Update on Teaching People to Throw a Forehand

This post represents some further thoughts on this. If you're interested, see my previous piece about it.

I got thinking about this again after reading an article on the Thinkulti blog. It looks at the plane of release of a forehand. It's interesting enough. Read that, and an older post on the same blog more specifically about teaching a beginner to throw a forehand. 

Given it's university recruiting season, I guess this is quite relevant right now. If you have a university team,  you're probably teaching a new batch of beginners how to throw. If you get it right, you'll be laughing. If you're not so good at it, your club might be known for its lack of disc skills for years to come!

Of course the reason I care so much about it, is that there's a good chance that this seasons new college players make up plenty of next seasons Irish juniors teams. (With which I may or may not be involved). Every year I have been involved, there are plenty of players that come to the try-outs with really dodgy forehands. 

Having talked it over with the other Irish junior open coach from this year, its not just elbow in ribcage throws we see, (see my previous piece about this), but more generally forehand throws released with the wrist much higher than the elbow. (and not able to throw any other way). Which makes it incredibly hard to learn inside break flicks and very low release flicks.

I think the forehand grip angles discussed on that piece on the Thinkulti blog, could be a related issue. 

Anyway, best of luck to anyone teaching any beginners. 

IFDA College Recruitment Guide

The blog's been quiet for a while. I've been busy. I intend getting back to the Ireland caps topics soon, and there are also a few other topics I've got in mind, but for now, I'm going to talk about recruitment.

The IFDA recently released a very early version 0.5 of their planned college recruitment guide. Basically it's an edited version of the various submissions they had received. If you're on pookas, have a read of it. There's some great stuff in it.

Structuring the Recruitment Document

I think the best thing that could happen to the document next, is for it to get structured in some logical way. Both to make it easier to read, and also to make it easier to build on. Once the document has a sensible structure, deficient sections will stand out and any conflicting opinions also become more obvious. I replied to the email saying as much (and offering to help with it).

A preliminary structure idea could be as follows:
1. overall / being organised / having a meeting about it.
2. PR during the first few weeks.
3. recruiting day.
4. retaining the people that signed up, and turning them into active club members.

How version 0.5 measures up against that proposed structure

As it stands, the document has plenty of thoughts on getting plenty of people to sign up on clubs and socs day (or freshers week or whatever you call it). I find amusing the mentions of the strategic placement of "hot guys" and "hot girls" at the recruitment stand (possibly because its true).

Where I think it might be lacking is in the area of early term PR on campus. I thought there might be more about this in the document version 0.5. Maybe its just that there wasn't much variety in what was said, and plenty of repeated stuff got edited out.

Anyway, that section would focus on PR before sign up day. It would include stuff about posters, about being visible on campus throwing, wearing club merchandise, having as many articles in every campus publication as you can and mentioning ultimate enthusiastically to anyone you're talking to.

Retaining Beginners

Stuff about retaining the beginners could get interesting. I imagine there could be various different opinions on it.

I think this section could get further subdivided into
A - training
B - tournaments
C - club sociability

Possibly what sort of players you want to recruit and retain could be worth some discussion. I think any club has a finite capacity for active membership; you're unlikely to add 100 new active members to a club (although I understand plenty of clubs sign up more than this nowadays). There just isn't the space at practice (and possibly the existing club members haven't the ability to remember that many names). So perhaps a club needs to think about exactly what sort of players they really want to try to keep.

Increasing the Natural Capacity of a Club

Before anyone gets too carried away with being selective, it is possible to expand the natural capacity of a club. Try as hard as you can to recruit and retain more players before you start to pick and choose. I think UCC managed that last year. If you run a few separate practice sessions aimed at different groups, then the practices won't be overcrowded and no one needs to remember absolutely all the beginners names. This probably even holds true for socialising too. There's an upper limit on the size of a tight-knit social group. Only so many people can comfortably hang out in a living room. If a big club has multiple smaller tight-knit groups it allows space for more newbies to become active members.

Anyone from UCC tell me if I've got that right?

What sort of beginners will stay playing

So, once there's room for plenty of newbies, it's probably still true that you'll not be able to get all of those that sign up to stick around. And who sticks around will largely be determined by what you do in the first few weeks after the beginners join. For instance, if you do drills involving quite a bit of sprinting, then people that like sprinting will stick around.

Also, who becomes a regular is determined by who you get to know; who the experienced players become friends with. If all the experienced players spend all their time making friends with final year student newbies and 1 semester foreign students, they'll have no time to get to know the first years (that's bad).