cutting
Either get open or get out of the way
2009/03/10 19:56 Filed in: Ultimate
When people go to their first ultimate clinic, they’re usually taught a version of the vertical stack in which you cut from the front and clear out to the back in some sort of big looping pattern that reminds me of magnetic fields diagrams. 
It’s this nice egalitarian model of cutting, where everyone gets their turn, and it is pretty easy to understand. In real life, though, you’ve got less than 10 seconds to get open. There isn’t time for an endless cycle of ineffective cuts.
It wasn’t until I picked up Zaz’s book, about 6 months after I started playing ultimate, that I got some sense of how this was actually supposed to work. “Oh, you’re supposed to get open.” Looking back, it seems obvious, but in the beginning it was never really clear that you had a responsibility to actually get open on your cut.
This is something that really needs to be emphasized for beginning players. If you’re cutting off a vertical stack, you need to get open every time. You don’t need to get the disc every time - sometimes the throw won’t be there, or one of your team-mates will be more open - but you should beat your defender and make a viable cut. If you’re just going through the motions, it isn’t going to work.
No matter what your team’s offensive scheme, there are certain spots on the field where your team intends to catch the disc. A team with strong handlers might really prioritize the break side and the deep. With weaker handlers, you may prioritize the open side. In a split stack, it’s the middle of the field that you’re opening up. When the disc is on the sideline, it’s anywhere where you can reset the disc. No matter where your team’s goals lie, any time you move into these spots, you have to be open.
It’s not enough to get open in these spots, you have to be open when you get there. If I’m dancing around in the lane for four stalls, I’ve completely clogged up my team’s offence. You need to get open before you move into the lane, so that you’re open for the duration of your time in the lane, and as soon as you’re no longer open, you have to get out of the way. In a ho stack, I can’t cut deep to set up an in-cut unless I’m actually open on my deep cut, otherwise I’m getting in the way of someone who can get open deep. Every cut to a priority position needs to be a legitimate open cut.
There are some exceptions, such as offensive sets where the initiating cut gets into a priority position before attempting to get open (an endzone iso, setting up a “German”, etc.), but in any sort of motion-based offence, everyone needs to understand that if they’re going to cut somewhere, they have a responsibility to either get open or get out.
It’s this nice egalitarian model of cutting, where everyone gets their turn, and it is pretty easy to understand. In real life, though, you’ve got less than 10 seconds to get open. There isn’t time for an endless cycle of ineffective cuts.It wasn’t until I picked up Zaz’s book, about 6 months after I started playing ultimate, that I got some sense of how this was actually supposed to work. “Oh, you’re supposed to get open.” Looking back, it seems obvious, but in the beginning it was never really clear that you had a responsibility to actually get open on your cut.
This is something that really needs to be emphasized for beginning players. If you’re cutting off a vertical stack, you need to get open every time. You don’t need to get the disc every time - sometimes the throw won’t be there, or one of your team-mates will be more open - but you should beat your defender and make a viable cut. If you’re just going through the motions, it isn’t going to work.
No matter what your team’s offensive scheme, there are certain spots on the field where your team intends to catch the disc. A team with strong handlers might really prioritize the break side and the deep. With weaker handlers, you may prioritize the open side. In a split stack, it’s the middle of the field that you’re opening up. When the disc is on the sideline, it’s anywhere where you can reset the disc. No matter where your team’s goals lie, any time you move into these spots, you have to be open.
It’s not enough to get open in these spots, you have to be open when you get there. If I’m dancing around in the lane for four stalls, I’ve completely clogged up my team’s offence. You need to get open before you move into the lane, so that you’re open for the duration of your time in the lane, and as soon as you’re no longer open, you have to get out of the way. In a ho stack, I can’t cut deep to set up an in-cut unless I’m actually open on my deep cut, otherwise I’m getting in the way of someone who can get open deep. Every cut to a priority position needs to be a legitimate open cut.
There are some exceptions, such as offensive sets where the initiating cut gets into a priority position before attempting to get open (an endzone iso, setting up a “German”, etc.), but in any sort of motion-based offence, everyone needs to understand that if they’re going to cut somewhere, they have a responsibility to either get open or get out.
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Piston Cutting Is Dumb
2009/03/04 12:27 Filed in: Ultimate
When I was first taught the horizontal stack, I was taught to piston cut in pairs. The basic principle is pretty simple. On each side of the field you have two cutters. One cuts out while the other cuts in. Then you switch. Then you switch again. Back and forth you go, over and over again.
I think this is a fairly standard way of introducing the horizontal stack. On some level, it kind of makes sense, since the horizontal stack is supposed to open up the short and the deep, so these are the spots you want to cut into, and you don’t want to be running all over the place cutting off your team-mates.
Increasingly, though, when playing with players who have been taught to cut this way, I want to strangle them. After some reflection, I realized it wasn’t really their fault. I now want to strangle whoever taught them to cut that way. There are a number of reasons for this.
Looking at each individual cutter, there are a number of problems. When you’re confined to a vertical lane, your options are severely restricted - you can cut in, or out, that’s it. When you are deep, you can only cut straight back in. When you’re in, you can only cut back out deep. If your defender has the basic intelligence required to lace up his or her cleats, they know where you’re going, which makes their job even easier.
At least when you’re in the middle you have two options (it’s not good when two options is something to get excited about). The only problem is that because of this whole pairs thing, you are back to one option, because you have to go the opposite way from your pair (otherwise things get clogged). The pairs thing never works in practice anyway, since deep strikes are generally longer than in strikes, so the timing gets thrown off, and inevitably you either get out of sync, the “stack” gets too deep, or both.
You’ve always got two cutters cutting deep, and two cutters cutting in (in theory), so you’re never actually in a horizontal stack. Instead, you are always running through it. Our horizontal “stack” now looks more like a box, with two players deep and two players short, especially once your cutters start to get tired from all this running back and forth.
If, somehow, you do manage to get open on an in-cut (your defender is a slow, mentally or physically), you’re now essentially in a straight foot-race with your defender, and while you may have a step on them, they have the advantage of being on the force side. You’re not even in position to get your body between them and the disc. You absolutely can’t slow down to make the catch and the disc better be perfectly thrown or you are going to turn it over. For all this effort, you hopefully gain five yards.
If, somehow, you do manage to get open on an out-cut (your defender is slow, mentally or physically), you’re still in a foot-race, but because you’ve got two players cutting deep at a time, there’s an extra defender ready to help. Additionally, because of the stack inevitably ending up too deep, you’d better hope your thrower has a really solid arm in order to lead you.
On top of all this, if your defenders have half a brain, they’ll just switch on the cuts, so they’ve always got a defender between the in-cutter and the disc and they’ve always got a defender between the out-cutter and the end-zone. Not only does this prevent you from getting the disc, but it also means that you’re running your ass off, and they’re not. At the end of the game, who do you think is still going to have the energy to cut hard, you or them?
Of course, no experienced cutters actually cut like this. The problem is that a single piston cutter can completely KO your entire offensive flow. By cutting back and forth in a single lane (usually not very quickly, since they’re dead tired), that entire lane is now no longer usable by the other cutters. If you’re lucky, they’ll set up on the break-side and not really get in the way too much, but more often than not they are set up on the open side, cutting in an out, not getting open, and preventing anyone else from slashing into that space.
I think this is a fairly standard way of introducing the horizontal stack. On some level, it kind of makes sense, since the horizontal stack is supposed to open up the short and the deep, so these are the spots you want to cut into, and you don’t want to be running all over the place cutting off your team-mates.
Increasingly, though, when playing with players who have been taught to cut this way, I want to strangle them. After some reflection, I realized it wasn’t really their fault. I now want to strangle whoever taught them to cut that way. There are a number of reasons for this.
Looking at each individual cutter, there are a number of problems. When you’re confined to a vertical lane, your options are severely restricted - you can cut in, or out, that’s it. When you are deep, you can only cut straight back in. When you’re in, you can only cut back out deep. If your defender has the basic intelligence required to lace up his or her cleats, they know where you’re going, which makes their job even easier.
At least when you’re in the middle you have two options (it’s not good when two options is something to get excited about). The only problem is that because of this whole pairs thing, you are back to one option, because you have to go the opposite way from your pair (otherwise things get clogged). The pairs thing never works in practice anyway, since deep strikes are generally longer than in strikes, so the timing gets thrown off, and inevitably you either get out of sync, the “stack” gets too deep, or both.
You’ve always got two cutters cutting deep, and two cutters cutting in (in theory), so you’re never actually in a horizontal stack. Instead, you are always running through it. Our horizontal “stack” now looks more like a box, with two players deep and two players short, especially once your cutters start to get tired from all this running back and forth.
If, somehow, you do manage to get open on an in-cut (your defender is a slow, mentally or physically), you’re now essentially in a straight foot-race with your defender, and while you may have a step on them, they have the advantage of being on the force side. You’re not even in position to get your body between them and the disc. You absolutely can’t slow down to make the catch and the disc better be perfectly thrown or you are going to turn it over. For all this effort, you hopefully gain five yards.
If, somehow, you do manage to get open on an out-cut (your defender is slow, mentally or physically), you’re still in a foot-race, but because you’ve got two players cutting deep at a time, there’s an extra defender ready to help. Additionally, because of the stack inevitably ending up too deep, you’d better hope your thrower has a really solid arm in order to lead you.
On top of all this, if your defenders have half a brain, they’ll just switch on the cuts, so they’ve always got a defender between the in-cutter and the disc and they’ve always got a defender between the out-cutter and the end-zone. Not only does this prevent you from getting the disc, but it also means that you’re running your ass off, and they’re not. At the end of the game, who do you think is still going to have the energy to cut hard, you or them?
Of course, no experienced cutters actually cut like this. The problem is that a single piston cutter can completely KO your entire offensive flow. By cutting back and forth in a single lane (usually not very quickly, since they’re dead tired), that entire lane is now no longer usable by the other cutters. If you’re lucky, they’ll set up on the break-side and not really get in the way too much, but more often than not they are set up on the open side, cutting in an out, not getting open, and preventing anyone else from slashing into that space.
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.