Rookie Practices

We've been running practices 4 nights a week, 2 for the rookies and 2 for the A team tryouts. It's a lot of practice, and it's a lot of practice to plan. Bish, Trog, Yugo and I have been dividing up the duty, but it's tough coordinate a consistent message for the week.

It's been kind of tough to go from club regionals to teaching people that have never played ultimate before. The two worlds couldn't be more different, and it can be kind of frustrating at times. I get really excited when I see our big players make plays because I'm looking ahead to the Spring.

Today, though, I was totally happy when our rookies took the lessons of the day and executed them really well in our scrimmages. We were working on teaching them to recognize power position, throw dish passes, and make cuts from the front of the stack in our endzone offense.

We ran a dish to huck drill for probably 15 minutes, and did some mini end zone games. During the scrimmage, I noticed people when I got the disc in power position, there was almost always someone streaking deep for me. Our vets handler movement improved from running the handler set on the endzone as well. It was very satisfying to see such immediate results from our designed practice.

I think our drills have been giving too much autonomy to the rookies as players on the field. We should be designing drills for them that teach the simplest processes that veteran players don't even think about as they do. We forget that rookies don't have the basic instincts to cut for the swing or for the break throw.

I think it was someone from Florida that wrote on The Huddle that you have to put your rookies in the position to succeed by giving them the tools that they need right now. It's a balance between teaching rookies what they need to do to win at a tournament this weekend and what will make them the best possible player a year from now. For right now, I think we need to focus on what will make them win this weekend -- the most basic fundamentals.

Once we start playing our tournaments, they'll see what ultimate is all about and they'll improve by leaps and bounds. We met tonight and picked our teams for Sandwich Day this weekend. There was some smack talk and I think people are pretty excited. And our team names are awesome:

Goat-c, Bicurious George, and Up Town Brown.