Mario O'Brien is the RISE UP founder. He is joined on certain legs of this tour by Alex Snyder and Ryan Purcell.
RISE UP is all about teaching ultimate communities the skills and drills used by the best teams in the world - through videos and in person.
But there is a second goal in the pipeline: build coaching and leadership skills. Both of these aspects were in play at the Australian clinics.
In their Melbourne clinic, Mario and Alex spent Saturday coaching around 40 female players.
Also, ten coaches attended. They weren't playing. They were observing the coaching practices of Mario and Alex, reflecting on them, and identifying the important features of team culture, drill progressions, focussed scrimmages and providing feedback.
This development of coaches is critical. More and more teams recognise the value of coaches, and have appointed them. Mario writes about this from the American perspective, while in Australia, the Dingoes, STBAU, Heads of State, Chilly Masters and Rabble have all recently appointed head coaches after not having one.
Appointing coaches is only the first step.
There is a need in ultimate to explicitly train those coaches into expert coaches, by giving them communities of coaches. These coaches need to peer observe, and reflect and plan together.
Many aspects of ultimate have lots of time and effort put into them: intercity and international competition, fitness, videos, news/blogs. But what programs or resources exist for turning adequate coaches into fantastic ones?
Well, not much. So Mario is stepping up to that opening. And he has the leadership training and ultimate experience to build something great.
Who else will step up?
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