JV Ultimate

I attended the high school's JV practice yesterday, and I left with a few thoughts.

Prior to practice, the coach gave a brief chalk-talk on the whiteboard in his classroom. He wanted to tell the kids about throwing deep, at the request of some of the new players. Well, almost all of the JV kids are brand-new players, because fewer than 6 have more than one season of experience. Almost all of them are freshman.

So the coach outlined a few rules about throwing deep. 1: Don't do it. Most of these kids can't throw accurately with any distance, although a few are learning semi-consistent short throws without a mark. So I understand the concept behind telling them to not throw it deep--most of them can't do it yet. He went on to explain a few tips for throwing deep afterwards (don't force it, throw io, use lots of spin, etc). But what stuck with me was the difficulty in teaching Ultimate to novice players. You can't simply teach "good Ultimate" because it requires fundamentals. So how do you build a team without fundamentals? How do you lay a foundation for structured and competitive Ultimate when most of the kids are uncoordinated, goofy freshmen? I was at a loss. I knew that the things he was teaching were horribly wrong for a competitive team, but they made sense for these kids. Where do you draw the line between short-term and long-term education in Ultimate?

I would probably do things differently if I were coaching, but it is hard to say exactly what I would do in situations like this. I can already see the temptation to focus on promising players, the need to give individual attention to the kids who you expect to step up to varsity next year, and the competing need to help the struggling stragglers. I have always liked the idea of a buddy system, where an experienced veteran takes a new player under his or her wing to teach individual concepts in practice and work with them on throwing outside of practice, but that's hard to do when most of the team is not very experienced. I remember my freshman year of high school, when I was one of two freshman and fewer than 6 brand-new players at the time. I got lots of individual attention, and I really think that was the biggest factor in my early growth in the sport. I remember being on the starting seven in the spring, getting playing time against teams at Nationals--no way would that have been possible without all those seniors taking me aside to show me how to throw, cut, and catch.

So later, everybody split into three teams, where each team had one or two experienced players. After my team's first point (with me on the sideline) I asked my team to circle up. I gave maybe two or three specific thoughts about what was going on and how they could improve: hold the force, prevent in-cuts by giving up the deep ("they can't throw deep!"), and cut to the open side on offense. Then I got on the field with them and tried to shape how things were going--calling for them to stack instead of throwing to the fast break, or trying to get the thrower to dump at high stall counts. But I found myself playing a little poachy at times, rather than sticking to my man. Three reasons: poaching helped my team's defense, enabled my (new player) matchup to learn to recognize when he is poached, and I found it frustrating to play tight defense when the force switched. So playing with JV, I played good offense and bad defense, because it seemed like the best way to teach the new players. I guess that's just how it goes.

I hope to learn more when I coach the girls at the SJA Invite next weekend.