Thoughts on Man D by Noah

The way I see it, there are two aspects of man D - playing shut-down defense and creating blocks. The ideal you should strive for is to be able to shut down your man while being able to get a block every once in a while, or be able to get blocks while not letting your man get into dangerous positions on the field. In some ways, these two aspects are contradictory to each other (i.e. if you are entirely focused on shut down defense, you may miss an opportunity to get a block, and if you poach off your man you will obviously not be shutting him down). So, it's important to be able to do each one, and once you can do each of these then the combination of knowing when to do what.

In practice, you may want to go into a defensive point with the mindset that, for the whole point, you are going to deny your man from ever touching the disc. Likewise, you might want to take the mindset that you are going to employ any means necessary to get a block. Sometimes it will work but obviously not always. (Note: If your captain/coach/teammate yells at you for not playing the way they want you to play, make sure not to tell him/her I said it was okay. It's just something that might be helpful in working on developing each aspect of the so-called defensive mindset.) I guess that the overall message here is to play shutdown D but try tobe aware of any possibilities to get a block. When that opportunity presents itself (or a split second before it does, if you can predict what's about to happen), it's sometimes o.k. to go for the block instead of staying right on your guy ( the block could come either in the open lane, deep, around the dump, or somewhere else on the field, depending on how the play develops).But, get back to your guy ASAP once the chance for the block has decreased or disappeared. Or, if you baited the thrower into making a bad throw toyour guy, lay out past him and get the D.

About Getting Better by Noah

It is very hard to improve as a player by waiting for advice from others. The best players and the ones who improve the most are those who actively seek it out. In general, frisbee players aren't the type to go out of their way to instruct others. Some of the best times for learning about the game are when someone asks a more experienced player (or even an equally skilled teammate) about a scenario, or about a play that happened, etc. The people who turn into the best players are the ones who ask the veterans on their team whenever they have a question about anything. They are the ones who ask their teammates "what happened?" when they are involved in a play that went wrong but only saw part of the play. They are the ones who email their captains and coaches when they are up late and randomly think of an ultimate-related question.

2-4-1 Update

Thanks to Wood and Parham for the 2-4-1 tips. I've moved the poppers back a bit more and we've started really focusing on going over the cup for short passes to the poppers or around the cup with handler-handler swings with an upfield continuation to the poppers. It's looking a lot smoother in practice. QCTU is this weekend so we'll see how it looks in real action.

aj

Site Update

Thanks to everyone who has sent me posts. For those of you who sent posts to my gmail account, I haven't forgotten about you. I've just been really busy the last few days. I'll try to get the posts up tonight.

AJ

RedZONE Defense by Wood

One of the main reasons teams play zone defense is to prevent the opponent from being able to score quickly, particularly on deep shots.
The defense allows the offense to make lots of shorter passes in the hopes of actively getting a D, the elements (wind) causing a turnover, or the offense simply making a mistake and turning the disc over. The defense prevents longer, high reward passes and encourages shorter, low reward passes. Once the offense gets into the redzone, however, even short passes become high reward because you don't have very far to go. Traditional zone defenses don't work very well in the redzone for this reason. So, defenses will often switch to man when they get into the redzone. Man is no longer disadvantaged because the deep shots are taken away. However, there can be matchup problems, either because you're playing mixed, or simply because of height or speed differences among players.
What if, instead of switching to man defense, you were able to switch to a different zone defense that was designed specifically for the redzone? What would a such a zone look like?
I have considered the idea only briefly and came up with the following plan. It's pure theory as I haven't yet been able to test it on the field. There are lots of weaknesses, so I'd be curious to see other's thoughts on what kind of zone would work on a shorter field.
A common redzone poaching scheme is clam-like, with poachers on the open and break side and someone to take away the zipper. Then deeper open and break poaches. I've seen this most often off a stopped disc
(timeout) when defending a center stack. I don't see this being quite as effective when switching from a zone, because the offensive players are already spread out.
Let's look at where our defenders are, just in general. We probably already have 2-4 cup/marker types near the disc. We've got a wing on each side, a short deep, and a deep deep. While different zones may have positions doing different things, these are the basic areas that must be covered so we'll assume someone is there or can get there quickly. If we can take away the short break pass, the break wing can take away the scoring hammer to the back of the endzone by himself.
Using the mark and one other cup/marker, we should be able to take away the short break pass. Have the marker force flick hard and not allow the around backhand. Have the other person take away the invert flick and the flick through the middle. The third cup/marker and the open side wing should set up on the open side short. The short deep stays in his normal position, the deep deep slides to the open side to take away the deep open-side option. This will force the offense to move the disc short and to the open side, hopefully out of the endzone. As the disc moves closer to the open sideline, the marker/cub can get more aggressive in taking away the dump and forcing a low percentage shot into the goal on the open side where most of our defense is. The deep defenders can allow receivers to get behind them, using the back of the endzone as an extra defender.
Unfortunately there are several weaknesses in this defense. The short deep/off wing have to really watch out for the dump-swing. Short breaks such as scoobers to open receivers can be pretty easy to complete. Perhaps pulling the off-wing up and challenging the offense to complete the high risk hammer to the back of the endzone is a better idea.

Call for Articles/Posts

Please send me any strategy type things you've written, and I'll post them up here. Also feel free to post comments to any of the existing posts.

Random Thought of the Day - Primary Cuts

Last night at Emory practice, Adrienne, our tall athletic receiver kept getting too deep and her defender kept sliding way under her making it very difficult for her to cut back to the disc. She had basically taken herself out of the play by getting too far away from the frisbee – her deep cut is effectively shut down because we don’t really have anyone who can throw it more than 55 yards consistently, and her in cut is shut down because her defender is way underneath her. It sort of reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write this big thing about offensive movement against man defense. Basically I think there are 3 types of offensive movement: 1)primary cutting – when you’re trying to get yourself open from a stopped disc, or you’re the first cutter in a called play, or sometimes the motion just stalls and someone just has to go get the disc 2)secondary (continuation) cutting – this is basically cuts from flow or motion. You’re moving on the field and reading the play and you change direction right as the person you’re cutting for catches the disc, voila you’re open. 3) Actively clearing space for your teammates – you almost never notice the guy who cuts as hard as he can under so someone else can go catch a goal, but it’s extremely important, especially when teams start poaching.

Anyway, I don’t have time to write the big huge thing I’m always telling myself to write, but this incident with Adrienne does make me want to talk about type 1 (primary) cuts for a minute. I always tell this anecdote about an interview I saw with Jerry Rice. I’m sure you’ve all heard me tell it before but bear with me while I repeat it. The interviewer asks Jerry Rice how he consistently gets open against defensive backs that are faster/quicker/stronger etc. than he is. Rice basically says that good defensive play is all about maintaining a cushion, tying a string around the receiver’s waist and maintaining the distance of that string at all times. Rice says a receiver’s job is to break the string. Now if you’re just twice as fast as your defender you can just throw it into overdrive and break the string by running away from them. Of course, Rice wasn’t faster and so his strategy for breaking the string was to stutter step or juke or do something where he could eliminate the cushion that defender was giving him. Rice wanted to have the defender pretty much right on top of him when he made his move because the defensive back wouldn’t have time to adjust and Rice would be able to create the separation he needed. I think good ultimate defenders want to do the same thing: they want to maintain a cushion in one direction and force you in the opposite direction. I think the easiest way to get open for type 1 cuts in ultimate is to find the “sweet spot” on the field where you can use the defender’s cushion against him. When I’m playing on Chain I love it when the call is Crawford to me, and I just wait for Crawford to get the disc and kind of walk/jog my guy out to a spot about 15-18 yards away from the disc. When you get out to an island where you can threaten both ways your defender is screwed. He’s forced to “break the string” himself. Why? Well if he continues to give me a 2 yard cushion underneath, the throw is going over both of our heads and he has no chance and if he gives me a 2 yard cushion away I walk back to the disc and he has no time to catch up. So he’s forced to play right on top of me. When he’s right on top of me, it’s really pretty easy for me to force him to turn his hips with some sort of juke.

Defending Horizontal Stacks

It seems that most of the top open teams have gone to some sort of horizontal or spread type offense. The most obvious benefit of these types of offenses is that they open up huge downfield cutting lanes – most notably, the deep lane is pretty much constantly open.

An additional concern for defenses is that called plays out of a spread formation are more resistant to transition defenses (zone to man, junk to man) than traditional straight stack plays. The reason for this is that the spread formation resembles a traditional zone offense formation and it’s pretty easy for an offense to simply call “after they transition to man, run the play.” That’s not to say that defenses should abandoned transition zones against spread offenses – I think it just means that defenses should rethink the point in time when the transition should occur. For instance, maybe you stay in you transition until the offense reaches a certain point on the field rather than a specific number of passes. Perhaps paradoxically, spread offenses become considerably less threatening the closer they get to the end zone they are scoring in.

I think the most effective strategy for playing man against spread offenses is to poach off the dumps and mark flat. The handler defenders should work very hard to contain the frisbee in the handling zone. What I mean by that is you want to invite the three guys back with the frisbee to just keep hitting the open reset, while poaching like crazy to make throws downfield uninviting. I hear handlers saying all the time, “let’s just sit back here and hit the open resets all day.” That’s great for the defense because while the handlers are throwing their swing passes and racking up the touches without breaking a sweat, the cutters are downfield running. Fitness becomes an issue surprisingly quickly. If you think about how most teams train it makes sense. Generally, teams are focusing on short sprint workouts and are just typically not training for marathon points. Their reason for doing this is pretty sound – most of their offense points are involving 2 passes and then a bomb to isolation. Given this style of offense it makes sense to train for explosiveness over endurance. As a defense we want to use this against them. I usually feel if we can go out there and make them throw 6 or 7 horizontal reset passes the cutters are going to get tired and they’re either going to stop cutting all together or more likely, they’re going to keep cutting, but they’re going to be more prone to make errors.

Three thoughts about forcing backhand - by Wood

Wood sent me this in an email recently, and it's pretty much exactly the kind of thing i'd like to have on this blog so...here you go.

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First, usually the forehand force is used because it is a more difficult throw. However, I feel this mostly applies to beginners, and most club players have forehands that are as good or better than their backhands. The one exception is probably deep throws. So maybe teams force flick to make deep shots more difficult (although as the level of play increases I think this becomes even less of a factor).
Second, the backhand release and flight seem to be slower (it's not just me is it?). This would suggest it would be preferable to force backhand because it would give your defense more time to react.
Anecdotally, I know that when I am playing short deep in the zone, I am much more likely to be able to get a d on a backhand swing pass than a forehand swing pass. This may also be due to reason three...
Third, the backhand release is such that the thrower's back is to most of the field, whereas the forehand release positions the thrower to face the field. This should make throws to the breakmark side more difficult, and make it easier for the thrower to not see a defender who is in position to get a d.

2-4-1 Zone O and the Emory Ladies

So Emory practice is pretty much back in full swing again. We’ve made a commitment to stick with the 2-4-1 zone offense this year. We ended up abandoning it last year as our handlers were pretty much unwilling to make aggressive passes over the cup. The last two practices have been primarily devoted to 2-4-1. We’re doing a decent job of getting the disc through the cup to the poppers, but we’re not doing a great job of fast breaking once we get there. This seems somewhat counterintuitive to me as the pass through the cup should theoretically be the hardest pass in the offense. Right now, I think the poppers and wings continue to be too conservative. I’m going to put a handler-type as the deep position in the offense and try to get them coming back under for the poppers. We’ll see how it works.