. 

What i have gone on and on about in the past is that the method we use most of the time when we teach involves explanation and then applying it.  What i have long complained about is that this method skips the middle (and possibly most important) phase of the learning process, the associative phase.  We should explain, then drill the technique in isolation without a ton of other stimuli and skills involved, and then drill it in a game situation.  That middle phase is where the muscle memory occurs, technique is perfected and made instinctual/automatic.  We finally started doing this when we started teaching clam and the monkey zone, but we still do not maximize our teaching time by not focusing more attention on the associative phase of learning and jumping too quickly into live play.  I blame our poor offensive motion, our consistently getting beat by upline cuts, our poor individual defensive positioning, our drifting toward the disc, etc... all on poor teaching and poor learning.  Guys who've played with Pike for 4 or 5 years still run blindly in the cup or only watch the disc when they're on offense.  It's embarassing.  This is not all the teachers' fault, but obviously it starts with the leadership.

When Jim was injured all the time in 2004, he would watch our practices and constantly complain about how the d-team's offensive motion was terrible, and then he'd draw it out on the white board how it's supposed to work.  And it never did any good.  We cannot expect to just explain something and for people to do it.  We must drill muscle memory in simplified scenarios before we do it in a scrimmage.  The Katzenbach drill is a good start for that type of thing, but only a start.

Depending on what theory of education you're reading, there are 3 to 6 phases of learning.  For the sake of learning a skill, e.g. throwing, you can talk about 3 phases:

Cognitive:  how to hold the disc, how to step, arm motion, when to use the throw, where to aim, etc.

Associative:  Repetition/practice in controlled environment.  Typically the longest phase.  We throw thousands of times and monitor our technique.

Autonomous:  Natural, reflexive movement.  Less attention required, freeing up the player to focus on other things (i.e. is a cutter open, is there a poacher, etc).

We drill throwing, but teams tend not to drill team level strategies nearly as much, short-changing the associative phase.  We draw up our offense on a white board and then do a few walk throughs and then scrimmage.  Maybe since we have little time together as a team, we feel we need to scrimmage.  Or maybe we just don't know how to drill tactics.

The article that Dusty links to talks about progressing from 1v1 to 2v2 to 3v3 etc.  When i coached volleyball, we broke down drills into 1 skill drills, 2 skill drills, 3 skill drills, etc.  Breaking down the game into smaller pieces allows us to better focus on the details.