Frustration and...promise?

Udderburn practice.  It feels like a bunch of college kids who have never known anything outside of the college sphere run a team.  It is almost the exact opposite of how I want to run it.  I don't think the offense suits the roster, I don't think the team has a strong identity (though in part I will admit fault there, they had a pretty good one until the cohort of people who really wanted to win showed up), I don't think the people running things know what they're doing.  I mean, sure, nobody _knows_ what they're doing in this sport, but it seems like they've never gone out looking for something else to see what's there.  The mix of people is frustrating as well- talented players and people who can't throw dumps. 

Many of the problems are epitomized in our choice in drills- we run rhino (which I consider a vestigial drill) and we run the five-man dump drill.  In half an hour, Udderburn covered what ISide covered in literally 5 minutes, as did Ubuntu- if the main dump fails and you're the backup, you're go do what you have to do to get open.  But when you run the drill, you emphasize the wrong things and the wrong people practice the wrong positions.  90% of the team never needs to be dump cutters.  We have perhaps 8 handlers on the team, maybe 10 and there is so much more value to just working them on the dumps and having everybody else learn their tendencies.  If the point of the drill is to work the swing, all the more reason- what purpose to teaching our cutters how to throw a swing?  That isn't their job.  It wastes their time and the handlers time.

There were so many good ideas from Boston tryouts last year and to come here and see this is so frustrating.  Ball ran good scenario walkthroughs (though in too large a group, I felt), and 7th tried them also.  Iside and Ubuntu both had very good understandings of not just the basics but the nuances of their offenses, as did Slow.  This was borne out through the work that they did (ISide at least)   I really don't feel like udderburn know what their strengths are, nor the subtleties of the spread.  And there's a very strong tendency to do things "our way"both at the team level- they refuse to call it a spread, insisting on the much more confusing "split ho", and the personal level- this is a much more common, but extremely bad habit, one which I'm guilty of all too often as well.


As for the practice itself- in low wind conditions it was still a turn-stravaganza.  Personally, I had a mediocre/bad practice after a promising start in the three-man mark drill with Rob and Bill.  Two pretty decent handlers, rob's got length on me and Bill has good quickness with the disc.  I got somewhere around three blocks and got blocked i think twice, so I was up on that drill.  Again, though, that drill isn't really a drill for cutters.  Why teach them how to break the mark like that?  That's a handler's job.

Anyway, a guy from Mad Club showed up and balled all day, which was fun to watch.  He had the ups and he had the intangibles.  It was good covering him because he was a lot like ryan- he just ran away and then in and then away and then in all day every day.  Tiring and very good at getting you out of position- really made me work hard.  I had one shot at the layout d I wanted and he took it away with a great move to put himself in the lane.  Partly his good, partly my bad; I could have still pulled that trigger.  I had my head wrong, but still.  A great player and a lot of fun to mark up on.  Quick as hell, too.  Our team definitely won the suicides at the end, despite lots of confusion.

I reaped what I sowed after practice though, as my leg seized out and eventually I couldn't walk without shooting pain.  Oh well.  Advil and I will be buddies for a few, I guess.  Ginie and I have a tour, so there'll be plenty of walking...we'll see how it goes.

Doin' my work,
~#28