Quick Hits: Tactics and Throwing
So, I foolishly left my biiiiiiiig developmenty blog post on my computer at home, but while taking a little break from work I thought I’d put up a couple of things I’ve wanted to mention, but don’t really merit posts themselves… So here they are.
Tactics, or Hmmm, why do we do this again?
I played with a cool Austrian team at Windmill Windup a couple of weeks ago. And they played a ‘standard’ offence which freaked me out. Playing out of vertical stack they had THREE handlers back. Three. Not two. Weird.
I didn’t like it. And it took me a while to work out that it wasn’t that I was just being fussy, and it wasn’t what I was used to but that actually the 2-5 set up suited my “style” better. To me, vert is all about breaking the mark, which becomes super difficult when there’s an extra poachy d player hanging out in the around break lane – all you’ve got is the IO, and if the force takes that away, you are stumped. Sure, you can throw the disc to the handler whose mark is in the around lane, but it’s not a damaging, play-starting throw.
Lesson learned: 2-5 is cool, and not just cos it’s the way we play vert, but more generally, try to work out *why* we play particular sets we do, why in women’s we play “don’t get beaten to the open side under” defence… If you know why a tactic is getting used, you can work out when it won’t work and stop using it.
Throwing, or Why does my sidearm suck?
My main whinge at Felix in the Spring term was, “How come my sidearm sucks?” And y’know, I tried a few adjustments, failed to improve, tried a few more adjustments, still sucked. I was frustrated. Because it’s frustrating to be rubbish at a particular throw (or at least, behind where you should be for how long you’ve been playing).
And then I started throwing more. Not just a bit more, loads more. Right now, I haven’t thrown for two days. And that feels weird. It feels like ages since I’ve thrown. And while it’s not cool that I haven’t thrown for two days (naughty Megan), it is cool that it feels weird. And that my sidearm sucks less.
Lesson learned: If you want to be better at throwing, throw around more. It is embarrassing that I had not tried this before…
3 COMMENTS
I need to do more sidearm practicing, especially since it seems I’m main handler at tour 3 :s
Anyway, if anyone wants to do the same and has similar length sidearm throws, let me know. Campus probably best
Haha, this post made me laugh a little. Before I came here, in Turkey we always used to play 3-4. So you can imagine how lost I felt when I first came here, and I don’t have one third of the game smarts you have, those were a long few months.
Now I figured 2-5 out a little bit and I’m determined to carry it back with me since it makes a lot of sense and gives you more options.
Ben Wiggins in his Zen throwing article said that he threw best when he threw 20 days in a row before a tournament.. Man o man..
One thing I find interesting with tactics is something that cropped up again for Huckit & Spade at Tour 3; in some games, our standard vertical stack allowed us to get the space we needed for cutting, while in others a horizontal stack was much more effective for our players to get free. I wonder why it seems to differ from game to game?
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