Disclaimer: I ramble on a lot in this, read it anyways
In response the Brun's recent rambling, I have decided to tell my story to counter as well as add to his story. Bruns and I are an interesting species, we are the only two players in Illinois Ultimate history to go from the C team to the A team the following year. Lets not forgot the many others from the C team who detoured at the B team before getting called up. People like Steve Haake, Brandon Smith, Papa bear, and this year Jack Rabuck. It also is telling that others from that team stuck it out for their whole career and were not discouraged that at the beginning, they were very bad at ultimate like all people on the C team. People like Conerty, Dana, Jacob, and Rob. At let us not forget the dearly departed, like Alan Jarman, and Charlie Ma.
That's enough shout outs. What I'm trying to say is that being on the C-team was a collection of people that all got different things out of it. Bruns said he was very upset that he got cut to the C team, but I didn't care all that much because I hadn't put much effort into ultimate that spring and had poor attendance to spring practices and tournaments. So getting cut to the C team wasn't that big of a surprise for me. I was also pretty bad at ultimate.
Backing up a lil bit to how I got involved in the program. In high school, Pecs and I went to the same high school and the summers following junior and senior year I would come along to pickup ultimate with a group of people Chris knew from church. We took it pretty casually as we were always the worst team out there, a bunch of high schoolers with no experience playing against people who had played some sort of structured ultimate before. We lost all the time and we referred to ourselves as the moral boosting team, because other teams always stomped us and felt better about themselves.
So basically I thought of ultimate as this game where you just ran around in circles, and Pecs would boost hammers to me in the back corner of the end zone every once in a while. The summer following senior year Chris had a teacher from our high school come play with us a few times and opened our eyes to some of the subtleties in cutting and getting open. He told us to either run away or at the disc, because its easier to get open and easier to throw to. This is an idea that comes up in our offense even now. It was a good point. His tutelage helped and we played a little bit better. It should be noted at this point that I didn't really have an idea of how to throw forehand at all and could barely throw a backhand.
Over the course of that summer, Pecs was super jacked up about playing ultimate at Illinois and did all the research into the Rookie Facebook group they had created and contacted all the right people. I remember talking to Mike Cozza and thinking he was super awesome and I hoped that ultimate at school would be super fun and all that jazz. I was pretty excited about playing, but not to the extent that pecs was at the beginning of freshman year. Similar to Bruns, I didn't attend all the practices, and I don't remember much about that fall outdoor practices. We learned stuff like the vert stack, Beta, which is different that ours now. At the same time, I was a part of the wrestling club on campus and went to that twice a year, I wrestled in junior high and high school pretty seriously so I was probably more interested in that then ultimate.
Once we moved indoors, my attendance was even poorer because face it, the armory sucks dick, and we were practicing 4 times a week in there. On average I probably went to 2.5 practices a week. When tryouts came around, I skipped the first tryout practice and made the first cut, so I was pretty pumped about that. It should be noted that at this time, I was not the little fatty I am now, and was in much better shape compared to now. At this time, Bruns was just a nobody that was only referred to as Chuck Junior, because hes a ginger like a fomer player, Chuck. To tell you the truth, I don't even remember Bruns from the fall of freshman year. I only remember that someone was called Chuck junior.
The next tryout practice came around and long story short, I got cut. Didn't really matter to me though, I knew I had no business being on the A team. B team was huge though, probably like 40 people, although no more than 25 ever showed to practices, but thats to be expected. I guess its important to note that freshman year, I had been playing as a long and saw no reason to do anything different. I was decently athletic and had garbage throws, throw me on the pile of longs in similar situations.
That spring I think I only attended 2 tournaments, the Music City Tuneup in Tennesee somewhere, and sectionals with the C team. I skipped Mardi Gras to stay in champaign and party with old wrestling coaches, because State was in town that weekend. I also skipped out on Huck Finn because I participated in a wrestling tournament at ISU. Needless to say, at this point I was more interested in wrestling that playing ultimate. Seemed right to me because I invested so much time in high school to wrestling and felt fitting to continue doing so.
So when I finally got cut to the C team is when I made the switch from Long to handler, on the grounds that there were only 2 or 3 people on the C team who handled. I decided I would handle out of necessity for the team. By this time my throws had progressed a little bit from where they were in the fall. I distinctly remember being at music city tune up warming up by throwing and feeling really confident in my forehands like I could actually control them and what not. I also remember the first time I boosted a forehand really well was at an Irwin practice right after we had been split into B/C and I went to a handler group instead of the long group and a few people were like wtf are you doing. We were doing some sort of hucking drill and I just bombed a forehand and it all seemed to fit nicely.
C team played at D2 sectionals that spring and although we didn't play all that well, it was hella fun. We had some people on that team that were really bad and we hadn't practiced together and it was all together ugly. We ran Beta X a few times, I had a few good hucks and some people decided to drop them. I do remember in the ISU game they were playing zone or some junk defense and I threw a blade forehand across the width of the field and it was completed. Not much has changed since then I guess.
Here is where the important part of the post should be. How I got better over the summer following my freshman year in order to make the A team, but I've been enjoying myself too much just rambling about myself and ultimate, so it took me 1000 words or so to get to this point.
So essentially the summer after my freshman year, I played tons of ultimate. I was in 3 different summer leagues that allowed me to be playing 3-4 times a week. I was playing in a CUSL-West league, the NUSL, and the church league that I mentioned earlier in my post. Each league had its own little niche of improvement. The most competitive of these leagues was the CUSL league. It was mostly older people with some college players mixed in so everyone knew how to throw and what was going on essentially. This was my proving ground, when I did something well for the team in this league, I was super pumped because it was against decent competition. The NUSL summer league was usually dicking around with other Illinois players as we stomped on high schoolers, but sometimes there would be a decent matchup against some other college players. When we were stomping on high schoolers, I would frequently boost it, do kind of silly stuff that I wouldn't do in the CUSL league because my teammates would get angry. Then there was the church league, which had a lot of people that didn't really know what was going on and the results didn't really matter, so we dicked around a lot. The only players on our team with experience was pecs and I so we had to teach some of our friends how ultimate should be played and helped our game as well. We would mess around even more in this league, I'd throw hammers all the time, recklessly boost it, etc etc.
So the basics of what I did the summer after freshman year was to just mass as much playing time as I could. Young players need to experience different situations and no amount of practice can take the place of what you learn in game. Taking chances in meaningless games helps you identify what you need to work on more and what works in game and what doesn't. I didn't really have the goal of making A team my sophomore year. I was just enjoying playing ultimate, and success was just a byproduct of having fun. That summer I also went to a FC champaign tournament in Rockford which really opened my eyes after playing a summer of pickup and weak leagues. The first game at Rockford was against Beachfront and I was blown away by how fast everything was going and that I needed to step my game up to be back at real time, instead of at a summer league pace.
That fall, fall of '09, I tried out for FC champaign and made it which was pretty awesome because the only other sophomore on the team was Sid, so I felt like I was in good company. I didn't get to play all that much at sectionals for FC but I got a lot of good practices in with them on the weekends as well as some good playing experience at CHC that fall. I went to pretty much all the practices that fall, just felt like I should, I didn't have any big motivations to make A team, but ultimate was fun and I had fun at practice, so I went to all of them. I felt like I had a chance of making A team and once it got closer and closer to cuts I felt like it was very possible. After Border Brawl, our tryout tournament, I figured that they were gunna take 2 handlers out of myself, Steve, and Pecs. Pecs and I got the call up to the A team and Steve went on to rule the B team.
I'm really glad I ended up making the A team, I wouldn't have had the patience to play on the B team, and although I played a very little amount on the A team, I learned a lot from practice and just watching a lot of ultimate. Walden always like to cover me when he could and would just make my life a living hell ,but I know his intentions were good. Basically over the course of this whole year I just went to practice, kept boosting it and I was happy with that. I felt like I became a much better player over the course of the year just by exposure to good players and tough practice opponents.
The summer following my sophomore year I was working down in champaign, and we would do workouts 2 or 3 times a week and the usual crew would be myself, Sidrys, Pecs, Kurley, Mark, Jacob, Dmac, and Goose would usually run things. That summer seemed like it was 95 degrees and 100% humidity every time we worked out but it let us do some pretty brutal workouts. Goose always seemed to have a good drill for us to do that seemed very applicable. He'd see something and then we'd do a very specific drill to help that situation and would always help. We'd do a hucking drill, but with the special focus of trying to throw the huck directly over the defenders head to make it difficult to D. Drills like this seemed to help control on throws immensely. There are countless other drills we did, but thats just one I remember. We also did a lot of physical workouts with sprints, even when it was blistering heat. Goose would continue to tell us, “Make the heat your friend.” Seemed kinda crazy, but I feel like over the course of this summer is when I made a lot of improvements to my game, my throws, and my physical ability.
One of the things we focused on a lot was flat throw, We'd be doing a huck drill and I would throw a bomb, but usually goose had something to say about every throw that could've made it a little bit better and to concentrate on for the next throw. I feel like this mentality can help make great strides in your throwing technique and throwing skill. After every throw, think of how you could've made it better or how to make the throw more game applicable.
Needless to say, I was pumped up for the year to come, I felt like I was in position to be a starting D line handler behind Kennedy and we would just bomb it all the time on the D line and everything would be awesome. I felt like this is when I peaked thus far, the fall of my junior year felt really good and I felt that I was playing well at the fall tournaments I attended. Some mental errors I could've done without, but physically I was at my peak that fall. As many of you know, at rivalry reheat I tore my ACL and I haven't really been the same since. I had the surgery on my knee just about a year ago, (December 19th, 2010) and I thought by this point my knee would be no issue. Sadly, It still kind of is, and I need to take the proper steps to get it feeling where it needs to be.
In my time of being injured, I spent a lot of time just throwing during practice with other injured people or sometimes goose would come hang out and we'd throw. One drill that really helped with accuracy is you start standing like 10 yards away from each other and each of you throws 5 passes to each other, and if the other person had to move their pivot you start over. After 5 completions each, you each take a few steps back, and you keep doing this until you're throwing 40 yarders directly to each other. It just goes to show that with a lot of concentration its easy to throw really accurately.
Another throwing thing I did in the armory into the net, was throwing while off balance or with odd body momentum. Snackman does it sometimes and just kinda looks stupid, he stands on one foot and throws. I would step backwards and throw. It makes it so you kind of detach your arm from your body and prevents you from using your body to influence your throws. Practicing this is what allows you to throw fadeaway 60 yard hucks. Its pretty cool. Credit goes to some dude on Jam that Walden sent me an email about.
Basically theres so many things you can do to get better at throwing with pretty minimal effort. Kennedy sent out that wiggins throwing stuff a while back, and while I read through that, a lot of the main points were stuff that I usually thought about or goose lectured us on. So if you haven't read that, it would probably be a good idea to do so.
To kind of wrap everything up, a lot of rookies are at a point where they have no clue what they need to get better at, or more so just need to get better at everything. My advice to you is play ultimate to get better at ultimate and just to learn what the fuck is going on. Just learning how everything works and seeing a bunch of different situations and high and low levels of play will help your ultimate intelligence. Once you know whats going on, then you can take the proper steps to improving specific aspects of your game, and learning what your niche of the game is. Are you just gunna run around like a squirrel and layout and get D's like gibby or are you gunna be the gunslinger, boosting it all the time like me, shifty hips like JR or long cuts like Bsmith.
Play ultimate to get better at ultimate.
Read this:
Read all of these: http://www.brown.edu/Athletics/Mens_Ultimate/media/zipstips/
Throwing article I referenced : http://skydmagazine.com/2011/11/wiggins-zen-throwing-routine/
Theres loads of other information on the web, dig through skydmagazine, they have lots of cool articles on there
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