Thoughts as I'm planning tryouts

It's spring, which means the club season starts gearing up in the Northeast. Hatch has been planning tryouts for the past month or two, and I've got my practice plan all set for the first 2 weeks (open tryouts), and am working on the next 2 weeks. What is difficult right now is to determine how much redundancy to build into the plan. I don't expect that we'll be able to see everyone at every practice, which means that a lot of what we do has to either be fairly universal and basic, or that we need to review new or higher-level skills at multiple times during tryouts.

On the other hand, we are offering tryouts at times which should minimally conflict with other teams, and so I do expect that serious tryouts will be able to make most of the practices. Furthermore, I have big plans for the team this year, and we can't afford to delay building our new skills and working on our offenses/defenses for a month just to focus on basics. Sure, we could all use more work on fundamentals, but getting a newer team to gel together takes time and we need to be efficient about using our time together.

This is part of the reason why we declined doing combined open tryouts with Brute. There was initial appeal because we would be able to potentially see a larger group of women and it would also not force tryouts to choose between which tryout to attend. This is a format that is done elsewhere in the nation, and even the men's side in Boston is holding combined tryouts this year. But we have our own practice agenda to carry out, and we also felt that it would be hard to express our own team personality and to not be seen as a feeder team for Brute if we did combined tryouts. We are a legitimate 3rd option for women with a different experience to offer players; not a way-point or training ground on their way to play for Brute or Godiva.

I've had a number of people question whether the Boston metro-area can even support 3 competitive women's teams. Sure, we are on the smallish side of cities, but there are plenty of ultimate players - and colleges - in the area that feed into the ultimate scene. There has been an explosion in the number of women's programs in the local colleges, and I believe that having more women's club teams also help encourage and promote women's ultimate in this area (I looked around at Sectionals and every other team was coached by a Brute!), so I come down squarely on the side of the more the merrier.