Tryouts Day 7

Today was rough. Wet enough that the disc was slick, windy enough that throws and catches were difficult. And then we played clam.

I've written before about my plan for this team: I want to mold these individuals into a cohesive unit, wherein the whole is much more than its parts. We've been working a lot on team defense recently, what with zone for the past week and horizontal defense before that. Today we came back around to team defense vs a vertical stack, but not as a willy-nilly switching defense on the fly - we'll play clam as a stepping stone towards being able to react as a team, but for now we need the structure that clam imparts in order to get us there.

We'd done a little bit of switching defense against a vertical stack a couple weeks ago, and it was pretty bad. But with the work that we've been doing since then, everyone has gotten a whole lot more comfortable and competent at switching effectively.

We had some trouble early on in the middle, and I think the hardest thing for people playing there was to remember to trust the mark. Protect the I/O lane, and don't follow people to the around side - pass those off to the break side defender and trust that the mark will not let an easy break off.

We also need to recover more quickly from a break. We should be thinking of it like any other break pass - push to the break side on defense to seal it and stop the flow on that side. Give up throws to the open side if needed - the clam is glorious when the disc gets trapped on the line, so let it get there.

People really picked up on how to play clam much more easily than I'd expected. That's not to say it's perfect - we'll certainly give up some easy scores next weekend playing this. But we're learning, and at the end of the journey I'm confident that we'll have become quite a formidable opponent.

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We made our second round of cuts after today's practice. We had about 40 people still on our tryout list, and we'd like to get to 22-25 for the final team size. It was a difficult discussion - I could see potential and desire in every one of our tryouts, and they're improving so much that I want to hold onto all of them! But at the end of the day, we had to be realistic about who has the strongest chance of making the team given the talent that's present, and we had to let some great people go.