Ultimate Tips - Reader Contributions Please
puddleduck asks:
I'd be curious to read your thoughts on skills development and ultimate specific training. Currently I play 2-3 times a week and hope to become an impact player at this level (RIPUL Summer League ... roughly equivilent to Buda's Hatleagues) over the next two seasons.
Other than playing as often as possible, and testing my wife's patients for throwing with me, do you have suggestions for learning the game? I missed out on the opportunity to get coached in college and I don't see myself making a club team anytime soon.
Alrighty! Instruction for new players with perhaps an emphasis on throwing seems to be the target, so here goes:
- Buy a copy of Ultimate Techniques and Tactics by Jim Parinella and Eric Zazlow. It's fantastic. You will learn much more from it than you will from me.
- Throw as often as you can. I sometimes feel that players that come to the sport after college are at a big disadvantage. When you are on a team in college, you throw every day, sometimes in multiple sessions, and that doesn't even count practices. You'll see teammates between classes and you'll kill time by tossing. You almost can't help but become a good thrower. I play with a fair number of guys who came to the sport after college, and their throws have taken much longer to develop. Repetition, repetition, repetition.
Fix your grips sooner rather than later. When I first started playing I threw my backhand with my index finger laying along the rim. It took six months before a more experienced player noticed and said to me, "you know, nobody who's any good holds their backhand like that." Argh (thank you, Will Heyman). Fortunately, with only six months under my belt the rebuild wasn't too painful. You should squeeze your backhand in your fist, all fingers curled under the rim. Much more power than the finger-out grip.
As for the flick, they tell me you should have two fingers on the rim but I can't help you there, as I've been using the split-finger grip (index finger on the rim, middle finger pointing towards the middle of the disc) for 17 years and it's too late for me to change now (I've tried). But if you're still finding your style, you should probably get a two-finger flick thrower to teach you. Watching the teams warm up for the finals at Open Nationals last year, seemed like the split-finger grip was the rare exception.
(A story about my inferior grip: a teammate was trying to convince another split-finger thrower to change grips. He was going around demonstrating that all the good throwers threw two-finger. Until he got to me, and was shocked to discover I was in the split-finger camp. Kinda undermined his case. So I've made do. But still, if I had it to do over again...)
- When you practice throwing, throw like you will in a game. Fake, pivot, throw. Don't just stand upright and casually toss. Especially if you aren't throwing every day. Make your rare throwing sessions count. Most importantly...
Get your body low when you throw! Practice pivoting wide and throwing from a lunged position. Bend from the knees, not the waist. You want to be able to pivot from the forehand lunge to the backhand lunge and back while maintaining balance about your center of gravity. There are throwers that can break the mark at will while standing more upright, but in my experience many of the good mark-breakers do it with the legs and low throws.
(Another story: the player that gave me the biggest nightmares was Jeff Capella. I often ended up covering him, and was always woefully outmatched. I remember once trying to mark him, and he had pivoted way out for the forehand. Then way back for the backhand. The thing was, he never came out of the crouch when transitioning. It was like he was on rails, and his shoulders never got higher than three feet off the ground. The worse part was when he'd get to the middle of transitioning from forehand to backhand, and would rapidly juke back-and-forth in this crouched position before extending out for an easy throw around my hapless mark. Nightmares, I tell you.)
- Don't learn a high-release backhand. You will fall in love with it, and you will always use it to break the mark to the forehand side. You will use it at the expense of your low-release backhand and break-mark flick. It will become a crutch, but one that you can't use at all in the wind. You will use it for years anyway, before finally admitting to yourself that it sucks, and going back to learn the throws you should have been using all along. Trust me on this.
- Get in shape, stay in shape. It feels worse to get beat by bad players who outrun you than good players who outplay you.
- There are two ways to mark effectively: cheat, or move your feet. Cheating is easy, moving your feet is hard. You have to decide which kind of marker you want to be: [a] ineffective, [b] dishonorable, or [c] really, really tired from working so hard. Most guys that stop me from breaking the mark do it by blatant fouling on the pivot, so I really admire the guys that do it with footwork.
- When covering a cutter, adopt a proactive mindset. Reactive defense generally sucks (when you wait to see what your man is going to do and then you chase him). Get where your man wants to go first. Even better, make him go where you want him to. This is a pretty subtle skill, requires a good team defense, and is not one I'm particularly good at. But every now that then I've felt it, and it feels great.
That's all off the top of my head. You'd think 17 years of play would amount to more advice. Any tips from readers?