Guest Topic: Catching

I have invited one of the best people I have coached to write about catching. When I say best, I by no means imply the most athletic. I mean it strictly on a coachability and student of the game standpoint.

Pete makes up for being, um, being dealt the short, squat card in life for having a great mind for the game, and for learning how to milk every bit of his athleticism out of his body. He definitely isn't the quickest or fastest on the field, but he rarely gets blown up on an in cut because he shields the disc well and catches the disc fully out in front of him.

It is a great read.

Claw Catching: It’s Ergonomic

The purpose of ultimate is to score goals, by passing and passing alone. Passing is throws and catches. The "best practice" of catches is the claw catch. Let us set that aside momentarily and slam down the basics of catching.

Circumstances will require receivers to make plays by whatever means are necessary. It is correct to catch the disc however you can. It is wrong to habitually use bad form. In general these rules apply. First, two hands all the time; be professional. Second, run through the disc. Never slow down to catch a disc. Slowing down before possessing the disc is how defenders run past or layout and get blocks on you. Think about running through the disc like this - your fastest stride should be the one immediately after the catch. This guarantees that you are moving as fast as possible and have reduced to a minimum the defender's efforts and window to break-up this pass. Third, greet the disc. Do not stab, slap, smack, or punch the disc. Do not wait for the disc to come to you. Catch the disc firmly with the whole of your hands. Fourth, watch disc while catching it. This basic rule of all sports is as deadly as it is simple. Taking your eye off the disc will cause you to drop it; not every time, but every time you do lose it it's a soft turnover - a stupid, preventable drop that fucked the team

The claw catch, put bluntly, is the way Frankenstein's monster would play ultimate. However, please promise to play with the athleticism, coordination, fluidity, and grace that Mary Shelley's classic monster cannot summon. What follows are the basics. Form your hands like sock puppets - fingers together, thumb opposite them forming a 'C'. Fully extend your arms away from the body at chest height. Catch the disc in front of your chest keeping your thumbs down. If the disc is below your chest bend your knees and drop your hips to keep the disc in front of your body. When the disc is too low to catch like this, flip your hands such that your thumb is up and your fingers are down. If the disc is in danger of hitting the ground either layout or baseball slide with your thumbs up to meet the disc before a turnover. Claw catching is the best catching form because it is aggressive and fast. Aggressive and fast makes good ultimate.

Aggressive: Attack the disc and keep it away from the defender. Shoot both hands out and snare the disc at the earliest possible moment at the point furthest from your man. When claw-catching, I end up with the disc, snug in both hands, facing the path it flew; in shooting out and grabbing the disc, my wrists rotate through the catch and point the disc's edge towards the ground. Claw catching is ergonomic. The disc fits right into the padded palm, the fingers mold to the disc's face, the thumb latches onto the rim. Fast: the claw catch's form keeps you moving fast and prevents you from slowing down. Proper sprinting requires a runner to pump his arms, adding momentum. The claw catch extends one's arms forward to make the catch. This is close to proper sprint form and is an easy motion/transition in a full sprint. Keeping your arms forward moves your center of gravity forward. All human motion is essentially a controlled fall. The claw catch helps keep the body moving forward.

A word on clap catching: Clap (or pancake or alligator) catching is a good way to catch a disc, especially in wind. In wind, clap catching is the superior catching form. When cutting, however, the clap catch suffers. First, the clap catch is close to the receiver's body. This decreases the distance between the defender and the disc, and increases the chance of a block. Second, my considered and corroborated observation is that almost all receivers slow down to clap catch. Receivers perform a hop a half-step before clap catching. This hop steals that last step's push from impelling the receiver toward the disc and spends its energy on a slowing hiccup to make the mechanics and position of the clap catch a little easier. The claw catch improves upon the clap catch by making the receiver faster, increasing the distance between defender and disc, and catching the disc earlier in its flight If you have any questions, thoughts, barbs, or criticism please leave them in the comments. My thanks to Will Hall, as told by Josh, for the title.

Pete

October 28, 2008

Trust

I have the unique opportunity this year to play on a team with 25 ballers on it. Top to bottom, bottom to top, we are all solid players. What makes us even better though, is the ability to trust each other and utilize each player to the fullest.

College is a little different because you have players at various stages of development playing on the same field together. You have the club calibre kid playing with the kid who learned a forehand 2 weeks ago and has shakey at best catches. I am going to try to make it my mission this year to utilize each and every player this year to maximize our ability as a TEAM.

This task also falls on the shoulders of the veterans on the team. By my 4th year at lehigh, I was a good player, but I didn't make others around me better. It wasn't until my 5th year that I began to do that. I enlisted the help of my friend and fellow 5th year player who would tell me when I was not playing within the flow of the team. He made me concentrate on putting others in situations where they could succeed. This might mean making sure you make a good soft throw to a younger player. Setting up a dump cut early, or not trying the hard break, but rather trusting others to be able to take 2 more passes to score. Most importantly for me, it was trusting my teammates to play good D and not try to play everyone's D for them.

It's the little things that develop trust. It can be as simple as looking a teammate in the eye in big games letting them know that you believe in them and the team. Most of it, however, is done not at tournaments, but in the car-rides to tourneys, track workouts, lifting sessions, and most importantly, practices.

Your goal for every practice should be to make your teammates better in every drill, every sprint, and every scrimmage. If you play your hardest, most physical D on a player, you are going to push them to get better. Likewise, on Offense, if you make it your goal to punish whoever is covering you by making hard real cuts, they are going to learn how to play better and better D. Challenge them to get better. Set the bar higher and higher for them each practice, and through these battles, you will get better by them pushing you to do the same.

Look your teammates in the eyes at the end of practice. Look at them with the pride of knowing that you pushed them and they, in turn, pushed back. By the end of the season, when you look them in the eye, you will also see the complete trust in knowing that no other team is going to push as hard as you pushed each other. That is a wonderful and unstoppable feeling.

-josh

Handler Cuts

I am not very good at throwing, but I am an adequate handler. I make up for my throwing shortcomings by moving well when I don't have the disc (that isn't to say that I don't actively work on making my throws better). There are basically two types of handlers - ones that handle by moving the disc around the field using their legs, and then there are the types that move the disc around the field with their throws. Watch a club game sometime, and you will see what I mean. The throwing handlers seem to get more comfortable and in control the longer they hold the disc (they also give more possessional dumps since they get field position by throwing), and the ones who use their legs rely on catching the disc in a spot on the field that puts them in an aggressive position to release the disc quickly before the mark gets there, and then moving to receive it again.

Ideally, a handler should be able to do both. One of the hardest things I had to learn when I started playing club was dumping since my college team never played with a dump (our captain was a volleyball player who we just floated a throw up high to the breakside when we got in trouble and he came down with it).

At first, the motion seems very strange, and hard to throw to, but after a while, once I learned to recognize the different dump patterns and worked on throwing to space, I begin to realize the merits of dumping. For starters, a properly executed dump cut is pretty much unguardable as long as the throw is out to space. This allows for easy resets and even more important, if a dumping system is properly integrated into the teams system, it is a predictable and dependable way to gain more advantageous field positions and help take take the force side advantage away from the defense.

It might just be that I am a handler now, but I feel the dump cut is the most powerful cut you can do in ultimate. If done correctly, it is the backbone of all club level offenses, and done incorrectly, it can lead to soft turnovers and breaks.

Below is a slide showing the various different dump movements and cuts. Read them, understand them, and we will be incorporating most into our offense this year.

-josh

Sphere of Influence

I don't remember much from high school, let alone history. But I do remember about spheres of influence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence#Post-Imperial_China . I always thought it was an odd term because although countries had "influence" they definitely didn't have spheres.

Anyway, one day when I was coaching lehigh about dumping, we kept having downfield cutters cut into the dump area. Finally, I came up with a concrete visual that I think helped people realize the handler area and the cutter area.

Picture the field with the thrower trapped on the sideline, now imagine him with a 10-15 yard sphere around him. This is the dumps area. The dump has a 10 yard sphere of influence around the thrower. Cutters, generally, 99% of the time, should NEVER invade this sphere.

This 10 yard sphere exists around the thrower at all areas on the field. Let the dump be able to get to the dump. Leave those 5-8 yards in front of the thrower open for the dump to get it upline in the power position. This is a great position to huck from, and everyone loves to score goals.

Maybe i will draw a picture sometime..... probably not.

-josh

Handler Area

Click on the picture to enlarge and read up a little. I stole this slide from Geoff Buhl (with his permission). He was the coach of Rutgers when I was at lehigh. Rutgers was not very athletic, but Geoff managed to eek every ounce of athleticism and ultimate IQ of these guys to make a run to sunday of regionals every year.

Anyway, basically what we did well 2 years ago was that the handlers and the cutters understood what part of the field was for handler motion, and what part of the field was for big cuts. This lead to cutters setting up for large in and out cuts, and the handlers working to get easy throws off by using their legs.

I am going to post another post on handler cutting.

-josh

On Improvisation (i suck at spelling)

I hate the concept of "plays" as in, player 1 does this, player 2 does this, we throw to player 3. I feel as a team, we are very robotic and don't do a good job of reacting to stimuli (i.e. making minor adjustments offensively or defensively in a game. This is especially evident when we play teams that throw shitty, bladey hucks, or playing against teams that poach or play a clammy defense).

In the past, we have gone over flow drills and split the game down into the small parts (various dumps, etc.), and we have even had plays. But, when we call them plays, i feel people don't realize that the best plays are really just patterns or situations that arise depending on your situation on the field. Also, I feel it teaches people to not throw to the OPEN man, but rather the man they think they should throw to.

Most college teams in the Northeast have coaches. Most of those coaches really know their x's and o's. They might have slightly varying O structures, dumps, defenses, but, for the most part, they are mostly based on the same fundamentals: throw the disc out to space, cut to get the disc AND make space, on defense take away the option the cutter wants, make the thrower break you with their 2nd best break throw when marking.

A good college team will execute their team's system well, a great college team will know how to improvise within a system when their first and second options are shut down. I am not talking about flashy scoobers and stall 9 blades (although every throw has it's place somewhere for a certain situation); I am more talking about, if someone is poached, where should he go, if they are back marking the thrower, how should he react, should our dumps change, and, if people are throwing bladey flick hucks on us, how should we defend differently.

I feel last year a lot of the freshmen and sophomores were good at playing D against MIT (squirrely handlers cutting upline, big cutters who jack it to other big cutters out of the ho stack). We were not good at playing against hippie ultimate.... no real stack and big throws. We also gave up 2 breaks every time a zone was put on us because our handlers would either miscommunicate and have a soft drop, or the handlers couldn't figure out if the cup was loose or tight and how to attack each one.

This stuff takes time to learn, and playing against colleges of all sizes and playing styles gives you much more experience than a watered down O line of MIT. This is why I have been pushing for you guys to play in as many tourneys as possible. I cannot teach you guys to play against every type of zone out there. We barely have enough time to learn how to run 1 effective zone. It is only through playing against different teams that you will begin to see the different patterns of O's and D's and then learn how to make adjustments on the fly about how to counter them. This is what I have been hinting at all season about the veterans learning pattern recognition.

Anyway, you guys are playing WPI tonight. They have 2 good players I know of, and both of them like to throw deep and run deep. I am assuming you will have a zone thrown against you and on offense they will run some sort of ho stack and throw it deep a lot with outside/ins. Be prepared to counter this by starting the game off dictating your man under. If they are going to score, make them score with 30 in cuts. If they do it the first time, make them do it 3 more times, I promise you that they will get frustrated and jack it deep the first second they think their man has a 50/50 shot at it.

no more mr. roboto, from now on, react to stimuli!
-josh