State College and QCTU

So, I see that our tournament director has denied the open program admission to the tournament because of their suspension. Calls have been made and Jen Waldrup (the women's director of QCTU) has received word that she should think about denying the women's program bid. Naturally, she came to talk to me about the matter, and I am extremely against denying them access for two reasons:

A) Their suspension is, for lack of a more profressional word, crap.
B) Since A exists, denying a team like this access to a tournament only hurts women's college ultimate from two view points: 1. Other teams do not get the chance to play against a strong college program - which there are still so few of and 2. It will ultimately really hurt, if not kill, the State College women's team. I personally do not want any hand in this part and would feel horrible about it.

So, given reasons A and B, I think State College should be given the green light to compete in any and all tournaments this year up until the series. What do others think about this matter?

Utilizing Winter Break

School's gotten out and for the next three weeks everyone on your college team could easily be sitting at home in her parent's house eating Christmas cookies. Not exactly the best strategy for getting in shape to start off the 2006 season...

I'm sure most teams have their own specific guidelines for workouts to do over the break, but I figured I'd elaborate a little on what I think individuals can do with their time away from school. Stanford divides its winter break suggestions into four categories:

1. aerobic activity to build endurance
   
2. strength training to create a stronger core
   
3. flexibility work to prevent injuries
   
4. throwing practice
   

In this post, I'm going to focus on drills for throwing practice that you can do by yourself, inside, or with a friend who's never really thrown before. The more you can mess around with a disc during the break, the better your disc skills will be next quarter.

• Couch Throw: Use a couch with a high back or pillows set up on your bed against the wall to play catch with you. Work on your throwing motion and a smooth release. The disc should be spinning well and flying flat as it hits the pillows each time
  
• Bed Throw: Lie on your back on your bed with your throwing shoulder blade slightly off the edge of the bed. Practice throwing forehand blades straight up in the air and catching them again. This helps work on your wrist snap and release, so try to get the discs to fly as smoothly as possible without much wobble.
  
• One-handed Faking: Practice switching grips between forehand and backhand without the help of your other hand. Snapping your wrist as you fake one throw will help roll the disc into the grip of the next throw. Your goal should be to be comfortable with the disc in your hand and feel confident in changing your grips. This will help make your fakes faster and more realistic.
  
• Pivoting with Fakes: Combine your practice of switching grips with full fakes. Step out and fake a backhand then push off of your right leg as you step into a forehand. Fake your forehand then push off your right leg and step into a backhand. The more comfortable you feel doing this the more you should challenge yourself to step out further and further for each throw. If you are really stepping into each throw you will feel it in your quad and butt muscle. Try doing this infront of a mirror to see how believable your fakes look (poor-man's video tape).
  
• Disc Golf: Go to a park with a friend (you’ll need two discs for this) and make up a disc golf course with various landmarks such as trees, benches, or bushes as holes. Practice using different throws (don’t just throw your backhand for every shot) and make sure that there is variety in the distances you are shooting for.
  
• Hucking Solo: Gather up 5 or 6 discs and head out to a big open space. Throw all your discs, trying to get them to land in the same spot. Pace out the distance between where you threw the discs and where they landed so you can get a good idea of how far your throws will travel on the ultimate field.
  
• Breaking the Mark: To practice stepping out around a mark when you throw, find a pole where you can set yourself up in front of it and force yourself to step out to one side of the pole to throw. To practice throwing low below a marker's arms, use an old wire coathanger to create a "L" shaped obstacle to release the disc under. This drill works best when you have a partner to throw with, but if you can’t find anyone to help you out, get multiple discs to throw and round them up after you’ve thrown them all.

Even if you are already pretty confident with the disc, pushing yourself to find throws and release points that you are uncomfortable with will improve your throws and help add to your repertoire.

And of course, winter break is always great for joining local pick-up games and playing in hat tournaments where you get to go run around and impress people with how in-shape you are...

teaching

by the time people enter college, they have usually been exposed to a lot of different sports (maybe because they played the sport, or they have seen it on TV, etc), but ultimate is not usually one of them. one of the ways i try to teach ultimate is to draw analogies between ultimate and these other sports because it can help beginners visualize what i'm trying to explain.

some of the ones that i have used:
- pivoting (basketball)
- throwing a backhand huck (swinging a baseball bat - stepping and driving hips, shoulders, elbows, and finally wrists)
- the "get low, chop your feet, and explode" cut that Tiina Booth teaches at NUTC (football wide receiver cuts)
- leading with the elbow when throwing a forehand (baseball pitchers - you always see head on pictures of them as they are coming forward with the ball where their elbow is leading their wrist)
- hammer windup (tennis serve - particularly the rocking back on the rear foot)

what other ones have people out there used? was it effective?

Women's video footage...

...where is it?

There was recently a bit of a stir over on rec.sport.disc because of the unequal DVD coverage of the different divisions from the UPA Club Championships. In thinking about the market for video footage of women's ultimate, I started to try and figure out what game film was currently out there. Amazingly, I wasn't able to come up with a single online clip of a women's game when I searched video.google.com. So currently the only videos available over the internet (that I know about) are at the CSTV website, where there is streaming video of the semis and finals from the College Championships.

It's hard to overstate the value of game footage. I know multiple teams have used various DVDs of ultimate to study different strategies and to help recruit new players who may not have seen what a "real" game looks like. In my mind, having more women's games on video can only be good for the game. As a result, whenever there's a DVD that comes up that has women's coverage I'm the first to get in line for it. However, I'm sure there's more footage out there of women playing ultimate that I just haven't stumbled across yet. So this is a request for anyone reading this blog to spread the word if you know of any site anywhere that has video of women playing ultimate.

If there really isn't any women's ultimate video out there, then that's another issue that also should be talked about...

February = fun

In general, tournaments are fun. That's why most of us play this sport: because we have fun at tournaments. For some people its the thrill of competition, for others its the laughter with teammates in the hotel, and for others its meeting new people at the fields or the tournament party. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of that simple fact when planning which tournaments to go to for the season.

For teams aspiring to compete at the highest level, it's obviously important to try and play at the most competitive tournaments possible. It's important to see teams from outside the region and it's important to know what to work on to be able to play with the best. These are the tournaments that teams preferentially allocate their resources towards and are how the Stanford Invite, Centex, Easterns, and Presidents' Day have attracted teams from across the country over the years. Usually at tournaments like this the goal is to gain as much as possible in terms of the team's development on the ultimate field.

Especially given how important team morale-building is, I think it's also equally important to have a tournament, retreat, or trip planned for the team where fun is the primary goal, and the ultimate is secondary. Often teams utilize their spring breaks for some such trip, combining a tournament one weekend with a week of partying in a house somewhere. The team bonding and memories created during such a trip bring everyone closer together and help inhance people's personal investment in the team and their teammates. However, if you think about it, the timing of such a spring break trip is flawed because it occurs AFTER the winter months when such fun team bonding is most important.

January through March is the toughest period to get through in the college season. The weather is miserable, forcing many teams to practice inside or in suboptimal condidions. The team's goals of Regionals or Nationals are far away and its easy to want to justify skipping a practice or work-out here and there because there is another demand on a player's time. Often teams struggle with low numbers or low productivity at winter practices.

Once the spring comes around, the weather gets better and so the team starts playing in more tournaments, practicing on grass, and fine tuning its skills and strategy in anticipation of the UPA Series. During the spring it is easy to love ultimate and so the team bonding that occurs over spring breaks is just a reinforcement of the trend towards team love that is already happening because of the sun. Instead, what if that team bonding trip happened in the dead of the winter doldrums as a way to revitalize the waning energy levels and remind people of why they are playing the sport?

Tournaments like Trouble in Vegas and Mardi Gras offer the perfect solution. Both happen in February in places that don't suffer from the ice, snow, and rain of much of the country, offering a necessary glimpse of sun and grass for many teams. Additionally, both are HUGE tournaments with enough room for almost all the teams interested in going, so it doesn't matter if your team is one of the top in the country. Both tournaments also offer locations with a huge emphasis on fun. It just doesn't get much crazier than partying at Mardi Gras or Vegas.

Having a tournament like this to look forward to during January and the beginning of February is key in terms of getting through some of the tough parts about practicing in the winter. Then after the tournament, the enormous amount of team bonding that has just gone on allows people to know their teammates better, earlier in the season. This then carries on during the rest of the winter months and into the spring. Of course, full disclosure would make me acknowledge that one of my housemates is the TD for Trouble in Vegas, but I would be advocating the benefits of a February team trip even if I didn't know Skip. If your team has been trying to decide its tournament schedule for the coming season, just remember that February=fun.

When is it too much?

I am the captain of my college team, and we are currently trying to set a spring schedule - both tournaments and practices. Setting a schedule with a college team is such a delicate matter. One has to recognize that all these girls are not absolutely, 100% in love with this sport and are unwilling to put a lot of things second to achieve goals within the sport. So, every college season, I find myself wondering, when is it too much? Is twice a week practices at 2.75 hours each too much? Is a mandatory, once a week track workout too much? Is flying to two tournaments in one season too much? (Recognize that my college team will not have to fly to nationals this year). How much money of their own is too much?

On one hand, my team wants to have no regrets. We want to be as competitive as realistically possible. We want nationals, we want to win regionals - at least that is what we say. On the other hand, I feel like it is hard to convey to these women that to be the best, you need to practice like the best, play with the best - basically conduct yourself in a manner that would only perpetuate excellence. From my experiences, if you want to be the best, you are going to have to train harder and longer than the best. I have always been willing to do that, and sometimes I feel like my team is with me on that one, but other times I feel like some of them will walk away and lose heart if you ask for 15 more minutes out of them. College is such a different animal from club, for a number of reasons, but especially this one. I feel like if I can get a college team to work towards one goal together, the most difficult goal still possible, that would be a miracle.

So, I guess the point of this blog is this - when is it too much? What can I realistically expect out of a group of college women, some who will never play the sport again once they graduate? What do other schools expect? How do you keep motivation levels high despite the demanding schedules? Any information would be appreciated and interesting.

Joining the blogworld

This blog will be an addition to the website I maintain on women's college ultimate, Inside College Ultimate. Similarly to that website, the goal of this blog will be to increase the general dialogue about the women's game. Hopefully there will be a number of contributing authors from around the country submitting posts here, and I hope that people feel free to comment with questions, additions, and other thoughts.

~Gwen