The RISE UP World Tour

Right now RISE UP is on its world tour, visiting these five countries.

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?

How Alex Snyder throws

The captain of San Francisco's Fury and the 2013 USA World Games team, Alex Snyder, has a pretty good bio in ultimate. I don't know who is a more accomplished athlete in our sport.

So how does a top level player throw a forehand? If you watch a video or in person, it's all over in 1 second.

This gif will let you see the actual mechanics.

What is happening when Alex throws?

Alex steps forward. A lot. She said that she does this even if the mark is there, throwing past the plane of the marker. Most markers will step back, foul her, or allow her to throw through the gap.

For a lot of players, a big step forward will swing their throw to their left or give it too much outside in - their hips will rotate during the throw. Alex doesn't. She winds up her torso before the throw, and this brings her right shoulder a long way back. It then drives forward in the throwing action, but her hips don't rotate relative to her feet.

Her left arm is out from her body, to counterbalance her throw, and create space from the marker.

Alex has a good range of motion - her right elbow is leading her right hand as she starts her throw. She can lunge forward a good distance. She can twist her torso.

Alex is a good example to learn from.

If you come along to a RiseUp clinic in Australia this week, you'll learn many other things from Alex too. She knows how to coach, and is here to share her knowledge of training for ultimate.

Looking wider

Its good to see ultimate communities getting new ideas from outside. Four examples:

For the upcoming Australian Juniors camp in January, the AFDA is flying in a US coach.

Ra from Singapore is planning to bring in foreign coaches to train up his coaches and participate in a junior camp in 2009.

I hear Colombians are flying in top coaches from the US Northwest.

The proliferation of blogs connects local communities to foreign ones.

So the clear message is that plane flights are more affordable in the twenty-first century? Well, that and the point that ultimate communities are learning from expertise outside their postcode, and outside their country. Drawing on foreign expertise is no longer just about playing foreign teams - there is more than that now.

The Australian Sports Commission is pushing sports organisations to use the resources and existing courses of other sports in their coaching programs - part of becoming a football coach can involve attending a cricket coaching course and doing an online ASC course. So ultimate may continue the trend of looking beyond conventional boundaries, in the field of coaching development.

A new coaching textbook: Essential Ultimate

There are two folks in the US I would like to meet.

They are Michael Baccarini and Tiina Booth. Both are high school ultimate coaches. High school coaches who have coached teams to multiple National Championships and World Championships. They also run cutting edge youth camps and train up ultimate coaches.

So I really enjoyed reading the book they have just written: Essential Ultimate. It is a fantastic resource for coaches and players alike.

My review is at Amazon. I make a few comparisons to Parinella and Zazslow's "Ultimate Techniques and Tactics" in the review, in case you have seen that book.

Essential Ultimate is available through Amazon, or through the publisher Human Kinetics here in Australia.

Viewing plays online

Freisey prompted me to search for online videos/animations on ultimate tactics, plays and drills. Here is what I found.

• The videopapers I have spoken about before
  
• Java animations of 85 plays/drills, plus the ability to make your own.
  
• Flash animations of a few plays, with the ability to drawn your own "coming soon"
  

Got any others?

Crikey, ultimate can be played by 100 000 people world wide for several decades with elite teams dedicating small fortunes to this sport... but we don't have focussed programs to share and distribute plays and tactics. The textbooks and online tools are only just emerging, taking baby steps. I guess this is usually driven by the dollar in most sports.

Conventions to challenge

Conventions get challenged at the cutting edge of a sport, ie the elite level.

These conventions include those relating to training methods, tactics, attitudes and organisation.

Look at what used to be convention in ultimate, 15 or so years ago:

Once in zone, stay in zone. Stacks are vertical. Be patient against zone O.

Nowadays, these are no longer hard and fast "rules", merely suggestions for beginners.

Here are a few paradigms. I bet a proportion of these will no longer be set-in-stone paradigms, before too long. Maybe teams are experimenting with them right now.

• mark on the open side of your man
  
• stack upfield
  
• don't reveal your plays to the opposition
  
• throw to an open player
  
• look at your dump on high counts
  
• defensive plays are decided before you pull

Its a lot of fun to try new ideas - and its fascinating to see a paradigm be changed.

Applying this to that

I have started my new job. I am redesigning a first year electronics subject, specifically looking at how the subject is taught, and ways to improve the teaching and learning.

When I read a theory or case study on physics education, or talk to a colleague, I can often see how it relates to coaching ultimate.

If you have different topics or environments, but similar techniques, you really start thinking about those techniques. So I am getting new perspectives on teaching each day, thanks to my two backgrounds: science and ultimate.

Perhaps I should add a third... or fourth...

I want to test my new science education methods in the ultimate world.

Looking to Kindy

After hearing about another person's experience at a workplace seminar, I tried to summarise what I see missing from many learning sessions. And I came up with Kindergarten.

At a corporate seminar, you may listen to a talk. Unless the speaker is a gifted storyteller (not speaker, but a storyteller), the ideas or skills they want to you to understand or learn are generally lost one hour later. A quality learning experience requires putting the lesson into practice. You do not become an acclaimed world-class pianist by hearing someone describe how to play piano. You do not become a successful accountant by listening to someone talking about best practice in accountancy.

The learner needs a range of inputs to work with. And they need to interact and practise.

Adults are no different to children in learning, except we adults have learnt to hide our boredom and suck it in. The attention span of an adult is not that different to that of a child. If a talker is boring us, we adults suck it in and try to focus on them again, but it is an uphill battle. We usually avoid talking to the person next to us in a lecture, or playing with the hair of the person in front of us.

But children in kindergarten provide a great reminder of how learning works. If a kindy kid is bored, you will see it! They will stop listening and walk away, or fidget, or pull Freddy's hair, or find worms and put them in their pocket. It is a fantastic visual reminder to the teacher that they want to interact.

A kindergarten teacher knows this. Consider Mrs Schloogle. She will talk to her class of kindergartern children for 30 seconds at most (unless she is storytelling - a different thing altogether). Then it is time to have the kids actally play the recorder, not just hear instructions. (Or painting a picture of their house. Or build a Lego house together.) The teacher knows that little Billy may not have every instruction needed, and may put the wrong end of the recorder in his mouth. But that can be quickly corrected one-on-one. Billy will know that Mrs Schloogle cares, and that he didn't get bored.

So if you are teaching, or helping someone learn, remember Mrs Schloogle. Remember Billy. Remember kindergarten, and treat your audience as if they were 4 years old. Less talking and more interaction is a good direction for better learning. The biggest barrier is inventing or researching ways for the audience to interact with the content.