Learning to defend in Ultimate

This is something I had been thinking about last year. I saw so many players that I thought were missing out on huge learning opportunities when they were playing defence that it bugged me sometimes. The issue I'm thinking of is when players give a particular cut for free to the person they're marking (like in a systematic way).

Say for example: at some pick up game or hat tourney - there's a less experienced player defending against some handler who's known for being quite good. And the less experienced player stands like 3 or 4 metres up line of them...thinking the handler is so good that if he gets the disc up the line, he'll definitely throw a score. So instead he gives free back field passes for the entire point. (and this good handler would proceed to do quite a bit for the offence, considering the lack of defensive pressure).

I don't mean to imply an intentional effort to poach off the handler by the way - all I mean is that a defender is giving an offender so much respect that he stops actually trying to defend against him.

(the same thing can happen with marking a recognised good cutter - with players no longer defending properly and just taking away one thing - the deep cut)

Clearly this situation is crazy. And the less experienced player is losing out on a huge learning opportunity. If he marked the other player tightly, he'd possibly get beat a few times, but if he makes an effort to not get beaten with the same move more than once, he should improve his defending hugely and indirectly get to learn some offence moves too.

So my tip for inexperienced players for learning how to defend is.... try defending. As in try to shut down every cut, and remember - if you 'get schooled' - then you should have learned something.