Haven’t been doing much work lately (rehabbing my shoulder, plus lots of work at work), but I’ve been reading/watching/thinking about ultimate a lot. Here’s a great AMA from Ben Wiggins. It’s full of good advice and thoughts on the current state of ultimate and where it’s headed. For example, here’s an answer about handler training:

Handler training: I am going to say this roughly 1 million times in my life, but it bears repeating…Throw Every Day. Steve Nash doesn’t take days off of shooting when he wants to improve. Tony Gwynn didn’t have non-BP days. Heck, how many of the best Halo players ever miss a 24-hour period? If you want to be better than last year, TED is your goal. In my best seasons, I missed 7 and 9 days of throwing in the 365 day span before Nationals.

Beyond that: Play something. Ultimate is fine and all, but play hoops or mini or hockey or something to work on the reactions and confidence and communication of sports without overusing the specific Ultimate parts of your body. This probably isn’t very different than cutters. Many years, I would use low level winter and spring games to work on cutter-type stuff because I wouldn’t get many chances to practice it during the year. And because it was fun.

Here’s some more advice on effective drilling:

I think of continuation or flow as ‘what you do while the disc is in the air between two of your teammates’.

As a coach, it can be easy to focus on the whiteboard version of ‘when disc moves like this, players should do this’. What we forget is that each of those moves is an OODA loop (look this up, it is rad). Each player needs to observe the field, orient themselves to the situation, decide if and where to move, and then act. To coach that, you shouldn’t be working at the birds-eye angle…you need to drill for instinct. Break it down. If you are here, and they disc moves there, you should turn your head to see this and take 2 steps this direction. Drill ONLY that piece before you go on. Give players the little tools to do what they need to react and use that air time.

If you don’t know these things…then as a coach, your first mission is fact finding and NOT coaching. If you can’t break it down, then you don’t know it enough to teach it. Describe it? Sure. Teach it? Not yet.

You can break these things down, though. Find out what YOU do when you are reacting correctly. Notice your feet, your head, the variables that you use to decide. Then recreate those in drills.

P.S. If you haven’t seen Chasing Sarasota yet, check it out.