Mar 2009
One at a time
2009/03/04 11:28 Filed in: Ultimate
Give any cutter an entire field to get open and he’ll get the disc every time (assuming reasonable competency of the thrower and cutter). There are just has too many options for the offence and the defender can only take away so many. Beating a defender is remarkably easy.
Put four cutters on the field together, and getting open is much harder. Even if none of the defenders are poaching, the options available to each cutter are now significantly more limited. Some of your options are no longer available, because other cutters have taken them away from you.
It’s tempting to think that even if each cutter has less options, having more cutters should mean more options, but this ignores the defence. A defender’s ability to take options away from an offensive player doesn’t decrease as the number of cutters increases. If defenders do a good job helping each other out, each additional defender increases the ability of each individual defender to take options away from the offence. Even without any defenders helping, each defender can still take away just as many options as before.
As we add cutters and defenders, the ability of each offensive player to get open decreases, while the ability of the defensive player to prevent the offensive player from getting open either increases or stays constant.
As a cutter, then, most of our effort should be placed not in getting open ourselves but in helping our team-mates get open, creating one-on-one scenarios. Sometimes we still need to get open (1/4 of the time), sometimes we need to be preparing to get open later (continuation or next cut if your team-mate doesn’t get open), but most of the time we should just be getting out of the way.
I think most good ultimate players recognize this. If you watch most top-level teams, most of their offence is designed to create a sequence of isolation scenarios for their cutters, so that the primary cutter at each moment in time has as many options as possible, keeping in mind that who is the “primary cutter” changes constantly as the play unfolds.
The problem is that most beginning players are not taught this, especially when the horizontal stack is taught. We teach so-called piston cutting... cut deep, cut in, cut deep, cut in... keep cutting back and forth forever. Soon I’ll go into more detail on how dumb this is, but for today it’s enough to recognize that with everyone trying to get open in their lane, each individual cutter is severely limited.
When everyone tries to get open, no one gets open.
This is the first of a bunch of new posts about ultimate.
Put four cutters on the field together, and getting open is much harder. Even if none of the defenders are poaching, the options available to each cutter are now significantly more limited. Some of your options are no longer available, because other cutters have taken them away from you.
It’s tempting to think that even if each cutter has less options, having more cutters should mean more options, but this ignores the defence. A defender’s ability to take options away from an offensive player doesn’t decrease as the number of cutters increases. If defenders do a good job helping each other out, each additional defender increases the ability of each individual defender to take options away from the offence. Even without any defenders helping, each defender can still take away just as many options as before.
As we add cutters and defenders, the ability of each offensive player to get open decreases, while the ability of the defensive player to prevent the offensive player from getting open either increases or stays constant.
As a cutter, then, most of our effort should be placed not in getting open ourselves but in helping our team-mates get open, creating one-on-one scenarios. Sometimes we still need to get open (1/4 of the time), sometimes we need to be preparing to get open later (continuation or next cut if your team-mate doesn’t get open), but most of the time we should just be getting out of the way.
I think most good ultimate players recognize this. If you watch most top-level teams, most of their offence is designed to create a sequence of isolation scenarios for their cutters, so that the primary cutter at each moment in time has as many options as possible, keeping in mind that who is the “primary cutter” changes constantly as the play unfolds.
The problem is that most beginning players are not taught this, especially when the horizontal stack is taught. We teach so-called piston cutting... cut deep, cut in, cut deep, cut in... keep cutting back and forth forever. Soon I’ll go into more detail on how dumb this is, but for today it’s enough to recognize that with everyone trying to get open in their lane, each individual cutter is severely limited.
When everyone tries to get open, no one gets open.
This is the first of a bunch of new posts about ultimate.
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