Thursday, September 24, 2009

Loose Ends, General Thoughts, and the Fireball of the South

The fall series is starting, college teams are forming up, club teams are ramping up for regionals, and everyone is filled with hopes.

MIT is going to have some pretty big transitions this year. For the first time in a long time, they are going to have a new coach(es), have to play without a kevin albert / andrew ji type athlete, and have to develop pretty much all new handlers.

I saw on a website that there is a small chance that college nationals could wind up in philadelphia or at my old stomping ground, lehigh. I feel 12 nice fields at lehigh might be hard unless they were allowed to use the football stadium, the soccer stadium, and the field hockey turf. but if they are allowed to do that, that would be pretty sweet. nice weather in the spring, moderately windy, beautiful campus.

speaking of beautiful fields, i got to use my "out of towner" pass this last weekend for NE sectionals and instead watched NC mixed sectionals at the Eurosport soccer complex. those fields were AWESOME. as far as my thoughts about mixed sectionals were:
1.) only having 5 women on a team is a terrible idea. after 2 games the women are lucky if they can still move.
2.) only tau dumped swang well.
3.) don't complain about a team calling a timeout in a time cap situation. you had the whole game to beat them.
4.) STEP OFF THE MARK. a good mark isn't a stationary straddle. vary your depth. there was a player on clean plate club, strasser (udel guy from way back), that just would work it up the field by reaching around the mark who was leaning into him... repeatedly, like every other pass, and the mark refused to do something different.

I have no idea what this post is talking about. i don't mean it in a bad way, i just can't grasp what it is referring to. maybe because i am not really a thrower. I guess it is saying that it is good to be able to decouple your legs from your top half so you can break. Or maybe it is saying that a lot of the throws int he elite game are released at shoulder height? There was a video link on the site that tried to show the two different breaks. It just looked like normal breaks to me. Most of the time, short breaks are released high and soft, and long breaks are released low and fast. I don't know if that is what it was referring too. I think it is more of a situational thing. i don't know if he was talking about the hucks or the breaks either.

Being 700 miles away from your team means track workouts alone. Track workouts by yourself suck. especially this year because we are doing more field specific workouts (change of direction, cleats, etc) than just running 400s and 200s this year. we did have some 200s last week and it was a joy because you can't lie to the watch.

some examples of the stuff we are doing are:

what we call the team usa box drill, i guess they did this at team usa tryouts, or something.... it is the devil.















This week, among various other shuttle runs, we have 3 sets of 2 reps of this. 1:30 of rest in between reps, 4 mintues between sets. the key is to do it as hard as humanly possible. your legs will be plenty tired towards the end. I think this would be a good college relay drill.

This, and the simulated D points are the two hardest things for me. They just ravage my legs. Simulated D points though might be a bit overkill for a college team that practices 3+ times a week since you can actually just play good D instead of having to pretend you are playing. ahhhh college.

we bumped up to one "track" workout and one speed workout a week now. I am also trying to get some riding in on the nice country roads out here. my wednesday night pickup has stopped since the team i was picking up with didn't qualify for regionals, so i am going to have to find another throwing outlet fast.

I am also having a hard time coming to grips with the fireball in the southern sky. it is no joke. it is so much more intense than up north. if you are outside around noon, you feel it could just melt you into the ground. I just did this weeks cardio workout around then and it was awful.

speaking of nonsequiturs, sorry, my brain is mush right now. another drill that we did some this year is a variation on the break mark drill. you know the two line drill where you mark, throw, and then cut for the breakmark? well, this one you have 1 mark for 5-10 throws, one thrower for those throws, and a line of cutters. after the thrower throws they do a shuttle run (maybe 5-10 yards back) and then the mark hands then another disc, taps it in, and the cut from the back of the "stack" happens. i like it because 1.) you get a lot of throws in to make immediate adjustments in you throws, 2.) as a marker, you can learn to make adjustments on the fly. 3.) it does a better job of throwing tired than the breakmark drill. if you ever want to change up the breakmark drill, you can try this drill if you have space.

wow, this post is one of the most jarbled posts ever. mental note: don't post after workouts.

-josh

1 comment:

Mackey said...

You're not the only one who was a little confused by that post. MMay have jumped the gun posting about something I didn't understand fully; for me; thinking "shoulder vs. hip" makes sense for my body, but it's pretty definitely a false dichotomy and an obvious oversimplification of throwing mechanics.

I've been gathering my thoughts to try and refine the post, hope to have it up in the next few weeks.