"What will we do today then?...does anyone know any drills?"

Have you ever heard that quote at an ultimate training session? It's really not a good thing!

What happens after you hear that? the group go through the motions of a few unrelated drills, drills that some of those present have done or seen elsewhere. There is no thought given to how the drill relates to real game play situations...and then in the second part of the session, there'll probably be a practice match but it would be more of a pick-up game instead of a match that practices whatever skills the drills that were just done might have tried to work on. 

It can be easy for teams to fall into this sort of practice session. It's hard work to be adequately prepared beforehand to avoid it.  

I think a good practice session focuses on just one or two things. These things being individual or team skills. Hopefully, whoever is in charge knows beforehand which individual or team skills they want the team to work on, and they've given some thought to the in-game situations where the skills are important. Then they can decide what drills to use and be able to explain how the drill relates to a game. Finally, if there is a game at the end of the session, the focus should still be on the same thing. It should not be just a pick-up game, but rather an opportunity to put into practice the skills that have been the focus of the training session. Using some modified rules could help to accomplish that. 

As for deciding which skills to focus on. Well, obviously, it depends on the team. For a beginner team, you'd start with the basic skills (individual skills like catching, and basic throwing - backhands and forehands, and team skills like dumps, forces and stacks perhaps), and hopefully progress over a season to more advanced team and individual skills.  

If you try listing out every possible skill that you could have as the focus of a practice session, there are a whole lot! It would be really difficult to cover everything well. so for a more advanced team I'd say you really want a good idea of what you game plan is, and what skills you need to implement it well. Then you can focus on those skills. 

The key to focussed practice sessions, is in writing things down. What you've already done and what skills you plan on covering for the rest of the season. Of course if a tournament highlights a big weakness, change the plan to work on that next.

I had once been of the opinion that after the most basic individual and team skills are covered, thereafter it would make sense to focus on the more advanced individual skills next, leaving the more advanced team skills until later in the season, closer to whatever tournament is the important one. I'm not so sure about that now.

But anyway, even if your plan covers the various skills in a illogical order, the team would still be better off than they would have been had they had no plan. Just don't come down to training every week and say "What will we do today? Anyone know any drills?"  

The Different levels of defence

This is somewhat of a follow-up post to learning to defend in ultimate. 

I got to thinking about why some defenders give so many free cuts to the offence (and by free, I mean really free, like 'standing 4 meters up the line from a handler' free). I think it's because it can feel intelligent, in a lazy sort of way.

Now obviously I know that there are times when you know you can't cover everything as a defender, and you'll want to take away certain cuts as a priority over others. Maybe you're playing in an important game, and marking someone that you're confident will be able to get open easily, no matter what you do (well first up, consider marking someone else).  It's such an easy decision to decide you're in this situation and to play 'intelligent' ultimate and just give them the cut that's the lesser threat, for free. Telling yourself that this is intelligent play makes this decision very easy to live with. Too easy.

Now while it might be more intelligent than giving every cut for free, it still doesn't seem like the most intelligent thing you could do. (Getting into incredibly good shape, so you can defend better is the most intelligent thing you could do).

As I described in my last post, I think the approach means you miss a learning opportunity. And learning is generally an intelligent thing. So, long story short, I've tried to rank the different levels of defensive play that a player can try, based on the intelligence of the approaches, as I perceive them.

level 0 - Zero Defence: following a guy around, not playing D at all. You shut down zero cuts, the cutter has whatever they like and you can't really learn anything (well nothing that you couldn't learn by watching from the sideline). Zero Defence is popular with beginners - who have no idea where the offense is likely to go, and also sometimes with fatigued experienced players (like me).

level 0.5 -Half Defence: slightly more intelligent - take away one thing- so you choose how your opponent will beat you.  for example, take away the deep cut from a cutter or the up the line cut from a handler and then give them the other option without any contest (like by standing 4 meters away from them). You probably won't get any blocks and again you can't learn much. But you can be happy that you're more intelligent than those level zero guys.

level 1- Actual Defence: try to contest everything. You might not be successful, but at least the offense now have to try. There is some pressure, so mistakes from the offence are more likely. The best part is that you can learn, both about the general subtleties of man D and about the tendencies of the particular cutter you're marking. 

(level 1.x: as above, but you've learned a few things now)

level 2: Team Defence. I'm not sure if I should have this as another level. A simple game plan based on a force is a team defence, but it's within such a context that I've been looking at all the previous levels.
But still, when you're playing with your regular team, you can coordinate with your team mates to shut down more of the viable cuts, like say, by switching. Which I think is intelligent (but be careful not to switch so much you switch to level 0.5).

Playing defence knowing where the rest of your teammates are likely to be in a given scenario, knowing what the mark is like and knowing what sort of break throws are likely could also be in this level. Or maybe it's on an even higher level? A level of being able to read exactly what the offence is likely to do. If I got to that level more often I might be able to blog about it.