A bit after college regionals, Andy asked me if I was interested in coaching the IYU U20 boys at YCC with him. After talking with Zubair about it, we both eventually decided to give it a shot this season as assistant coaches.
As an assistant coach, I felt that the time I brought the most to the table was with watching & discussing in-game adjustments with the other coaches, providing useful feedback to lines in-game, providing offensive play calls, and identifying defensive matchups. During the games on Saturday and Sunday, I felt like I was able to quickly identify large role offensive players on opposing teams and assign good matchups along with a few words of specific goals to those defenders. I think this had a big impact on how we were able to apply better pressure in 2nd halves of games. I also felt like I was able to communicate clearly and effectively with the offensive unit, and as a result we were able to use our small book of options in a more effective way. In practices, my role as an assistant coach was fairly small. I lead warm-ups for the first few weeks, ran a few drills here or there, provided individual advice, watched what our team was struggling at, and was available to run a practice when Andy was out of town. That said, if I hadn't know our players as well, my ability to help put players in positions to succeed on offense and defense would have been much worse, so maybe there's plenty of value in that alone.
I didn't really know what to expect going into it, but I was pretty sure that talking about ultimate with Andy & Zubair for 8 weeks was going to be a good time no matter what happened.
These were my goals going into the season, in no particular order:
- Watch and learn as much as possible from Andy
- Watch and learn as much as possible from Zubair
- Work with a new group of players with a unique set of backgrounds and abilities
- Make a positive impact on the team in terms of culture, level of play, etc.
- Be a positive role model for developing young men & players
- Understand some of the differences in how the game is played and taught at the high school level
These were my concerns:
- Whether I would be able to develop productive on-field relationships with new players in just 8 weeks
- The level of impact I would have in a smaller role
As expected, the 8 weeks of tryouts and practices flew by incredibly quickly. Practices were typically very hot, the playing surface was either a dried-out rock hard surface or a slightly grassy mud patch, attendance was a challenge with people going on family trips, and traffic on the way to practice was a real issue for a good amount of players.
Tryouts were a huge challenge for me, trying to learn the names of all the players and have productive discussion with my co-coaches after a few short hours of drills and games was very difficult. I have never gone into a tryout situation as a decision-maker with so little background information and so little time to assess players. In other contexts with club and college you either have way more information or way more time to make your assessments, and therefore the outcome is much more accurate. In this situation I had no choice to defer to the other coaches on a lot of players, providing input as best I could with what I had seen.
Practices were typically attended by between 12 and 16 players. We had a core of about 8 players who came to everything, then a rotating cast of 4-10 guys who came to things as much as they could between summer plans. This was not great for the development of the team, and I think probably lowered the performance ceiling of the team by about 15%. I don't have a good solution to this problem, travel distance and other priorities are going to remain a big challenge for a tourney team like this in the current format. I think if we had known about the level of attendance people would have prior to roster selection, I would have potentially advocated for some different players.
The practice structure was fairly basic. We would warm up, circle throw, do 4 lines, then basically alternate focused drills and short scrimmages. With only 6-7 weeks of actual practice time to work with, we spent a bit of time on a lot of different topics. I think this approach was really good for the players who came to everything, because it meant we were able to address a lot of different aspects of the game and improve a lot. For the players who attended fewer practices, this approach meant that they were missing a lot of critical structural information offensively and defensively, and they were clearly left behind. As a result, I felt like the players on the team were at really different levels by the end of the season in terms of ability to execute any kind of structure on the field. In part because of this, I think our offense was only about 40% implemented and our defensive systems were only about 25% complete.
As a head coach, Andy does a really good job talking about purpose and mentality in huddles. Most of his talk is focused on building "team-ness", through things like recognizing the positives in teammates, understanding the power of team effort and energy, and appreciating the time the team has together. I really like how Andy is able to use his tone of voice to add energy and conviction to huddles, and I think these efforts had a tremendously positive effect on the character of the team. Andy draws a lot of good ideas about spaces from soccer, and uses these concepts fairly directly when he talks about offensive cutting, decision making as a thrower, zone offense, and zone defense. Andy is also a strong "player's coach", and makes an effort to maintain and develop positive relationships with all players. He encourages players to have deeper conversations with each other, think critically, and addresses things directly when inappropriate comments are made.
Me, Andy, and Zubair obviously did not agree on everything. We all have strong personalities and opinions about how the game should be taught and how practices should be ran. If I had been the head coach of this team, our practices would have had more drills that were simpler & shorter, more stationary throwing, and more mini-games. I would have done less generic scrimmaging and fewer long drills. I would have spent more attention on making sure that players were getting enough throwing/catching and running in to improve in those areas over the 7 weeks. I would have spent more time on teaching offense and less time on defense and zone, since I think we would have seen a bigger benefit if we had gotten our offense up to 65% rather than improving our zone look.
That said, this is really making a mountain out of a molehill if the attendance issue doesn't get addressed. That's probably the biggest limiting factor, and changing practice structure probably isn't going to change that much.
The biggest barrier to development that I came across on this team was dealing with deeply ingrained bad habits. Many of the players on the team had been playing ultimate for 4+ years, but had been doing so in systems where concepts like spacing and timing were not explicitly taught. Each high school seemed to have it's own totally random set of cutting patterns and shapes, based on whatever the cutter is feeling at that particular moment. It was really common to see incuts straight at the disc from 15 yards directly in front of the thrower. Technical reset cutting was seemingly non-existent for many players, they would just do whatever was needed to get open with no regard for teammates or the thrower or attacking subsequently.
We had a scrimmage against Machine at the last practice of the season, which was a really fun thing Andy organized. Going in I expected us to score fewer than 3 points in a game to 15, that's how badly I felt we were playing. I was pleasantly surprised, as we ended up playing an 8-6 half against a pickup squad of machiners who were kind of trying. I remember being impressed with how fast we were, how well we were able to get open, and our patience working through machine's junk sets. I saw a skinny 16 year old sky Sam Kanner too, so that was a highlight I guess.
The tournament itself was a whirlwind. Our team was inconsistent, mostly due to offensive issues. When we were executing well and running hard, we played like a semifinalist. We turned in a number of really strong halves of games like this. We gave Atlanta a valiant effort in our pre-quarter match, showing a ton of heart and gritty defense, but at the end of the day our offensive inconsistency kept us out of quarters. There were a ton of parents who made the trip to Minnesota to watch and support the team, which was really awesome. Also, as much as KB doesn't like the organizational hassle, it is really cool to be able to have YCC in the same location as the U.S. Open. Being able to watch the club semifinal games live in the stadium with the whole IYU team was an amazing experience.
As an assistant coach, I felt that the time I brought the most to the table was with watching & discussing in-game adjustments with the other coaches, providing useful feedback to lines in-game, providing offensive play calls, and identifying defensive matchups. During the games on Saturday and Sunday, I felt like I was able to quickly identify large role offensive players on opposing teams and assign good matchups along with a few words of specific goals to those defenders. I think this had a big impact on how we were able to apply better pressure in 2nd halves of games. I also felt like I was able to communicate clearly and effectively with the offensive unit, and as a result we were able to use our small book of options in a more effective way. In practices, my role as an assistant coach was fairly small. I lead warm-ups for the first few weeks, ran a few drills here or there, provided individual advice, watched what our team was struggling at, and was available to run a practice when Andy was out of town. That said, if I hadn't know our players as well, my ability to help put players in positions to succeed on offense and defense would have been much worse, so maybe there's plenty of value in that alone.
P.S.
None of the team name suggestions that I brainstormed for this team resonated with Andy and Zubair. Which was lame. I came up with some really good ones - I'm going to solidly lay blame on them for our lack of an interesting name, I did my best. I finally started to make some progress by day 2 of YCCs with Zubair with "Land of Lincoln", hopefully that one sticks around.
