Maybe your team doesn’t have a grudge match. Maybe you don’t have that one particular team who it’s HORRIBLE to play. That team that you anticipate the possible match up with before the tournament, even if they’re not in your pool. That team that you’d consider poking your eyes out rather than play against because ‘they’re such dickheads’.

But maybe you do. I often find that having a bad game against a team once generally turns into having a bad game against that team again (without doing anything to avoid it, that is). So, as I promised Therapist, here’s a few thoughts on that ‘grudge match’ – what’s going on psychologically and how you can try to salvage spirit in these games.

What we look for, we find

Humans, in general, are pretty rubbish scientists. There’s a considerable amount of research that suggests that when asked to test a statement or hypothesis, we seek out only facts which would confirm it.* Equally, we’re very good at forgetting pieces of evidence which contradict our hypothesis. Apply this to the grudge match and you’ve got a recipe for disaster: you go into the game with all your knowledge of how they’ve been terribly spirited before, and hey, guess what, you find new evidence for this theory. Lots of new evidence.

Furthermore, we interpret this bad behaviour that we’ve looked for and found completely differently to our own behaviour (which probably isn’t perfect considering it’s a grudge match). Our behaviour in this game we see as externally driven (it’s because they’re a bunch of dicks that it’s hard to play spiritedly against them) and context-specific (we’re only unspirited in this game). In contrast, we perceive their behaviour as internal (they’re behaving like dicks because they’re dicks), global (they behave like dicks against everyone) and consistent across time (they’re dicks at every tournament). In psychology, this is called the fundamental attribution error – we undervalue the impact of situational factors on the behaviour of others.

So, if they’re terrible people to everyone, all the time, why the hell should you treat them with respect? Why should you attempt to play spiritedly? Chances are you struggle to remember the answer to that question during the game, and it all goes downhill…

*the irony that this was the researchers’ hypothesis and they’ve confirmed it is not lost on me, honest.

Whatever happens, happens always

Psychology suggests that we not only go into those games looking for incidences of bad spirit (and find them), but that we go in expecting to see poor spirit, and this in turn actually has the potential to generate precisely that behaviour.

Expectancy effects are pretty phenomenal – if two people have conversations with the same stranger, but one believes that stranger to be a friendly person and the other believes them to be unfriendly, the two people behave in such different ways towards that person that the other person reacts – and reacts in the way that in turn confirms that original information. The ‘friendly’ stranger is greeted more warmly, sat closer to, engaged in more lively discsussion and in turn responds with warmer body language and more enthusiastic responses. The ‘unfriendly’ stranger experiences the reverse of this, and responds in kind, thus ‘proving’ their nature.

So not only do we underestimate the influence situational specifics have on the behaviour of our competitors, but we actually fail to realise that sometimes we are those situational factors.

Imagine you’re bringing down a high floating disc. Another player jumps at the wrong time, from the wrong angle, and wipes you out – a clear foul. What if you know that the team you’re up against has done this before? If this is your ‘grudge match’? You get pissed off. You loudly and aggressively call ‘foul’, and start muttering under your breath about their failures of spirit. They respond by contesting it. You infer that they are a terribly spirited team – how else could they contest that call?

Having calls made aggressively against you is unpleasant and tends to make you want to be aggressive back. Either you’ve got to care enough about your own spirit being good, rather than theirs being bad, or you contest it because you want to punish their poor communication.

Imagine that exact situation happens against a team you’ve had well-spirited games with in the past. Maybe you don’t even call foul straight away. You start with ‘ouch!’ and then probably tell them ‘foul’ – but the way you call it will suggest that you expect them to be entirely reasonable about it, will make them feel like you think they’re not a complete moron, and will make them far more likely to uncontest your call. You conclude that they are a well-spirited team, like you already knew, because they gave up that call.

We have the ability to elicit behaviour from our opponents, just by expecting it.

So are grudge matches doomed to remain grudge matches forever?

Er, no. Here are some ways to avoid what’s going on psychologically.

They’re people too

No, seriously. Those ‘dirty cheating scumbags’ at the other end of the pitch. They are human beings too. It is easy in the grudge match to get sucked into playing harder just to win the match and ‘prove’ who was right about those calls last time you played. Don’t give in to it. People have lives off the pitch. To view them as only your opponents on the pitch is dangerous, and leads (I’ve found) to reckless bids, and poorly discussed calls. The latter makes a game nasty and makes both your teams look bad to spectators. The former can seriously alter someone’s life.

Disprove your hypotheses; expect the unexpected

Go into the game looking for good spirit. Interpret ambiguous situations as good spirit (not cynicism, or the mimicking of spirit). Go into this game trying to convince yourselves that they’re going to be the best spirited team you play all tournament. Give them a fighting chance to prove that they’re a well-spirited team – you’d ask the same.

Recognise the Grudge Match

Other advice aside, I’d say this is the biggie. Recognising what’s going on in the grudge match is actually half the battle. Knowing that you’re psychologically wired up to a) confirm that they’re horrible people and b) cause them to behave like horrible people is a pretty big first step.

You’re going to have to work extra hard in a grudge match to be well-spirited, to not make dodgy bids, or calls, or even just to call correct things maliciously (every little travel…) or aggressively (“foul, you fouling ****!”). Maybe they’ll be working hard as well. Maybe they won’t (from your perspective). But if you value spirit of the game enough, does that matter? It’s bad enough for one team to abuse the rules/spirit (if that is what they’re doing): don’t get sucked in too.

Chances are you’ll find the game much better spirited as a whole, and much more enjoyable.

Now is the time to start thinking about whether you would like to be a captain for the next academic year. Please send us a paragraph or two explaining why you think you would be good for the position and what you think you could bring to role. Please don’t do this on a whim because it takes a considerable amount of time and effort but if you think you can spare the time this is a very rewarding role and will be very good for your CV.

The positions you can apply for are:

• Open Captain
• Women’s Captain
• Mixed Captain
• Women’s Vice Captain

If you think you would be a good candidate for more than one of these positions then please apply for both (stating any preference that you have). We as captains will liaise with each other so don’t worry about applying for multiple roles. Please let us know before the end of the term so that we have Easter to discuss the applications.

Please send any Open Captain enquiries to opencaptain@mohawks.co.uk

Mixed Captain enquiries to mixedcaptain@mohawks.co.uk

and Women’s Captain and Women’s Vice Captain enquiries to womenscaptain@mohawks.co.uk

Finally if you are thinking about any other committee roles then please refer to http://committee.mohawks.co.uk/. You don’t need to worry too much about this until the agm which will be some time early in the summer term but it is something to certainly consider.

Thanks,

Lucy, Rhona, Kneetu and Ashley

Well, no I figured it out after about 2 and half hours

I would like to see all our women at training please so if you were there last time come again and if you were not but are interested in playing turn up

These are the guys I would like to see a mixed training this wednesday (from 1pm)
Rapo
Ash
Shim
Cake
Joe
Ed
Spoon
Frank
Faron
Pete
Taxi
Sam
Jonas

Thank you

Kneetu

Please pay:
Mr Callum Smith
Account No: 27175839
Sort code: 603009

email Spoon and Callum once you’re paid up. merchandise@mohawks.co.uk and finance@mohawks.co.uk. If you fail to email then we will assume that you have not paid, and so will chase you up. Make sure the email has useful information in it, not something crap like:

“Hey guys,
Just paid some monies.
Laterz boyz.
Rich”

Be useful and instead write:

“Dear Callum and Spoon,
I have just paid £6.00, this is because I ordered three items of clothing.
My reference is: “Therapist kit”
Hope that is OK, let me know of any problems.
Yours,
Richard”

If you really want then you can bring the money to training on Wednesday. ONLY CORRECT MONEY WILL BE ACCEPTED.

Thank you in advance.

Young Women (born 1993 or later)
Go to GB U20’s trials. Check this page: http://www.mohawks.co.uk/forum/post12526.html#p12526  of the forum for details but DEFINITELY GO!

Training this Sunday (indoors)
…is at 7:30-9pm. As a one off. This will be geared towards women’s things (as it has been in 2012) so don’t be surprised if the women boss you about!

Training week 7
Mixed from 1-2:30. Kneetu WILL be in touch, won’t he Kneetu? If in doubt then please hassle him (mixedcaptain@mohawks.co.uk). Normal training from 2:30pm as ever.

Socials next week
Open regionals team specific – please make an effort to get to them and have some fun and bonding with your regionals team. I know that these have not been announced to the masses yet but they will be soon. You’ll hear from your captain very soon I imagine *hopeful grin*

Summary
Pay extra for kit (sorry) and be at trainings/socials soon.

Ciao for now,

Therapist

Apologies for the lateness of this post, this term is racing away very quickly.

At Monday night practice we have been trying out a series of fast-paced warm-up drills, one of which includes an intense version of the three-man/break-force where the marker marks for 10 successive throws (rather than the normal version where you throw then mark the person you threw to). This has the advantage that it makes you more tired and also enables you to focus on each element of the drill for an extended period of time.

Faced with a nasty GB mark who kept getting hand blocks I had to innovate. After a couple of fakes he stepped off from me so I floated a break around him (some would call this cheating in the drill but it’s the best way to punish somebody who steps off you). Next time he came closer, I stepped and leaned backwards on the side-arm side, as if to throw the same loopy pass, drawing the mark toward me. This opened up a gap on the back-hand side that I could step forwards into, not just pivoting out of my marker’s reach but also putting my body between him and my hand, making getting a block impossible without committing a foul.

At the start of the year on Wednesdays we would regularly do a pivoting drill, with a mark for a full stall, trying to see whether and how much we could break them (but not releasing the disc). Demonstrations of the drill always involved making pivots along a horizontal axis, and the mark’s movement was mirroring this horizontal movement. And that’s how I think most people executed the drill (correct me if I’m wrong). But of course there’s no particular reason to be restricted in this way when pivoting – using a single axis in this way will make your mark cover a lot of ground, and will eventually allow you to get a break out but probably isn’t the most efficient way to do it, and may make you more vulnerable to getting blocked by somebody with a large wing-span or fast reactions. Using your axes will make the mark have to cover not just two release points (left or right) but infinitely many release points – anywhere in the full 360 degree reach of your pivot.

Seriously though, being able to get your body between your mark and where you’re releasing the disc is a cast-iron way to ensure that you don’t get point-blocked, and the easiest way to achieve this is to use your axes – varying where you pivot on an x- and y-axis will help you move the mark more effectively and allow you to wrest the initiative from an over-bearing mark and make them do what you want. So next time you’re in a break-force have a go at using your axes to move the mark and get your body between them and your release point.

See you at practice.

P.S. Week 5 I learned that snow sucks.

Secondly – our first proper throwing clinic is happening this Friday at 3pm.

This session we’ll focus on the components of ‘how to break a mark’ – with some individual exercises you can do at home, some paired throwing exercises and a couple of drills (depending on numbers obviously).

Main benefit – you’ll learn some new ways to improve your pivot, your fakes and your throws. All handy things on the frisbee pitch. We’ll also have people around to do lots of one-on-one coaching of throws, which is tricky to do for everyone at Wednesday sessions.

Regardless of your level, there will be stuff for everyone (new drills, new exercises, new thoughts), so come along.

Nobody is lying to you. And nobody is cheating.

The fundamental assumption that people do not make calls they know to be untrue is integral to spirit of the game. The rules are written not to punish those who break the rules, but to make sure that whatever should have happened, does happen. Equally, they make the implicit assumption that people will not purposefully call things which are false.

Let me just say it again. People do not call rubbish.

Sometimes this assumption is hard to stick with when, from your perspective, someone has called rubbish – something that is physically impossible given where the disc went/when you collided/whatever. But it’s true. People make calls because they believe that is what occurred on pitch.

Well, maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. That’s not my point. My point is that as players, we need to believe this is true for spirit of the game to ‘work’.

When you discuss a call, if you think someone is purposefully lying to you, what are you hoping to achieve? They’ve already made the deliberate decision to lie to your face, and make a false call, so why exactly are they going to take it back? Discussing a call with this thought in your head is not going to make you behave like a nice and/or spirited person – and it’s not going to get them to ‘give it up’ either.

If I’m discussing a call, it’s because I know what I think happened, and I want to know what the other team’s players think happened. I’m rarely trying to ‘convince’ the other person to back down, to uncontest or retract the call – I’m trying to match up my reality with theirs.

Discussing calls becomes ridiculous if you believe that people are likely to lie to you. So don’t. Trust your opposition. Believe that people are telling the truth as they see it. Yes, sometimes, our brains will get the better of us, and we will not have seen stuff right, in which case we should be able to listen to a calm explanation of the facts and realise we saw stuff wrong. With the ‘no-one is lying’ attitude, you’ll be better at explaining those facts to other players, without coming across as aggressive and confrontational. Equally, you’ll rarely walk away from a call feeling cheated or hard done by, which is pretty damn awesome.

So yeah. No-one’s lying to you. Except maybe in that call afterwards where you have to line them up in order of age…

There are two lists below the first one is everyone who has signed up and the second is for those people who have spoken to me about regionals/are likely to play regionals but haven’t signed up yet. If you are on that list then also please contact me as soon as possible. For anyone on the first list you can now pay Callum (If you have not done so already) You need to transfer him £25 to the details below and then email finance@mohawks.co.uk stating what reference you used and how much you have transferred. A good reference would be “YOURNAME_REGIONALS”. Lawrence, Meg and Charlie only need to pay £12.50 as you are playing one day.

Callum Smith
Sort Code: 60-30-09
Account Number: 27175839

Signed Up
Ash
Kneetu
Rich
Callum
Shim
Frank
Ed
Joe
Lawrence (Saturday Only)
Dude
Sam Airey
Spoon
James Allen
Faron
Pete
Wham
Geezer
Benjy
Lucy
Natalie
Megan (Sunday)
Jessie
Football
Taxi
Charlie (Saturday)
Dan Knightley
Kyle Shurtz
Ed Pocock
Tag
Rob Ellis.

Need To Confirm List
Jizzy
Jack Pasco
Sim

Thanks.

Ash

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=f42536837ab49658fc74526ab&id=c44b27e630&e=e165f4db83