rookie offense

We took a gamble in the fall, and came out teaching a horizontal offense. And we taught it to a team composed of 2/3 rookies and 1/3 returners, only one of whom had even played ho before.

My reasoning was that we could isolate our more experienced cutters to make better use of the field and maintain the disc with the stronger handlers for more of the time. Furthermore, we would hopefully be able to avoid the swarm mentality that so easily occurs with vertical, especially given how many new players would be on the field.

To a degree, this worked okay in the fall - we were able to build a foundation for cutting, and ensured that their vision of the field is not solely fixed in vertical (or solely in ho), but by the end of the semester, we stopped using the horizontal as much. Part of the problem was that because we were working with players whose field sense had not quite developed yet, we had to teach them a more structured pattern of cutting, which took a lot of cognitive processing (but we're MIT, so that actually went more smoothly than I feared), and they had difficulty recognizing the open spaces and timing their cuts to those spaces effectively. Vertical was easier for them because it was simpler to determine who was supposed to be cutting, and to where.

Now fast forward a couple months. It's the start of the spring semester, and after we wrapped up our team defenses unit, we started back on the ho stack for 3 practices thus far. The difference is astounding.

I don't know what clicked, exactly, or how, but during the scrimmage today I saw two cutters work together to get the disc in flow without cutting each other off, I saw another make a perfectly timed fill cut from the sideline position when she saw that both middle cutters were out of position, and there were multitudes of isolated deep cuts off of dishes with the correct timing. And yes, these were all first-year players.

One thing that may have helped was spending a lot of time doing a 2-cutter ho stack drill, where the second cutter has to react to the motion of the first and give the opposite option for the thrower. In that way, we reinforced the importance of isolating cuts into the two cutting areas (in and deep) and trained them to pay attention to each other's cuts and position.

Their own steep learning curve, too, has much to do with the improvement compared to the fall - their sense of the field is continuing to develop with every point they play, they are starting to learn how to pay attention to their defenders and their teammates when they cut, and they have more confidence in what they are doing and so every cut is that much more aggressive.

Things are beginning to click for this very young and promising team, and I think our gamble is starting to pay off. Let's just hope that the challenges of being outdoors (wind, larger field) won't be too much for us to handle.