Project Play Colombia

Project Play Colombia is a project worth checking out. There is a blog and a facebook page.

The aim is to develop conflict resolution skills in ultimate players while teaching the skills of ultimate.

The project is run by Lucho, a mover and shaker on the Colombian ultimate scene who has recently returned from the fertile fields of Vancouver ultimate.

Laurel, Nicky and I will be his fellow coaches for a series of clinics this week in the cities of Cali and Ibagué. We will run clinics with established men's, women's and university clubs.

A proposal for building stronger spirit

My last post talked about my observations with spirit in Colombia and, to an extent, Venezuela. Between my arrival here in Colombia, the recent Huddle blogposts on spirit and the discussion on line assistants in Australia, the topic seems, well, topical.

There are several factors at work when spirit goes bad.

I believe one of the key ones is a “them and us” attitude. A minority of players adopt a mindset that individuals, or other teams in general, have behaved poorly and are likely to do so again in the future. These other people are framed as “them” in comparison to “us”.

“They” are cheats; “they” often play dirty; “they” think “we” shouldn't have won that last match, but “they” are wrong.

This attitude is built by what ultimate is available.

In Australia, players train and compete with elite clubs during the elite season. It is “them” and “us”.

But, importantly, there is also Other Ultimate, which elite men take part in. There are weekly mixed city leagues. There are numerous mixed tournaments. There are hat tournaments. There are numerous training camps and selection events prior to World Championships. And Australia tends to do well in spirit scores at international tournaments. A bit of a leap to assume causation, but the extent of Other Ultimate in other countries and their reputation for spirit seems to roughly correlate, at first glance.

And this Other Ultimate forces elite players to play with, socialise with and befriend other players outside their club. Ultimate becomes a community, moreso than a collection of clubs where some players happen to know other players, and socialise when they happen to meet.

In a true community, “them” and “us” dissolve into just “us”.

So this is a theory. And there are some facts I have pointed out that seem to support it.

I don't think refining spirit score systems or adding observers address this underlying issue.

I have a different proposal.

The proposal is for the countries and regions that have the desire, to build community through “other ultimate”.

The national organisations and local leaders can build “other ultimate” through many means: ask elite clubs to host hat tournaments, build an annual calendar where mixed ultimate and open/womens ultimate doesn't clash, subsidise travel or minimise travel costs in general, expand selection and development events for National teams, hold gala dinners where a broad range of folk can attend, create incentives for the open club season to be restricted to certain months. When US players head to Kaimana and Paganello on teams with a real mix of players, as they regularly do, this is a positive thing.

And a big "goodonya" for everyone who has built and is building this ultimate.

In the end, with Other Ultimate in place, it's much less likely that Joe Handler will yell abuse at Fred Receiver and complain about Fred when he is in the pub that night, if Fred is on his mixed league team and played a hat tournament with him last year.

Spirit in Colombia

In my two weeks in Colombia, I have seen some worrying incidents relating to spirit in the open division. I have also had a number of Colombians and non-Colombians recount incidents of very poor spirit to me, from intense arguing and border-line cheating to pushing, shoving and punching on the field.

My previous experiences with South American men's ultimate were playing a very fiery Venezuela team and a more subdued Colombian team at Worlds 2008. I also saw that South American teams had very low rankings in Spirit scores for Worlds 2008 in a number of divisions, particularly Open.

The poor spirit has arisen particularly in certain team match-ups and from certain players.

Many other games across Regionals and Nationals had excellent spirit, and this was acknowledged after the game within the teams.

But in a way, spirit is a chain as strong as its weakest link.

Immediately after those disappointing quarterfinals at Nationals, I started talking to players about spirit. It seems to be evolving into a social research project worthy of several PhDs. The more people I talk to, the more I learn.

Many players are aware of the issues with spirit, and have pointed out a range of factors: the strong focus on club ultimate, the culture and history of Colombia (as this Columbian columnist discusses, this country has had "una cultura de justificación de la violencia y de la venganza"), the isolation from other international ultimate, and the lack of restraints or sanctions on those given power within teams.

In my next post, I'll offer an inkling of a proposal aimed at one of these factors. I have started to share this idea with the movers and shakers of Colombia during my time here, and see what they think of it. So far the responses have been supportive.

Colombian Nationals

The inaugaral Colombian National Championships wrapped up in Medellín yesterday.

This is the first time Colombia has had an official National Championships, and the tournament followed on from the series of Regional Championships held during the previous weekends.

The playing venues were across three locations: a university, a public recreation centre and the big sports stadiums of the city. Half were grass, half were astroturf (sintética).

Word of mouth culture is strong here. I briefly glimpsed a draw once, but otherwise it was a case of ask someone what the games were (much like driving around the city - you don't use a map, you just stop and ask for directions from strangers every few blocks).

Day 1 saw my team, Comunidad de Oso, win its two easier pool games. One comfortably and in the other we fell across the line to win. Playing time was shared reasonably equally across the team, so I got a lot of chances to get my frisbee legs in gear.

Every team seems to have 2-4 excellent throwers who can get open, and put up decent hucks or big hammers, plus lefty backhands. Its the quality of the upfield cutters and the consistency of execution that often determines the game.

Day 2 started well. We defeated another Bogotá team, Matanga. Their poaching was quite effective, especially that of one of their key defenders who got two blocks and was inches from two more. Personally I connected on a number of good breaks and hucks, so it was rewarding to make a big contribution to a team I was so new to.

Then came the quarterfinal. Oso were matched up against key Bogotá rivals, Euphoria, who we had beaten by a point in the Regionals final. In front of a vocal crowd in the stadium, Euphoria grab a lead early. Then trouble starts. One captain calls back-to-back travel calls on hucks from the other captain. The game is held up while one captain demands observers.

Almost ten minutes later the game restarts with the TD pulled in as an observer (he has never been one in his life - no Colombian has). But the calls and argue rain down with the actual rain that arrived. Fouls, yelling, travel, and no respect for the opinions or decisions of opponents. The issues derived from a few key players on each team, but no-one made any effort to cool down any of the hotheads.

Oso claw back to 12 all. However my interest in winning this game has dwindled. What incentive is there to win an arguing competition? I wanted to compete at ultimate. My thoughts circled around the question of what small contribution I, an Australian in Colombia, could make to address this abysmally spirited match. I resolved to talk with the teams post-game and see if they needed to talk to each other.

Euphoria win the last point, and celebrate with gusto, as Oso despondently leave the field. I asked a few Euphoria players post-game if they were happy to talk with Oso and they said yes. But Oso were scattered to the winds of dismay and the key players I found were in no mood to converse, as I judged it.

So I put my feet up, watched some ultimate, and pondered what I had just experienced. The game I watched was another quarterfinal: Matanga vs Aire. Unfortunately this was another poorly spirited game. The last two points took 20 minutes in total, and Aire won the game by a point, mostly because Matanga lost the competition of "who can call the disc back the most times with a dodgy call".

To top things off, there was no party at this tournament, unlike the vast majority of tournaments in Australia.

Day 3 was at least a new day.

Oso played off for 6th vs Mamuts, but we lost in a lacklustre effort.

The finals were in Estadio Atanasio Girardot (pictured), where Colombia had played Chile in the FIFA World Cup qualifying match the night before. It was a great venue but a crowd of 200 ultimate players in a stadium of 53 000 seats rattles around like a handful of marbles in a bathtub.

Revolution defeated Waijra in the women's final, while Euphoria toppled Kie, the top team in Medellin to take the men's title. Both games had decent spirit.

So the theme uppermost in my mind here in Colombia is Spirit of the Game. My next post or two will offer some more optimistic thoughts on spirit, and reveal some amazing work being done here in Colombian ultimate.

From the sidelines: The Unselected

The first 13 years of my ultimate career were a bit of a dream run. A number of factors gave me the chance to appear on representative teams for my state and country. I was on University Green and Gold teams, the Dingoes, and was selected to the demo games that have been held at Halibuts, Nationals and Melbourne Hats.

The last 12 months have been a turn-around – I have regularly joined the ranks of the unselected and benched.

Despite being a perspective that hasn't changed my opinions on selection events, methods and selectors, it has given me experience with emotions and thoughts of being on the outside, looking in. Indeed, I regularly considered that perspective when writing the AFDA Rep teams policy and Selectors Manual for the AFDA recently (useful for any team!).

The current example is that I am here in Colombia playing with a club team, Comunidad de Oso. I am a big unknown for Colombian players – overseas pickups are rare here, in comparison, to say Australia, where almost every university and club team has a recently arrived North American player.

Adding to the mix is that in games, every line is called. This a change from the self-managed playing time systems that I have usually experienced. In the past, those times when there have been lines called, it has been me calling them most of the time, as a captain or a coach, so when I do go to the bench, I have at least consulted myself!

So a few poor points in one training and one game have seen me down at the far end of the bench. I have aimed to take constructive steps: get a clear picture from the leadership of their thoughts, dump my frustration on friendly ears who will listen, be present if needed on-field, get some sideline Ds with talking, and get ready and in the right mindset for the next opportunity to show my game.

Let's see how the situation pans out from here...

A first look at ultimate in Colombia

Last weekend I attended the Regional Championships for Bogotá. The top bracket of teams played their games at the venue I was at.

There was parity among the men's teams unlike anything I have seen – the four games were each decided by one or two points, and no team dominated at any stage. The sponge effect (one team sucks up the strong players in its area) usually makes having multiple, even teams from one place very difficult – look at the US (especially the flux in the Philly to NY region) and Australia. But Bogotá has avoided this, which creates a great competitive environment to develop elite ultimate.

Colombian ultimate has a number of the features that are common hallmarks of well-organised, competitive ultimate: tape for sidelines, lush green fields, many coaches and stat-takers, and O and D lines. There were quirks though, such as sideline players regularly wandering up to 5 metres(!) onto the field during play, teams with only one water bottle between 20 players, and many teams with a hodge-podge of shirts and shorts instead of full matching uniforms.

In terms of style, the stand-out feature was a strong habit of poaching off dumps to defend the forward throwing lanes. Dumps could jog behind the disc to get a reset pass without breaking a sweat, and regularly did so.

And in line with wandering onto the field not being an issue, things that would elsewhere be called as travel and offside were ignored here.

Hucks were limited, most likely because of the consistent breezes. I want to see Colombian ultimate in still conditions.

The stereotype of short, layout machines applied to a good number of players, but they weren't necessarily speedier than Australian ultimate players, which was another stereotype I wanted to check out.

Nationals starts this Saturday, the first time Colombia has had an official National Championships, and is sure to be fun.

Bound for Colombia

In Australia, there have been more and more Colombian players around. I've met a few, and now it's my turn to take part in the Australia-Colombia exchange, as I am going to Colombia for 6 weeks.

While there, I plan to play in the Colombia National Championships and in the Torneo Eterna Primavera Medellín. Both tournaments will be held in the city of Medellín (cool weather, 3 million residents, culture, 2nd fiddle to Bogotá - think Melbourne with mountains). But I'll spend most of my time in Bogotá.

I've been invited to play with Communidad de Oso by Julian Bocanegra, who played with Fakulti in 2008 (quite the international exchange). And I'm excited!

I aim to post here a bit about ultimate in Colombia - the style of play, the coaching, the competitions and the plans. And Colombia do have plans - they went from little ultimate in 2001, to fielding five strong teams at Worlds 2008. TEP Medellín is an ambitious tournament, judging from the invite list (Sockeye, Furious, Riot and Traffic are on board), the marketing and the website.

Have any other Australians played in Colombia? I know Ben Wiggins and Idaho (Sockeye) visited last year.

The tools for throwing a break throw

Being able to break the mark whenever you like is invaluable.

Here are the physical tools that will really help you.

1. A wide release.
Don't be tucking that elbow into your body.

2. Hip flexibility
If you can't move your upper body out over your non-pivot leg, you won't get wide.

3. Leg strength
You need to be able to lunge out wide and be balanced once you are out there.

Tex and Jonno demonstrate the tools, even if these examples aren't necessarily break throws.

The fourth quadrant

As a player on the field, you have two modes you can be in: playing defence or playing offence.

And you can be involved with the throwing of the disc or the catching of the disc.

So put simply, there are four quadrants for the on-field roles: thrower and cutter (on offence), and their defensive counterparts, marker and guarder.

It can be worthwhile to evaluate which of these are your strengths, and which you have to work on.

Obviously the thrower role is critical for every player - a team with mostly poor throwers is not a strong team.

I think that the skills of a guarder are under-evaluated. Many folks I know have a very simple approach to guarding: "stay open-side, chase my cutter, get a block if can". There isn't much adapting to circumstance, and while you won't go too wrong, that isn't enough at the elite level. The corresponding skills for throwing, cutting and marking are far longer lists in the conscious and subconscious minds of many players.

There are many small goals and skills for a guarder:

• Unnerve the cutter with my positioning
• Talk to teammates
• Steer the cutter back to the other defenders in the stack
• Choose when to look over at the thrower and their stance
• Bait the huck
• Take a charge
• Look to switch with a mismatched teammate

Mackey covers some more of this.

Principles of athletic conditioning

In the last 12 months, I've rethought a few things in ultimate, both from a player's and coach's perspective.

Identifying what works is key to any decisions a coach makes about his or her team.

And this particularly applies to athletic conditioning, which for a small, amateur sport like ultimate is key.

Concepts of periodisation, measurement, goal-setting and individualisation are important.

But getting players to train can be the first goal. This requires setting fitness training in accessible places, setting out clearly what is required, establishing clear reporting guidelines  And managing and preventing injuries during a season of training.

When it comes to ways to make players accountable for the work they do, making fitness competitive can be a big step. Give those who make the biggest gains or attend the most, the bragging rights. Give 'em rewards. Put races and challenges into the activities.

The goal of winning your big comp in 3 months time won't drive most players on most nights to bust a gut.  But knowing that coming second in the next sprint would mean giving piggybacks and losing the food reward does motivate.

And this can all be simple and fun.

Ultimate has what footy needs

I read an opinion piece on male sporting culture and women, which was written in the wake of the latest footy player sex scandal in Australia.

Ultimate (the mixed version) seems to be an example of what John Fitzgerald seeks.

How to defeat a heavy favourite

The recipe is basically here.

In the context of ultimate, this means change your game and make your opponents play a different game.

You can run and gun on every turnover, or huck incessantly, or zone every point, or do all three. Or some other tactic that effectively changes the game away from a conventional contest where the favourite is favoured.

Sophisticated forces

When I first started playing ultimate, forces were simple: backhand, forehand and force middle.

Since then I have seen more complexity - specific defences to pressure certain options for the offence, such as straight-up into one-way forces to pressure hucks in general, and funnel (one-way force with straight up on one sideline in the far half) to pressure hucks down the trapped sideline.

In one game at Nationals recently, my team had big successes taking away an opposing team's down the sideline hucks, by forcing middle. But we also wanted to pressure the hucks in the middle so we went more straight up the closer the disc was to the middle of the field. Call it Mesa - flat in the middle and angled on the sides. As we were defending closer to our own endzone this transitioned into a one-way force (the huck threat disappears and having a one-way force to rely is more valuable for a guarder.

I can also see the converse being an option: straight-up in the middle, moving to straight-up in the middle, for teams that you want to see trapped on the sideline. Call it Valley (the converse of Mesa).

Have you used these forces, or anything more sophisticated than just switching a force when the disc moves more than X metres down the field (yet worth the added complexity)?

Where are we headed? Well, we have a long way to go before we reach 100+ year old sports like basketball. Check out just some of the defences you can use against the variety of screens (aka picks) the offence can try.

But as we see teams building deep rosters, engaging coaches, training more and investing time on the details of their defences, more and more sophisticated forces should arise.

Australian Ultimate Championships 2009 - a HoS perspective

This Nationals campaign was a long and rewarding one for the young Heads of State club.

Our bronze medals were earnt through some hard yakka and good planning.



Here are some of the features of our campaign this year:

• Our fitness program and training camps started back in November, making it a 6 month long journey to Nationals.
• We articulated our goals for the season, revisited them and measured them.
• Building on previous seasons, we had feedback sessions where players got considered feedback from the team selectors.
  
• We again took a second team to Regionals and again helped turn around games with sheer forceful sideline support.
• Kaimana Klassik (and Hollywood Husak) met HoS.
• HoS also did some recruiting from overseas this year. Stout provided so much to our team in the few weeks he was in Australia - unending confidence, a head sock, humility, backhand hucks, and the desire and ability to guard every star cutter in the land. Check him out accompanied by Queen or Aladdin. And our other Yank, Eric was Mr Versatile Handler when he finally got back from injury. He also is a sideline maestro - unbelievable commitment.

At the tournament itself, I felt we had successes:

• We had carved out clear expectations of playing time, and roles for players.
• Boo Boo was our invaluable statistician and advisor at Nationals giving us valuable live stats on what was working and what wasn't.
• Simple routines for timeouts (and regular use of them) without putting the team into the Chamber of One Person Talking Endlessly
• We enjoyed the routine of getting in the cold pool each evening for recovery, even if certain individuals still squeal
• HoS beat every team we played at least once, except the 4-time National Champions
• Mixing up the defensive looks when our opponents got comfortable
• Providing routine in our warm-ups that rehearsed how we wanted to play (there's that word again: routine)
• Having predictable, rehearsed actions to take when we need to alter lines (for example, bringing certain throwers over to the D line in windy games, using crunch lines at certain points)

Good work for a team with an average age of 22 (sorry lads - with me on board, the average shifts up from 21).

OK, enough patting our own backs. There is a world more to learn in our next campaign: Nationals and then World Clubs 2010 in Prague...

Prague - Photo by pavelm

Australian Ultimate Championships 2009 - an overview

Nationals wrapped up yesterday and it was one for the history books.

A smaller field of entrants this year (14 mens teams and 12 womens teams) and the massive fields actually made 450-plus players look small. As the venue for Clubs 2006, UWA Sports Park is huge.

In the women's final, Wildcard met Team Box, a rematch of the 2007 final. Both swam through the draw confidently to reach this game, and the game didn't disappoint. Box took half 9-7, but wavered thereafter as Wildcard pulled to an consistent 2-3 point lead. It seemed like Box fulfilled more of their promise this year - 6th last year was a temporary dip for a very talented club. However, Wildcard were too deep - even their young players are veterans.

Sugar Mags (3rd) and Honey (4th) attained club-best finishes.

In the men's division, a few teams from 2008 were missing - the Taipans (Aussie Masters team), New Zealand and Barefoot to start with. Higher spots were up for grabs for the keen, younger clubs out there.

Returning to an X/Y split, Fakulti didn't yield a top 3 finish for the first time in their club's history. Fakulti Y did fight hard though, falling 2 points shy of the 5th and 6th place finishers, Firestorm and Karma. Sublime were inches from their first return to the semis since 2000 (another WA-hosted Nats), losing to Heads of State in the pre-semi. JD pretty much played savage in that one.

I-Beam had the smoothest offence at the tournament, and claimed 4th. Heads of State pushed Chilly hard in the semi-final (leading 8-6 at one stage), but couldn't hang on. We then took 3rd with a barnstorming defensive run at the end of the 3-4 match vs I-Beam.

Fyshwick's win over Chilly in the rounds seemed to promise lots for them. But it wasn't to be in the final, as Gack hucked and hucked, and the other Chilly players shared the wealth, with every man looking like an option deep. Fyshwick's zippy handler resets of 2008 seemed absent, and they regularly hit 6-7 counts with the disc trapped on the line.

So where are teams tactically in 2009?

Karma and I-Beam ran sidestacks to then iso one cutter, with I-Beam also running split stacks (the "U"). Chilly ran everyone deep, with the occasional Gack feldrenner. Defensively, Chilly showed some 1-pass transitions. Fyshwick would bring out their super-saggy diamond zone as a mix-up D, which I first saw in 2007.
 

And on Heads of State we started to evolve a straight-up meets force middle, mid-tournament, to combat hucks down sidelines and from the middle of the field. Offensively, we brought in north-west American horo offence ideas. 

Sublime vs Fyshwick United