A pretty good 5-hour practice. We some skills work and scrimmaged a lot. We spent a good amount of time focusing on our redzone offense. We worked on the gravity cut, which turns out to be very hard to defend if you’re close to the endzone. The third cut (to the cone, back across for the break, then force side to the back cone) is especially tricky to cover. If you don’t sell out to get the IO, it’s pretty easy to throw something in that area. If you do, the cut to the back cone is open. Doing this drill on O and on D really let us experiment with making the cut different ways and defending it different ways, and it really proved to me how hard it is to cover (if the thrower is close enough).

After that, we went into some endzone-focused scrimmage. The O line really struggled here, and the D line played very well on D and on O. They were very smooth, only had one cut at a time to each threatening space, and broke the mark very well for goals. The O line had trouble scoring more than 2 or 3 in a row, and often the goals were quite contested. We were very frustrated towards the end of practice.

For our last drill, worked on a bit of transition O/D in the redzone. Here, the success of the lines swapped and the O line crushed it. Maybe it helped that it started to rain and the disc became very slippery, but the O line scored almost all their opportunities and got a good amount of Ds as well.

My takeaways from the practice are:

• We should be way better about scoring in the redzone. It makes sense to isolate one cutter and look at them for a while, esp when the thrower is close to the endzone.
• Our O needs to figure out whats going on with us. Possession and scoring should be easy, yet we struggle so much.
• Mixing up the O/D lines may be useful. I know the argument for “chemistry” among the lines, but there are significant benefits to variety (more creativity, a stronger requirement for communication, more practice adapting to novel situations, learning from more players, etc) and these may outweigh the chemistry thing.