Bill Parcells coached for over 40 years and won two Super Bowls. I love hearing thoughts about competition and preparation from people who do those things for a living, and Parcells was one of the best. I’ve been reading these and looking for ways to apply them to my high school team and upcoming club tryouts and I think they’ll be useful for anyone looking to up their mental edge as they head into Nationals. Some favorites:
“See, this kind of game is just like playing baseball. If your fastball is getting them out, you just keep on throwing it until there’s twentyseven of ‘em gone. It’s that kind of thing. If you get away from that in a game like this, it’s only because you want to show everybody how smart you are as a coach. That’s like carnival football: jugglers to the left, seals to the right, and then everybody says, ‘Look how smart the coach is. This is really exciting.’ But you’re not a coach at all then. You’re a carnival barker.”
“Mock intercepts the ball in the end zone. Now we’re in the locker room and the press is all around him and a reporter asks, ‘Is that the biggest play you ever made in your life?’ and the kid says, ‘Yep.’ Now the guy asks why and Mock says, ‘Because if I don’t make it, they win, but I made it so we win.’
“I knew right there I had that kid. I knew he understood. That’s how simple it is. You get your coaches and your players to understand it, you win. You don’t get anything for being smarter or flashier. All anybody wants to know is if you won.”
“Losing may take a little from your credibility, but quitting will destroy it.”
“The worst thing that can happen to a player [from a player’s perspective] is for him not to know what the coach is really thinking about him” and “People can’t become accountable unless they understand exactly what you want.”
“Say something to each individual every day.”
“Consistency is overrated. A leader is obligated not to be consistent, but to be right—t0do what’s best for the organization.”
In this post, Dusty argues that keeping your arm 90 degrees to your torso is the best way to throw because it generates the most power and it is the most natural motion. His point reminds me of Ben Wiggins’ note about keeping the disc flat throughout your entire backswing, which he articulates in the Wall Resets drill in Zen Throwing. Dusty also talks about the balance provided by the non-throwing side of your body as well as the importance of ignoring the wind. The comments section gets into some nitty gritty, including another point about the “ludicrous obsession with getting under the mark” that reminds me of Idris Nolan’s point that many great throwers don’t pivot because they develop a good sense of where the mark is and simply move accordingly.
In general, I think that throwing mechanics come down to individuals and what makes them comfortable. If a player has hideous form but can get the disc where it needs to go at the right time, I don’t see much of a need to worry about cosmetics. But thinking about form and what works for others is always beneficial. There are always tweaks and improvements to be made.
A specific example: Sean Keegan, a teammate of mine who is an exceptional hucker and wind thrower, recently told me that when he first started playing at Delaware, he was taught to throw on an incline. At first, I pictured finding a hill and, for some reason that I didn’t understand, throwing on it. But once he explained that he meant always giving leading edge of the disc a slight tilt, I got it. I tried it out and for me, throwing on an incline helps compensate for my tendency to throw with the leading edge down a bit; I frequently hit guys in the waste or knees when I want to hit them in the chest. There’s always the feeling that something is working just because it is new advice or a clear version of something you’ve never consciously practiced, but I like this one.
I coached the YHB Varsity Boys at Virginia States this past weekend, where we won the final 10-8 over Woodside High School. In pool play on Saturday, we beat them 12-7. The final was nerve wracking: we took half 7-6 only to go down 8-7, battled back to 8-8 and then took the lead 9-8, and then grinded out a final point that, in retrospect, feels like it had 10 turnovers and lasted 15 minutes.”They’re really athletic” is a term that ultimate players use a whole, whole lot, but Woodside definitely fit the bill. I saw a number of one-handed hammer skies, hucks that were chased down from over 30 yards, and layouts that flew way farther than I expected when the player left the ground. Woodside is coached by Richard Rudnicki and has been around since at least the early 2000s. Carter Mize, a 2010 alum, was on the last Junior Worlds team, and Chase Snead, a current junior, tried out.
In looking at All-State nominees, I think that Snead (the layer-outer and the best dump cover that I have seen this high school season), Trent Cooper (the huck runner-downer with really, really impressive hands), and [I believe] Jason Luster (their main thrower) should represent Woodside. On the YHB end, I think Jay Boyle (tournament MVP as voted on by all of the Open coaches, Junior Worlds 2012), Grayson Sanner (stepped up huge in the air and as a cutter all weekend), and Sam Fenstermacher (another big cutter for us who hucked well and helped a lot on the endzone line) shined the most. I don’t know if that last spot should go to someone from another team (Ben Green from Herndon High School comes to mind, but Herndon didn’t come to States) or someone else from Woodside or YHB.
I wish that I could report on the Girls division, but I only got to see about 5 girls points all weekend. YHB beat WT Woodson 13-3 in the final. The tournament MVP was YHB’s JoJo Emerson, who is heading to Ireland for Junior Worlds.
Luc Richard Mbah a Mute, a top NBA defender whose team, the Milwaukee Bucks, didn’t make the playoffs, offers eight thoughts on the remaining contenders. It’s hard to gauge how candid he is being, but I think it’s sincere and certainly insightful. It’d be sick to get a top ultimate player who either recently retired or missed Nationals to do this in the weeks leading up to Sarasota.
This week two of the leading Callahan contenders (or, more properly, their teams) released their entries in what’s by now a genre so defined that Luther’s Eric Johnson’s could be titled simply ‘Callahan Video.’ To watch them in succession is to appreciate just how different two extraordinary ultimate players can be. Pitt’s immaculate Alex Thorne, who would apparently consider it impolite to make his cutters actually jump, gives the impression that between throwing perfectly weighted hucks and velvet breaks he might plausibly compose a fugue in D or a monogram on Basquiat.
EJ’s video, by contrast, has all the bloody-mindedness you’d expect from a player who, RSD informs us, once field-dressed a roadkill deer on the way to a tournament. It’s a typical North Central video, in other words: most of the non-Nexgen games are played in several obvious layers of clothing, beneath skies promising to follow wind with frozen rain. The editors make an explicit point of rewinding impacts—where Thorne seems too composed to leave his feet, EJ bounces off the ground after a layout, then bounces again in slow motion. If Thorne’s video presents Frisbee as a series of geometric proofs, with each goal neatly labeled and followed by a QED, Johnson’s (aided by the robust linearity of his play, especially present in a hammer that seems more punched than thrown yet still lands perfectly in scoring hands) imagines the sport as primarily a physical process, one settled by the weight of tendons, bones, and straining muscles.
Yet in the race for the college men’s Callahan 2012, awarded to ‘the personification of the ideal ultimate player,’ the most convincing clip so far seems[1] to have been neither Thorne’s museum of perfection nor Johnson’s gallery of grisly domination. Instead, it’s a thirteen-second clip in which the advertised player jogs four steps, catches a dump, and makes one throw. It’s Georgia Tech’s Nick Lance, in his white hat, throwing a 25-yard inside-out scoober, flat as you like, into the break corner of the endzone against Tennessee—at sectionals[2].
Why should this one throw have greater purchase on our imagination than the montages prepared for two of the sport’s best-known names? Partially it’s the sheer majesty of the throw. If the average viewer couldn’t throw all of Thorne’s hucks or earn all of EJ’s layout Ds, he’s probably pretty sure he could do one. To do it all the time is the mark of an extraordinary player, but not necessarily of a mysterious player.
But Lance’s scoober comes from a place most of us won’t ever go. It’s a perfect conspiracy of vision, strength, and technique, one that most players couldn’t replicate even in the experimental minutes before practice. It’s a throw, in other words, that goes beyond its viewers, that appears miraculous—not least because Lance seems before, during, and after throwing it to treat it as an absolutely casual occurrence, something he was expecting before his dump cut and worthy of no special celebration. He’s throwing a scoober, but he’s touching the Frisbee sublime.
But just as it goes beyond its viewers, it may also mirror their understanding of the game. The rules of Frisbee dictate that every goal have at least a shadow of perfection in it—but for most players this perfection is more aspired to than achieved. We struggle through points, throw turnovers we don’t intend, are beaten sometimes. But at the end of the weekend we remember the few moments when it all happened together, when the cut was right and so was the throw, when the hammer didn’t hang in the wind but just flew through it, when we played as we imagine. If Lance, in that video, personifies an ideal ultimate player, it’s the one we all remember ourselves as when we’re sore on Tuesday afternoon—the one whose weekend is distilled to a single moment of transcendence.
Either of Thorne’s or Johnson’s videos would, in 2010, have been extraordinary—but it seems a genre need only exist to become outdated. Both videos seem to assume the key task in winning the Callahan is to prove how many plays the candidate has made. But the exceptional videos this year are of Lance’s scoober, and of Michigan’s Paula Seville, who took the innovative step of including actual testimonials from Michelle Ng, Kyle Weisbrod, and her co-captain Kelsey DeLave. The result is a video which, while lacking both the demonstrated excellence of the male contenders’ and the sublimity of Lance’s scoober, makes better than any previous the case that its subject is ‘the personification of the ideal ultimate player.’
Next year it seems likely that all the nominating teams will learn from this, and will post both highlights and reflections from teammates. Duluth’s Jay Drescher, this year, could probably snag a good few votes with a video like Paula’s—a video that’s finally learned the lesson of Joe Kershner, who won the Callahan on the strength of a great RSD post and one of the all-time best Vegas performances. What lesson? That you win the Callahan with mystery rather than with iMovie, with your scoober rather than your flick, and with your story rather than your vertical.
[1] On the admittedly-unsound basis of RSD chatter, which has been very impressed by the one and mostly indifferent to the others.
[2] There’s another GT video out there, featuring Lance and one of his cutters—but it’s an array of jump balls and grainy skies with nothing like the visceral impact of the Tennessee Scoober.
20 Days of Nationals and the 2012 College Tour are presented by Spin Ultimate
For most ultimate players, the season ends at Regionals. There’s talk of Nationals early in the year, but by the time April rolls around the seniors are more committed to bars than they are practice, the star freshman has plunged into frat life, and everyone is swamped with finals, papers, and portfolios. You might go farther than last year or get a big win over a Conference rival, but finishing atop the pile would require the guy who can’t catch to suddenly have sticky hands, the turnover machine of a handler to spend the weekend in a moment of Zen, and the entire team to play “our game” all at the same time. It’s all an impossible dream.
But for Minnesota-Duluth Northern Lights, it became a reality at last weekend’s North Central Regionals when they beat Wisconsin-Milwaukee 13-10 to take fifth place and the region’s final bid to the College Championships.
“It’s still hitting me in waves,” said Duluth captain Jay Drescher. “To be honest I didn’t think we had a great shot at making it. But we played our cards perfectly, Mikwaukee upset Iowa on universe point, and with Milwaukee tired, our fresher legs pulled away in the second half.”
In a five-bid region, Drescher and his fellow captains knew that there would be plenty of chances to fight on. Just four wins would get them into Nationals, so in both pool play against Wisconsin and in the second place bracket against Iowa, Northern Lights started at full strength but rested its starters when nothing got going in the second half. “We knew that we just needed one key win,” he said. “Our goal was to play for the fifth place game and put forth full force against a demoralized and tired team.”
Though Milwaukee broke upwind to start the game, Duluth’s plan got back on track when Northern Lights took the first half 8-6 and broke three time in a row to start the second. “We let off a few breaks before the game ended, but felt very confident with a five-point lead as soft cap went on,” said Drescher. “We made Duluth history.”
To be clear, this was not supposed to happen. Duluth was the seven seed overall and the third seed in its pool. It went 1-2 in pool play. Had an eleventh-hour bid to Regionals not come through because a few Division III teams declined theirs, Northern Lights’ season would have ended when they finished third at Northwood Conferences!* And until 2011 national semifinalist Iowa went down to Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the fifth-place semifinal, Duluth was still a long shot in just about everybody’s book. Before last weekend, the closest that the team had ever come to getting out of the region was a 2009 11-10 loss to Minnesota in the second place bracket (Minnesota went on to lose 11-10 to Luther, who was making its first run to Nationals and featured a freshman named Eric Johnson). But here’s Minnesota-Duluth, tickets punched to Boulder.
Northern Lights will be a bit different from other teams once they get there, and not just because of the crazy jerseys. For one, the team doesn’t make cuts because it can’t afford to. “We have to take everybody because you don’t know who is going to progress and be a good player,” said Drescher. “I’ve seen guys that seem worthless come up through the ranks and start on the O line.” As a result, Duluth avoids top tier tournaments like Centex and Easterns because “we’d have to play our top guys at the expense of development.” Also, Duluth’s lack of high school recruits and a roster comprised of all but one Minnesota native make it difficult to gain outside influence. “We rely solely on veterans to pass down their experience to new players.”
So while opponents at Nationals rely on dedicated coaches and players that have been throwing since middle school, Duluth will take pride in what it has achieved through years of internal development. “This is the accomplishment of an entire program, not just one season,” said Drescher. “When we qualified, the first people I found and hugged were alumni.”
Though many expected Iowa to round out the North Central Region’s five Nationals teams (the other four are Carleton, Luther, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), Duluth’s success is actually a testament to the North Central’s deep strength. “We are the fastest growing and most competitive region,” said Drescher. “We can compete, and I know we’re going to notch some wins.”
To prepare, Duluth will move this and next week’s practices closer to most of its players’ homes in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. At school, the team practiced two or three times per week depending on field slots that the administration assigned on a weekly basis. Most Northern Lights players are also flying to Boulder early to acclimate to the high elevation, a move that Drescher pushed for because of his experience at Colorado Cup while playing for Sub Zero in 2009.
It’s tough to know exactly how Duluth will perform at Nationals. But in reflecting on Regionals, Drescher noted a similar uncertainty. “I could see the path all the way to the backdoor game,” he said. “And then it ended.” While many share the dream of turning it on at the right time and making it out of Regionals alive, few stop to consider what comes next. But as the Northern Lights Twitter account reads, one thing is certain: “It’ll be hard to play a team with nowhere to go but up.”
*Drescher noted that the team would have earned another bid for the Northwoods Conference had it submitted an official USA Ultimate roster for Southerns. “None of our captains knew that we needed an original roster for each sanctioned tournament. It would have been a rough year if we had been done at Conferences due to captain error, but we found out before we played Minnesota [for second place] that we were going to Regionals.”
USA Ultimate Membership and Sport Development Manager Anna Schott provided the following: ”Teams are required to start their rosters in the online system by Monday so that they get the email that I send to all teams through the rostering system on Tuesday morning (that email has a reminder that the final roster is due at 5pm). If any teams do not have their roster started by Monday, the tournament organizer is required to provide me with an email contact for that team so that I can send the email to them directly. The tournament organizer has access to the online rostering system for their event so at any time they can see which teams have a roster in and which teams do not.”
Think of Inside Breaks as a discussion forum for best practices in competitive ultimate. Hopefully by trading observations on the players, coaches, teams, organizers, and tournaments around us, we will all become better students of the game.
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