Coaching with the big picture in mind

Quick preface: Jin asked me to give some of my thoughts on ultimate and as Northeastern has just won the NE Regional title for the second year in a row, my approach to our season seemed an appropriate topic. On paper finishing 3rd at Sectionals and 1st at Regionals doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and if asked to explain that my short answer would be that we played better at Regionals, but my bigger picture answer is that we weren't trying to win Sectionals, we were trying to win Regionals...

In my opinion there are two ways of going about trying to accomplish something: you either take what you have and try to make things work to meet your needs or you look at the entire situation and figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to be. These choices are true of most any aspect of life, but can be overlooked when trying to think about something like how to build a successful ultimate season. The Engineer in me always has me looking at the bigger picture and trying to figure out the most effective way to solve something even if the solution takes longer to figure out.

I am a very big proponent of formulating a team goal (even if that goal is just in my head and not fully expressed to the team) and then figuring out how the team can best accomplish that goal. Coming off a Nationals trip last season we were returning a lot of players but lost our two primary handlers as well as a couple complimentary role players. We still had a couple of our top players and we could have just focused the offense of the team completely around them, but I wanted to take a bigger approach to the season because my goal was to return to Nationals.

Throughout the fall and into the spring I made a point of trying to develop more handlers to fill the void of last year's team. I could have just plugged in our most experienced cutters (who also happen to have handling experience from past seasons) but I saw our team being stronger if we could develop more consistent play from our entire roster. I identified a group of about six players to audition for two or three open handler roles and spent the end of the fall and the first couple tournaments of the spring seeing how each of the players worked within our team. I knew that shuffling players around and asking players to take on bigger roles maybe before they were ready would mean that our play early in the season was not going to be as good as if I went with the more sure thing of leaning on the players I already trusted, but I also knew that the maximum potential of our team would be achieved if our top cutters could stay as our top cutters and we could develop new handlers.

Our performance at each of our pre-Series tournaments (President's Day, Long Island Classic, Centex) was lackluster at best from a results stand point and I know many of our players were frustrated by our play. But as the season moved along, I kept telling myself that our finish at these tournaments was not the most important thing; putting our best team on the field at Regionals was the most important thing. As long as the team and the individuals on the team were progressing we were putting ourselves in a better position to win at Regionals.

As Sectionals rolled around, we were battling a couple key injuries and trying to re-integrate a couple of key players coming back from injuries and moving the team along as a whole became more important than any individual game at the tournament. Sure we needed to qualify for Regionals first and foremost, but I didn't want to risk complicating any existing injuries or aggravating any past injuries by playing people that we could afford to have rest. Additionally, by sitting out some of our top players, other players on the team were forced to step into a greater role on the field. My thinking was that Sectionals was a testing ground for the entire roster and that when we put everything back together we would be better than we had been going into Sectionals. Once we clinched our birth to Regionals, I shut some more players down and we ended up stumbling to the aforementioned 3rd place finish.

The next step in the big picture was trying to build up the mental strength of the team to a point where we knew we could beat the teams (like Harvard and Tufts) that we had just lost to, and could play with the teams (like Dartmouth, Middlebury, Wesleyan, Brown, etc) that we had not yet seen. I made a big point to express my confidence in the team more than I usually do because I was looking at our roster as a whole and had a lot more faith in our players because of their individual play at Sectionals and other tournaments than I had at the beginning of the season.

At Regionals we played a consistent rotation of 14 players and had 16 players get playing time in the semis and finals. Our rotation seemed much bigger than other teams and allowed our top players to play 2 out of 3 points or 3 out of 4 points instead of 25 out of 25 points or 25 out of 28 points like the top players on other teams played. Because they had been in big spots, our entire roster was able to contribute and make plays and we emerged as the Regional champs.

I am not sure where we would have finished if our season was just built on the top 8 or 10 returning players from last year, but I am happy with how things turned out doing things the way we did.

A couple keys to coaching with the big picture in mind:

Communication - while the team may not need to know every minute detail of a coaches goal, having all of the players understand what the team is working for is vital. We didn't go to tournaments with a goal of winning said tournament, and we didn't approach any games with the goal that "we have to win this game". We saw our goal as playing the best ultimate we could at the end of the season, and the entire season we worked to improve towards that goal regardless of results. Players have to be willing to work through the entire season in order for a team to reach their potential, and making sure they understand how you plan to have them working all season is a great way to help insure that.

Losing Is OK - nobody wants to lose an individual battle or lose on purpose, but suffering team losses in moments that don't truly matter is fine. If you attack every point of every game to win that point and win that game, you will be limiting the roles you let people play and that will stunt their growth and along with that the growth of your team. Early in the season I often tell my handlers that they have to throw deep in their first 5 touches of the disc. These throws are often turns, and sometimes completely the wrong throw, but they build an experience and skill that will be useful later. I'll keep playing a particular defense even if we are not getting turns and I know we could with other defenses because we need to improve on things that we can't do well. If you have a big picture constructed in your head for where you want the team to get to you can more than afford to lose points or games early in the season to get closer to those goals.

Make Sure You Let People Play - working on something at practice is a very easy thing to do. There is no noticeable pressure, a mistake is simply a mistake, and you can talk things out as much as you want because you control the pace. But everything meaningful that your team is going to try to accomplish happens in real life games, against an opponent, where a mistake can mean the difference between you scoring you getting scored on, between winning and losing. So, letting people get game experience, and big game experience at that, will put them in the best position for success when the games you need to win are actually being played out and you want them on the field. This pretty much goes hand-in-hand with my comment about losing being OK, but I can't stress enough how important getting your entire roster onto the field in big moments of games instead of just riding your best players will help later in the season. And if you want someone to handle at a tournament in April, have them handle at a tournament in February, because February is the time for someone to mess up, for you to be there to help them, and for them to get better for when April rolls around.

Formulate and Trust Your Plan! - if you are a first year or very new coach, you may feel very overwhelmed by the thought of planning out an entire season before the season even starts, and frankly you should be overwhelmed by that thought. My first year coaching was spent working with what I had and trying to scrap for every point we could. As I got a handle on the team and got a feel for the game I began thinking more in terms of how to approach an entire game instead of one point, then how to approach an entire tournament instead of one game, and finally how to approach an entire season instead of just one tournament. This progression will take time, but keep your eyes and mind open to how you can do things better. I keep a notebook for random ideas I get about practice or game play and that helps me refine my big picture.

Once you have built up your confidence in yourself and your knowledge of the team, and you are willing to think ahead and plan for an entire season, you need to be able to trust yourself to carry out that plan. If you think the team is best with player X as a handler, and player X is not playing well, don't have them ride the bench, make them a better player by helping them improve their play. If you want six to eight players you can have run cup and at the front of the zone, and you can get lots of D's with persons A, B and C at the front of your zone, don't just have them play at the front of your zone, try persons D, E, and F because you want to build a deeper rotation. If you want a deep game to feature multiple threats so another team can't key up on your primary players and Star 1 can throw deep to Star 2 at will, don't put them on the field together and force Star 1 to create a Star 3 and Star 4 with their throws. If your goal is to be a fresher team on Sunday by playing a bigger rotation on Saturday and you get down 4-1 early don't shorten your rotation, stick with the plan for a big rotation and see if people can step up. If they can, you just built a ton of confidence. If they can't, work with them so that next time they can.