Defensive Positioning

I had a question come in from an old Fuguer (who bytheway need a good, dumb name like Geezergy.) She asked a series of questions related to defensive positioning:
1. DIP D - can you tell me when this is ideal?

2. Having a cushion - also, when to use verses DIP?

3. Poaching on the dump for the first few seconds, then getting right back on

4. Switches and dump D, too.
I'm going to get to all of it, but it is a lot, so it may take a bit.

Before talking about dip and cushions and switching, I'd like to cover basic, fundamental face-guarding positioning. The classic position is:
1. Between your player and the disc....
2. shifted half a step to the open lane. (Not the open side, the open lane.)
Take a look at this clip from the 07 Sockeye-Bravo final. Once the disc moves to Moses on the sideline, there are a series of Sockeye out cuts running down that sideline. The Bravo positioning is perfect - giving a half step deep and shading slightly to the open lane. Well, until Beau gets caught napping.
Something to consider about this standard club-ultimate defense: it is high risk, high reward. Championship caliber ultimate teams are completing 95% of their passes and 60% of their possessions. A turnover is a BIG deal. All the players are constantly making decisions about the percentages. It's not a question of open or covered. Offensively, it's a question of can I hit this throw (because the receiver is open for something.) Defensively, it's a question of limiting options to what the thrower doesn't want to throw (because you can't stop everything.) In this clip, the defenders are limiting the thrower to a straight-away 40 yard touch throw downwind. Not an easy throw and it doesn't come until Chase has a 5-step cushion.

If you are playing college ultimate or co-ed or city league or something where the completion and conversion percentages are lower, you might want to use something other than classic positioning and I'll talk about those next time.

Solstice

I went to watch Solstice Sunday, when the weather was lovely (unlikely Saturday's deluge) and was rewarded by a number of interesting games and a Sockeye over Furious final. All in all, things look about like they did last year in terms of relative position and strength of teams.

Sockeye
They looked very impressive in the final after a very lackluster semi over little brother Voodoo. The semifinal had all the markings of a disinterested bully letting some frustrated nerd kick him in the shins for a while, knowing he could pound skinny-four-eyes when he felt like it. (I didn't really follow it, instead focusing on the Rhino-Furious semi.)
Sockeye looks good, athletic and deep. They are very young and what experience (Moses, MC, Talbot, Bestock, Fleming) they have is mostly playing offense. They played a good mix of junk and man-to-man in the final. Furious lacks a great thrower and that made all the junk that much more effective. When it worked, it looked brilliant. When it didn't, it looked like crap. That's junk for ya. Offensively, Furious couldn't manage Sockeye's long double cuts which led to a number of wide open huck goals. It is also a testament to Sockeye's stack discipline that these cuts stayed open since they are so long to develop.
There is a lot of upside for this team. Their young talent is really yet to find a place on the team. Julian CW played great and had a consistent role on offense, but Chris CK, DSky and Simon are still looking for a spot to contribute. Sockeye also went through the tournament without most of their bigs: Nord was AWOL, Rehder and the Dutchman on the bench with injuries.

Fury
Same shit, different year. They still look more composed, athletic, conditioned and confident than everyone else. For the most part, they play the same game they always have, but I do have a few comments.
1. They are a very cutter dominated team. Their handlers are very good, but it is the cutters that drive the engine. Their cutters are fast and well conditioned, so they move and move and move. They are very good at using shiftiness to get open. Shiftiness meaning they slide a half-lane one direction or another away from their defender to create separation. The thrower is then responsible for a little break, usually a slight inside-out.
2. As they have gotten younger in the last few years, they are more and more a man-to-man team and less and less of the zone dominated team they were.
3. They threw four or five goals into space past face guarding defenders when the cutter was on the run. From a defensive perspective, this is really scary. From an offensive perspective, beautiful and startling.
4. The scariest thing about this team is that there is no sign they will falter. The great DoG teams of the 90s finally fell down because the bulk of the team was over 35, so they lost to a younger, hungrier and more athletic Condors. Fury just reloads and gets younger and stays as good.

Furious
This is a solid team that is lacking any A+ players and relying on defenders, role players and supporting players to carry the entire load. Facing a man-to-man situation, they weren't able to create easy openings, allowing defenders to stay home and not help. As I mentioned earlier, they are lacking a great thrower so they aren't able to consistently challenge the outside of a junk defense either. They are quite good defensively, but don't have the depth (or won't play it) to sustain a push across two games. They came from 4-8 down in the semis to win 15-12 over Rhino and that really limited their ability to make a push against the Fish in the final.

Riot
This team is very young. A huge portion of this team graduated from college in the last three years (if they went at all) and almost all of the players they are using as handlers. They are working on some new things offensively and struggled with it. They weren't able to generate consistent movement up front and when they did, it didn't connect with the cutters downfield. In general, they were lacking deep cuts. In the final, they got rattled and frustrated and then Fury just rolled over them. The positive for Riot is that they are still way on the bottom of the learning curve. With the youth and speed they have, they should be able to get better and better.

Rhino
Ugh. Up 8-4 at halftime in the Semis against Furious, they choked it away. First they let Furious sneak back in and make it a game. Then they let Furious score 4 in a row to win 12-15. Ouch. The crazy part is that Rhino willed it to happen. In the years before Jam's 2008 title, Double Happy/Jam had a rep for coughing it up when it mattered. At Worlds in 2002, after Sockeye came back from 10-14 to beat them 15-14, a gleeful Condor came up to me and said, "It's not you, you just have to be there when it happens." (Thanks for the complement.) This game felt exactly the same. A good team like Furious is going to make a push. They won't roll over at halftime. A good team responds. You take the punches, you sag on the ropes and then you come out swinging. As soon as Rhino felt the push, they started thinking, "Not again." They talked more on the line. Their body language was defeated. And this was while they still had the lead!
Give some credit to Furious. Led by Morgan Hibbert, they played great defense refusing to give up a comeback cut and challenging the Rhino players to go deep. When they did, the markers forced bad throws and bad timing. When Furious got the turn, Rhino's defense was lackluster and Furious banked everyone.
The good news for Rhino is that the talent is there to beat Furious. (They did on Saturday.) The question is can they beat Furious while fighting with themselves.

All the other teams
Didn't see them. Talked to Kira a bit about UBC and Traffic. They were pleased to have hung with Riot in the showcase game, but sad to have been crushed by Fury. Voodoo looked surprisingly good against the Fish in the semis. Underground looked surprisingly good against Riot in the semis.

Struggles

I'm still having a pretty rough time with how our Nationals went.

We built a team identity that was incredibly volatile. When we played well, we were unbeatable. When we played poorly, like in the semis, we lost and lost badly.

I can't escape the feeling that this is a coaching mistake. Meaning my mistake. To build a team that you know contains a flaw seems foolish. It was a team built to be great, not good. If we'd played great the whole way through Nationals, I would be feeling vindicated right now.

I want another month with this team. Come back to Eugene. Back to practice. Iron out the kinks. Be great.

Spirit of the Game Committee

I have been crazy swamped lately trying to get ready for Nationals. I have been watching video obsessively and trying to tie up the loose ends in the other parts of my life so I can go with a clear conscience. I'm going to avoid predictions and speculations about Nationals beyond saying that there is a ton of parity. A ton. When the dust settles on Monday, we'll anoint a champ and anoint the 'good' teams and the 'bad' ones, but if we've learned anything this year, it's that one tournament doesn't mean much.

However, I do have something totally unrelated that I want to talk about before I leave for Boulder on Thursday morning. USA Ultimate has decided to revive the Spirit of the Game Committee and I was asked (by Meredith Tosta) to serve on it and I agreed to do so. Here are the other members:

Meredith Tosta
Will Deaver
David Barkan
Jim Schoettler
Leila Tunnel
Catherine Greenwald

I am posting now because I'd like to solicit feedback on what people's thoughts are. Nationals is a great place to network and talk about stuff because it's one of the few places where we are all together. I am a little unclear on our mandate. Will and Meredith are swamped organizing D-III Nationals, D-I Nationals, Easterns and Westerns so there hasn't been much work or discussion yet, but I imagine it will pick up post-Nationals. I am beginning to work on ideas and thoughts about what can and/or should be done. I am trying to keep my ideas pretty general at this stage. There's no point getting detailed before there is any overarching vision.

Here are the two main ideas I am mulling over:
1. We need practice to back up theory. I teach middle school and we use the PBIS (here) model to instruct behavior. People need specific directions to learn behavior. Right now, the USAU's Ten Things You Should Know About Spirit are the most specific instructions in existence and they are still very general. What would more specific instructions look like in ultimate? How could it be delivered?
2. Focus on coaches. More and more college teams are driven by their coaches. As our sport matures and coaches begin to outlast players we will see more and more programs like the Stanford women where two and half generations of women have passed through with the same coach. Those coaches have a profound impact on their team's culture.

What are your ideas? You can comment them here, email me directly (louburruss@gmail.com) or find me in Boulder. I am not sure how much down time I will have, but I'll have some and I'd love to talk shop.

PS - I am quite aware of the irony involved in my membership on this committee. I'm not quite sure what else to say about it, but I thought I'd better mention it.

Heat and Sideline Safety

Here is the text of a letter I sent USAU regarding heat, sun and player safety. I will add this: if you are playing in Boulder Memorial day, you should have a plan to deal with the heat.

Will, Beth and Jeff,

I am writing you all in an official capacity because I have concerns about athlete and coach safety at Nationals in Boulder. This will be my third trip to Boulder as a coach for college Nationals. (99 and 08 were the other two.) In each of those years, my team had a player suffer from serious heat and/or altitude sickness. The player in 99 was sick to the point of vomiting and should have been hospitalized. (I wasn't informed until well after the fact.) The player in 08 was hospitalized and missed the last day of play. Although I don't know the details of hospitalizations and missed games throughout the tournament, I know that heat stroke was a major concern last year as well. I banished my own team to the tent during play to get them off of the sidelines and out of the heat and sun, but ended up suffering heat stroke myself and spent three hours in bed under cold towels on Saturday after pool play.

There are two policies I would like you to adjust and reconsider.

The first is the limit to two sideline support staff. With most teams at 20+ players and at least one coach, it is unrealistic to expect that 2 people can support 21 throughout a full day, let alone four full days. While it is important to keep foolish alumni under control (I am a CUT alum after all...) I think that this could be accomplished in a way that still allowed an appropriate and safe level of support for the teams. Please consider raising this limit to 4 non-players.

The second is the shade tent policy. It is unrealistic to fit 20+ people into a single tent, unless you squeeze them in, which defeats the purpose of cooling shade. Each team should have the opportunity to access two tents.

Thank you,
Lou Burruss
Oregon Fugue

Regionals Recap

I wrote one for USAU here. I've gt just a couple of comments that didn't make the general report.

First, the format issue is so weird. The USAU is trying to balance a zillion different concerns in their formats. Well, at least three. First, they are trying to get everyone a reasonable number of games which means at least five. (No matter that teams are forfeiting because they're worked over by the end.) Second, they are trying to determine the perfect quarterfinal match-ups entirely within the framework of the tournament. This often means exhaustive pool play and crossovers. Third, they love elimination games. (No matter that round robin ranks everyone.) There are some real advantages to this approach, particularly the elimination games. One and done is a nice way to settle the issue of who goes with some clarity. The real problem is the soft pool play. It encourages teams to throw games. The latest controversy emerges out of the South-Central open division, but teams have been 'throwing' games for a long time. (Quick aside: is it throwing a game to sit all your starters? Is it throwing a game to play equal playing time? Is it throwing a game to intentionally turf the first pass every possession?) The real issue is that there is fluff in the schedule. When there is fluff, people will take advantage of it.

Second, the 'coaching experiment' I referred to in my report was to play O and D lines. There are two dangers in playing O and D and we got torpedoed by both. The system only works as long as the O team is scoring consistently. (UBC went on an 8-3 second half run.) The split of O and D creates divisions within the team. Essentially, it creates two teams that are pasted together. Managing this division is one of the big personnel challenges on any team with an O and D split. Fugue needed only one day to discover that we hated it.

Preview + ReStructure Thoughts

I wrote a preview for USA Ultimate which you can read here. There were a couple of things I wanted to comment on that didn't make it into the article.

I hadn't yet talked to Whitman when I wrote the article for USAU, but I had been curious about their decision to not attend D-III Regionals and Nationals. Here's what their captain, Kelley Hall said:
"There wasn't a DIII regionals this year with the restructuring otherwise our decision may have been different. Unfortunately DIII Nationals is very far away and very expensive, and just wasn't feasible for our team. In addition, we collectively decided that we wanted to take on the challenge of playing some of the best teams in the nations just to test ourselves and grow from the experience."

I really like the idea of D-III. I think it will take off in 4-5 years, but right now it doesn't seem to be hitting on all cylinders yet. There is a level of commitment that teams have to cross to be a nationally traveling team and most D-III teams aren't there yet. It costs a lot of money to run a season that features a 5-7 tournaments. This commitment has to be fed occasionally by a return on investment i.e. a trip to Nationals. Most D-III teams (outside of Carleton and the New England) haven't in a position to compete for D-I Nationals and so they have never built up the financial commitment for a big-time season. As D-III teams experience success at the D-III level, we should see a slow increase in stability and participation.

The other team that didn't make the preview (because they declined their bid) was Utah. I had a long conversation with their captain, Cricket, who had organized enough women to drive the 16 hours (!!!) for a one day, 4-game Conference tournament. Had they accepted their bid to Regionals they would have needed to fly or to drive 21 hours to Burlington. Put Regionals in Vancouver (which will happen) and that's a 23 hour drive and a border crossing. Ugh.

The restructuring process was very good at managing and anticipating growth in the east, where there are a lot of teams and look to be a lot more. It did a much poorer job of managing the size issues in the west (which isn't getting any smaller.) In a lot of ways, our region only works because there aren't really any teams in the Big Sky. Should they ever get enough momentum, then we suddenly will have a pretty big (sky) problem. The men are already dealing with this; Utah is sending a team to Regionals. The South Central's version of this problem blew up on rsd a few weeks ago as Texas A&M was greatly indignant about the addition of Colorado to their region. (I can't find the link, sorry.)

Within these regions, it is very difficult to have growth when a new team is looking at a 16 hour drive to play. It just won't happen. They'll get a little momentum and then - poof! it's gone.

Here's a simple solution:
1. Two new regions: Big Sky North (MT, ID, WY, AB, SA) and Four Corners (NM, AZ, CO, UT)
2. Twenty-four team Nationals
You fix the geographic problems in the Northwest and South Central. You provide the extra bids to cushion the expansion. And three extra bids to further cushion the inaccuracy of results that will occur from time to time. (CO is going to send a team 90% of years anyway.)