[this is mostly from a B-team perspective, hopefully some A-teamer will post a recap from their perspective]

the first tournament of the year is always an awesome experience. we always seem to luck out with great weather for club sectionals, and this year was no different. not only that, but they were on some absolutely beautiful (and annoyingly expensive) fields.

although i got up early with a few other crazy people and trekked out to lancaster set up fields, the majority of the WPI team got the rare luxury of sleeping in the day of a tournament. Our first game wasn't until 12:40 so we had plenty of time to throw around and warmup.

The first two teams the B-team played were seeded pretty high in the tournament and were both quite talented. however, they couldn't have been more different. MIT was rather similar to us; a group of college aged athletic kids bringing some freshmen to their first tournament. Rude Boys on the other hand were a group of old veterans (they actually won nationals in 1982) that brought their non-surprisingly good kids to the tournament with them. needless to say, we didn't perform too well against them, although we managed to put up a few against each. and we got to witness a nice kodak moment against rude boys, when a father threw the game-winning hammer to his 12ish year old son for the score. some highlights include pc hucking to moakley for several scores, rick making a beautiful 2nd effort grab for a score, and the emergence of ian/ryan/jeff as go-to guys on the field.

the last game of the day was aginst tufts-B, and was a much better matchup for our team. we were even tied at threes at one point before tufts started to pull away. around 4-14 we decided to throw a zone on them, and broke them 3 straight times to end the day on a respectable note.

the next morning we played andover high school, in a game that was very reminiscent of the tufts game. we were close in the beginning, and made a nice run at the end again thanks to the success of our zone, but the final score was something like 15-7. this actually ended up being the last game of the weekend due to some lame teams not showing up on sunday, but we entertained ourselves with some scrimmaging, go-to drills, and cheering on the A-team. The A-team seemed to have a roller coaster of a weekend, playing very well at times and absolutely abysmal at others. I will say though that i was pretty inspired by the end of their game against red tide B, where they scored like 5 out of 6 points during one stretch. goes to show what stifling defense can do for you. props to kevin for getting like 5 skying D's in a single point, and to vaccaro for playing the best defense i've ever seen out of him. it was nice to see that even when they were down 11-3, they never gave up, and i think red tide was starting to get nervous before the end.
all in all it was a good time, and hopefully a good learning experience for those new to the game. there should be more tournaments come B term, so keep coming to practices so we can improve on this performance next time.

things that went well: attitude/spirit, zone D

things to work on: vertical cuts/cutting with confidence, communication on D, pivoting, conditioning
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so you're sprinting downfield for the deep look with your defender desperately trying to catch up from a few yards behind you. you're not to worried though; you've made this cut a million times, and as long as the thrower leads you into the endzone with the disc it should be a score. sure enough, the OI forehand huck goes up. "Shit, it's coming fast," you think to yourself. the disc has good distance, but it's quickly blading in high from your right. you continue sprinting after it, and jump with your right hand raised for the one-handed snag...and it tragically macs off your hand and quickly turfs. disgusted with yourself, you turn to play defense on the poor sap you just torched. and you think to yourself, "i should've listened to scheid all those times he rambled on and on about how to catch with one hand!"


well now is your chance :)

first off, i should say that two-handed catches are often preferable. pancakes should be used for anything from your thighs up to your head, and two-handed claws for most low throws, throws on either side of your body, and most jumping catches. sometimes though, a one-handed catch is the safest route (skying attempts, many layout attempts, very high or low throws to your side), and this primer is for those times.

different throws have different spins, and it's much easier to catch with one hand if you learn to instinctively read it. so for the next couple of weeks, every time you throw around with somebody, train your mind to read the disc's spin. backhands spin clockwise when viewed from above, and forehands spin counterclockwise (vice versa for southpaws). therefore, every disc approaching you has an edge that is split in two: half approaching edge and half trailing edge. try to visualize this; have your roommate throw a short pass to you if it helps. always catch a disc on the approaching edge, it is much harder to catch a trailing edge pass.

this means you should catch forehands on their left side, and backhands on their right side. this holds true whether you are chasing down a disc on a deep cut, or running to it on an incut. a corollary to this is that it's easier to catch forehands with your left hand, and backhands with your right hand, because of the way our hands are naturally shaped. give it a try next time you're throwing around. if you focus on it for 30 minutes straight, you'll never have to think about it again because it will be instinct. and a good ultimate player thrives on instinct. but that's a thought for another day...


-scheid

It's not about practice. I want to be very careful about what I say here, because I don't want it to be misconstrued, but the Ultimate season is not about practices. Or tournaments. It is important at the beginning of the season and at checkpoints along the way to set certain objectives as a team and make sure that everyone is on the same page. Yes, Ultimate is fun. Practices, tournaments, parties, road trips and eating contests. All good times. But the season comes down to the Championship Series in the spring. WPI has taken great strides in acknowledging the importance of the end of the season, and I only want to highlight how necessary it is to keep that Sectionals tourney in mind throughout the year, not just in D term.

Practice helps. Going to tournaments helps. Winning at tournaments helps. But what happens at individual events earlier in the season has less and less bearing as the Championship series approaches, which brings me to my actual point. There is a distinction between performing well and improving, both on an individual and a team level, that must be recognized. It is not of primary importance that you perform well at practice, but it is important that you improve. Same at a tournament. Sure, it would be nice to win Yale Cup or Terminus, but you can't display your won/lost record in April to the TD and explain to him or her why that should greenlight you to Regionals.

This is getting too complicated for such a simple issue, but my point is that you need to fight complacency all the time if you want to improve. You should never leave a tournament with the feeling that it went as well as it could've. If you have that feeling, you have peaked, and you might as well just wait for the end of the season. Similarly, you should never leave a practice thinking "That was easy." I understand that, especially early on in the season with a huge disparity in skill levels, practice is not ideally tailored to everyone. Make it hard on yourself. Show up early. Run a few miles or some sprints and see if it's as easy to walk through the drills as it was before. Focus on the little things, and set a nightly goal for yourself. Maybe no turnovers (always popular) or picking up a new throw for your arsenal.

The overwhelming theme here is to push yourself. Stay late. Run harder. Throw when you're tired. Try to play a D point after you just sprinted 100m for kicks. Put yourself at a physical disadvantage to your teammates. Ask more from yourself all the time. Because come spring, nobody is going to remember that sick layout block that happened on a Thursday night under the yellow lights on the turf. And here's the hard part, they might not even notice that you didn't get broken all game, or that you played shut-down defense the whole day and your guy got looked off time and again. But what will be noticed is the scoreboard. And no matter how unglorious your season was, that ticket to the next round is pretty damn exciting.

So this post is not directly related to ultimate, but I think it is extremely important to the team, especially in the long term. The fall season is about to start and a HUGE part of the fall is recruitment. We are trying to build the best team we can get, and hopefully try to continue that in the next year. There are a couple of very easy ways for the team to help make this recruitment season successful. Being in a fraternity (which a big percentage of the team is) gets you to learn some recruitment strategies and I am going to try and give the ones here that are most appropriate.

1. Go to orientation frisbee. For those of you who have not taken part in this, there is pickup just about every night (usually starting around 10:00pm or 11:00pm) on the turf. Frisbee is the kind of thing that attracts freshmen for some reason, so come out and start meeting people here. Hint at the fact that they should go to the information session. Talk to them a little bit about how the ultimate team works. Help them out with their forehand if they need it. This is a really great time for ultimate recruitment. Try and get to school by the Saturday before classes start so you can show up to these orientation games. Usually a TON of kids show up to this.

2. Learn kid's names. At each practice try to introduce yourself to some of the freshmen. Learn their names and talk to them when you see them around school or at the following practice. There is a certain ex-captain whose name I will not reveal who once said, "there are so many freshmen, I am not even going to bother learning names until most of them quit in the winter." This strategy is terrible and will end up causing the new kids to not feel welcome.

3. Show up to practice. This is also good because it will start teaching the new kids that even the most experienced players treat practice as important, so they will be more inclined to keep coming. Also, seeing the new kids at every practice makes doing #2 that much easier.

4. Persuade kids to come out. If you meet some cool kids, it is okay to ask them, "hey, are you coming to practice tonight?" I mean don't get really annoying and pester them every time you see them, but sometimes they don't have the schedules memorized and especially when they are just getting to college trying to figure stuff out, practice may slip their mind. But if you are telling them to show up to practice and then you don't yourself, it is going to look stupid, so keep doing #3 while doing this one.

5. Don't just focus on the really, really, ridiculously good kids. Yeah sure when we find a PC or Tim we should make sure that we get them to join because they are going to be great for the team. But keep the long term in mind, people can grow. I know I didn't have a forehand coming into my freshman year, and was not very athletic, but I (hopefully) have improved a lot and have become an important member of the team even if it took me a while to achieve this. So keep talking to kids even if they are not the kind of kids that are going to be on the A team in the spring.

That is all I will post for now. Remember that we are COMPETING with other clubs, organizations, sports teams, etc. We are also competing with laziness, so we have to make the team seem like a welcome place for everyone there and hopefully we can even steal some of the more athletic kids from their "real" sports (I know of a lot of kids who would have been on the team, but are doing crew or whatever instead. Come on, who would choose that over ultimate?) This past year, we barely had a B team. We should have at least as many kids on the B team as we had on the A team by the spring. These are the kids who should be replacing the A teamers when they graduate or become lazy and need to get kicked off the team. Keep all this in mind, and I will see you in the fall.

-Ravi

PS Captains, when is that club expo thing on the Quad? Make sure to email that out to the team so we have a ton of people their trying to recruit.

Okay guys, Here is the requested and long-awaited handling post that I decided to write.

To start off, I am going to say that even though these blogs are a great source of information and ideas, there is absolutely no substitute for PRACTICE and watching people do these things the right way. Repetition, Repetition, and more Repetition is the best way to get better fast. (As long as you are doing the right thing of course…)

With regards to handling there is not much that I can teach you in this blog post because in order to become a better handler, you must practice handling. It is different for everyone, so there is not really any “set” perfect way to handle. Each person has their own style (including pros and cons)– take kid and myself for example: Kid likes to value the disc a lot and is very chilly, And he really likes backhands, but also he tends to hold onto the disc for too long sometimes and ends up forcing some throws. I, on the other hand also value the disc, but I guess you could say that I am a bit more impulsive in my handling, I like to let our team make the plays happen and often that has me hucking to our receivers more often than kid (which can be a bad decision at some times). I also prefer forehands. The differences between us are not that big, but our “styles” are pretty complementary. As you handle more and more, you begin to see the field; where cuts are coming from, where certain teammates cut to, and what their tendencies are.

This leads into what I believe is the single-most important thing about handling. This is FIELD SENSE. I know some of you might ask “What exactly does FIELD SENSE mean?” and to this I would say field sense includes a multitude of things: Who is on the field at a certain time and what their strengths and weaknesses are, what the matchups are against the other team, where there is open space on the field to throw into, what the flow of the cuts is like, when you need to yell at people to get their heads out of their asses and cut, how the weather is affecting the game, what the other team’s defense is and how you can beat it, and many many others. As you can see trying to work on this huge number of things individually would get you nowhere, but if you can get to the point where you take a step back and look at the game as a bigger picture, you have begun to develop what I call “Field Sense”. It is only gained through playing ultimate and only gets better with more experience.

If anyone wants some advice on any of these topics feel free to talk to me whenever and I am more than happy to help you out.

Okay, enough of the handling side of things – I am in the process of writing a throwing post and it will be up in a few days :-) Hope everyone’s summers are going well and ill see y’all soon.

I have already discussed what I am about to write with Scheid and other members of the summer team, but here it goes.

Back in the spring when the ultimate team started to get serious (hopefully we start that a lot earlier this year), we started to really look at throwing form. One of the people on the team that I respect a lot in terms of throwing is Kid. Now Kid seemed to be telling everyone to try and put I/O on every throw, and I started to work on that but never really understood why until I started played some disc golf earlier this summer and it sort of dawned on me. Understanding the "why", at least for me, makes it easier to convince yourself to do something rather than just blindly trusting the people who are better than you at it, so here it goes.

When you throw, especially a forehand, the tendency is for the disc to go O/I. I am not sure about why this is, but if you look at someone who is just learning a forehand (oh remember those days?) you can see that their throws often turn to O/I blades. Now, in disc golf, the tendency is opposite (don't ask me why, something with the physics of the lip of the disc or something), so all your throws will "naturally" go I/O. To get distance in disc golf, one method that a more experienced player told me was to try and throw the disc O/I. When this is done you can see the disc flatten itself out, and sometimes even go I/O as its natural tendency is. It is much more exaggerated with disc golf discs than with ultimate discs, but the theory is the same (except opposite). Throw with I/O and the disc will flatten itself out, and while this happens the disc is using its natural tendency to stay in the air rather than fly down (as the disc gets more and more O/I its flight pattern is more and more downward).

So that is my reasoning for why I/O throws are more stable and will go further with less force. Maybe this was very obvious to you before, or maybe it makes no sense, but this epiphany has helped me a lot in terms of a mentality of throwing, so long as it helps at least one more of you then this entry is worth it. I am not an extremist like Kid to say that you should put I/O on EVERY throw, but in general it is better. There are definitely situations where O/I throws are better for getting to a target, but it is still a less stable throw and you should take that into account before throwing it.

So keep working on your throwing form and I will see you clowns in the fall.

-Ravi

Okay guys, I finally got my account fixed here so you will be hearing from me alot probably. I hope all of your summers are going great and Im really lookin forward to the fall.

Alas, These are not stories from late night escapades or drunken jousting with teammates' girlfriends, but a few helpful things that you may like to read.

Here is my first in a complementary line of posts to go with squat's thoughts:

To start off, I want to talk about being heads-up on the field. One understated aspect of ultimate is how long the disc can be in the air. Compared to ball sports, it's basically forever. What this means for you is that there are many more opportunities to be in the "right place at the right time" even if you aren't the intended receiver or the active defender on a play. I call this the "Derek Jeter" effect, similar to how, in the playoffs against the A's a few years ago, Jeter (a shortstop) was in position between the pitcher's mound and home plate to give the ball thrown from the outfield an extra little push to get the out at home plate.

The Video Papers archive on the "links" page is an excellent resource because analysis is combined with good visual examples. These are much more effective at communicating concepts in ultimate than mere explanations.

So, take a look at Follow the Play.

You can watch the entire video through one time from the intro page, but make sure to click on the 'examples' link because it will allow you to watch each clip one at a time. Furthermore, the video paper's author will have commentary associated with each individual segment of the clip.

-----

One lesson to take away from these examples is that, while you're on the field, you shouldn't stop moving very often. Ultimate is a battle for position. On the lowest level, it is a one-on-one battle which is glamorous, and one of pure physicality (who can jump highest or run fastest). But, ultimate doesn't need to be a "fair" game: you can stack the odds in favor of your team by involving yourself in somebody else's play.

It reminds me of the last official point I ever played for my first competitive team (in high school). A huck went up to our biggest receiver for what would be the winning score, if he caught it. It looked like it was a sure thing and many people just stood on the field watching, but unfortunately, though he had beat his defender, the wind was just strong enough to send the disc sailing past his (and his defender's) outstretched finger tips. Fortunately for our team, my brother had trailed my teammate and his defender by about 10 meters (and was offset horizontally by 10 meters) and was able to snag the disc that no one else had a chance at. It would have been easy to stop and watch as we "won" the game on a "sure" pass to our "big receiver".

On the flip side, I'm sure we can all think of instances where we gave up on a disc only to see it pop back up or hang due to the wind. On defense, I see people give up when they've been beat by their guy, only to see that the disc hung and that there would have been a chance to D the disc. The object lesson here is "DON'T GIVE UP!". Also, work hard for your position. You might think a lot of these plays are based on luck, but you create some of your own luck just by being there.

One final thought: what does it take for you to be able to "be there" all the time? Or asked a different way, why might you stop running when the disc goes up to someone other than you or your defender?

i was reading a blog, and thought this was an excellent post to pass along, especially for our fairly young team.


About Getting Better by Noah
It is very hard to improve as a player by waiting for advice from others. The best players and the ones who improve the most are those who actively seek it out. In general, frisbee players aren't the type to go out of their way to instruct others. Some of the best times for learning about the game are when someone asks a more experienced player (or even an equally skilled teammate) about a scenario, or about a play that happened, etc. The people who turn into the best players are the ones who ask the veterans on their team whenever they have a question about anything. They are the ones who ask their teammates "what happened?" when they are involved in a play that went wrong but only saw part of the play. They are the ones who email their captains and coaches when they are up late and randomly think of an ultimate-related question.

http://ultfris.blogspot.com/2005/02/about-getting-better-by-noah.html