Playing Coach p1

I had what could be considered my first real coaching experience over the past week, culminating in a trip to coach the Watchung Hills girls' team at the 2007 SJA Invitational Tournament.

After a couple conversations, Caitlin and I decided that our primary goal was to field a girls' team that was "self-sufficient" in the sense that they knew how to play the game, understood some basic strategy, and could play well enough within the strategy to score points and win games. With that in mind, I developed a simple kind of "action plan" to prepare the team for the tournament, given that we would only have three days to work with in the week leading up to it. I decided to focus mainly on the nine girls who would attend the SJA Invite, but I by no means wanted to neglect the other players, because my underlying hope was that all the girls would have fun. If they have fun, they will be more likely to keep playing, and I'd like to see Watchung Hills develop a women's program. I therefore tried to find a balance but not spread myself too thin, because ultimately I believed that girls who won games would have more fun. Since only those nine girls would have the opportunity to win games, they had priority.

The Varsity/JV coach for the high school had already taught everybody the basic three-man cup, and all the girls had had some instruction/practice throwing. We have four sophomores in their second year of experience (one of whom is JV co-captain), seven freshman (three coming to the Invite), two seniors playing for their first time (one coming to the Invite), and Caitlin--a fourth-year player with tremendous experience. Other than Caitlin, only a few girls have consistent throws, so that was the first thing I wanted to work on. I've always felt that individual instruction is imperative for new throwers, and I like to think that I've become effective at not only recognizing improper form and bad habits, but helping people to correct them. So I had the girls pair up 10yds apart for throwing, and I went around to correct form and give tips for close to half an hour.

The next step was defense. Caitlin and I decided to try Force Middle as a way to confuse inexperienced teams, with an emphasis on fronting downfield cutters. I predicted that most junior women's teams don't have accurate hucks, so we would give up the deep look until the other team can prove to me that they can complete them. We did a drill to practice shifting over to the force side every time the mark switches, and I tried to get them to call and echo the force every time the disc moved. After practicing this for some time, we did a dishy drill--I was hoping to make flow a little easier by keeping the disc moving and keeping it in the hands of our experienced throwers. Plus, dishy drill is a good way to practice cutting deep, coming in, then going deep again. We also did a 3-man marking drill to work on our marks and our throws around the mark, something I knew we could have trouble with in games. That was Monday's practice, which we concluded with some 4 on 4 scrimmage on a small field.