Month: <span>February 2012</span>

Blog Posts

WILTW Week 4 – Using your axes

  • 16th February 20129th March 2022
  • by shimmy

What I learned this week – Week 4: Using your axes

Apologies for the lateness of this post, this term is racing away very quickly.

At Monday night practice we have been trying out a series of fast-paced warm-up drills, one of which includes an intense version of the three-man/break-force where the marker marks for 10 successive throws (rather than the normal version where you throw then mark the person you threw to). This has the advantage that it makes you more tired and also enables you to focus on each element of the drill for an extended period of time.

Faced with a nasty GB mark who kept getting hand blocks I had to innovate. After a couple of fakes he stepped off from me so I floated a break around him (some would call this cheating in the drill but it’s the best way to punish somebody who steps off you). Next time he came closer, I stepped and leaned backwards on the side-arm side, as if to throw the same loopy pass, drawing the mark toward me. This opened up a gap on the back-hand side that I could step forwards into, not just pivoting out of my marker’s reach but also putting my body between him and my hand, making getting a block impossible without committing a foul.

At the start of the year on Wednesdays we would regularly do a pivoting drill, with a mark for a full stall, trying to see whether and how much we could break them (but not releasing the disc). Demonstrations of the drill always involved making pivots along a horizontal axis, and the mark’s movement was mirroring this horizontal movement. And that’s how I think most people executed the drill (correct me if I’m wrong). But of course there’s no particular reason to be restricted in this way when pivoting – using a single axis in this way will make your mark cover a lot of ground, and will eventually allow you to get a break out but probably isn’t the most efficient way to do it, and may make you more vulnerable to getting blocked by somebody with a large wing-span or fast reactions. Using your axes will make the mark have to cover not just two release points (left or right) but infinitely many release points – anywhere in the full 360 degree reach of your pivot.

Seriously though, being able to get your body between your mark and where you’re releasing the disc is a cast-iron way to ensure that you don’t get point-blocked, and the easiest way to achieve this is to use your axes – varying where you pivot on an x- and y-axis will help you move the mark more effectively and allow you to wrest the initiative from an over-bearing mark and make them do what you want. So next time you’re in a break-force have a go at using your axes to move the mark and get your body between them and your release point.

See you at practice.

P.S. Week 5 I learned that snow sucks.

Featured

Throwing Clinic THIS Friday – How to Break a…

  • 15th February 20129th March 2022
  • by megan

First up – show up to practice today. Pretty sure there should be some non-snow covered ground somewhere by now.

Secondly – our first proper throwing clinic is happening this Friday at 3pm.

This session we’ll focus on the components of ‘how to break a mark’ – with some individual exercises you can do at home, some paired throwing exercises and a couple of drills (depending on numbers obviously).

Main benefit – you’ll learn some new ways to improve your pivot, your fakes and your throws. All handy things on the frisbee pitch. We’ll also have people around to do lots of one-on-one coaching of throws, which is tricky to do for everyone at Wednesday sessions.

Regardless of your level, there will be stuff for everyone (new drills, new exercises, new thoughts), so come along.

 

 

 

 

Blog Posts

Spirited Thoughts Part 2: Leave The Lie Detector At…

  • 14th February 20129th March 2022
  • by megan

This is probably the biggest thing I have changed in my own approach to calls, and it’s shockingly simple.

 

Nobody is lying to you. And nobody is cheating.

 

The fundamental assumption that people do not make calls they know to be untrue is integral to spirit of the game. The rules are written not to punish those who break the rules, but to make sure that whatever should have happened, does happen. Equally, they make the implicit assumption that people will not purposefully call things which are false.

Let me just say it again. People do not call rubbish.

Sometimes this assumption is hard to stick with when, from your perspective, someone has called rubbish – something that is physically impossible given where the disc went/when you collided/whatever. But it’s true. People make calls because they believe that is what occurred on pitch.

Well, maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. That’s not my point. My point is that as players, we need to believe this is true for spirit of the game to ‘work’.

When you discuss a call, if you think someone is purposefully lying to you, what are you hoping to achieve? They’ve already made the deliberate decision to lie to your face, and make a false call, so why exactly are they going to take it back? Discussing a call with this thought in your head is not going to make you behave like a nice and/or spirited person – and it’s not going to get them to ‘give it up’ either.

If I’m discussing a call, it’s because I know what I think happened, and I want to know what the other team’s players think happened. I’m rarely trying to ‘convince’ the other person to back down, to uncontest or retract the call – I’m trying to match up my reality with theirs.

Discussing calls becomes ridiculous if you believe that people are likely to lie to you. So don’t. Trust your opposition. Believe that people are telling the truth as they see it. Yes, sometimes, our brains will get the better of us, and we will not have seen stuff right, in which case we should be able to listen to a calm explanation of the facts and realise we saw stuff wrong. With the ‘no-one is lying’ attitude, you’ll be better at explaining those facts to other players, without coming across as aggressive and confrontational. Equally, you’ll rarely walk away from a call feeling cheated or hard done by, which is pretty damn awesome.

So yeah. No-one’s lying to you. Except maybe in that call afterwards where you have to line them up in order of age…

Featured

Open Regionals Update and Payment Details

  • 10th February 20129th March 2022
  • by ashleyyeo

You will all be happy to know that we have managed to get three teams into Open Regionals in Chichester 10th/11th March. This means that everyone who signed up on the Regionals Sign Up Form saying they are able to play have a place on a team. There are still places available and if you would like to play then please sign up or contact me as soon as possible.

 

There are two lists below the first one is everyone who has signed up and the second is for those people who have spoken to me about regionals/are likely to play regionals but haven’t signed up yet. If you are on that list then also please contact me as soon as possible. For anyone on the first list you can now pay Callum (If you have not done so already) You need to transfer him £25 to the details below and then email [email protected] stating what reference you used and how much you have transferred. A good reference would be “YOURNAME_REGIONALS”. Lawrence, Meg and Charlie only need to pay £12.50 as you are playing one day.

 

Callum Smith
Sort Code: 60-30-09
Account Number: 27175839

 

Signed Up
Ash
Kneetu
Rich
Callum
Shim
Frank
Ed
Joe
Lawrence (Saturday Only)
Dude
Sam Airey
Spoon
James Allen
Faron
Pete
Wham
Geezer
Benjy
Lucy
Natalie
Megan (Sunday)
Jessie
Football
Taxi
Charlie (Saturday)
Dan Knightley
Kyle Shurtz
Ed Pocock
Tag
Rob Ellis.

Need To Confirm List
Jizzy
Jack Pasco
Sim

 

Thanks.

Ash

 

Mohawk Emails

Training Today (Falmer Bar Session)

  • 8th February 20129th March 2022
  • by ashleyyeo

Training today is officially cancelled due to the snow and really hard ground. I went down there this morning and the ground wasn’t rock solid but would potentially cause injury due to you not being able to see where you are putting your feet. Therefore it is advised that you don’t go and use Stanmer Park either.

I propose that we all go to Falmer Bar (I will be there from 2.30pm) and have an afternoon of watching ultimate (I will bring DVDs), playing pool/darts, playing mafia or anything else you like doing after a Wednesday training.

See you later.

Mohawk News

Training Today (Falmer Bar Session)

  • 8th February 20129th March 2022
  • by ashleyyeo

Training today is officially cancelled due to the snow and really hard ground. I went down there this morning and the ground wasn’t rock solid but would potentially cause injury due to you not being able to see where you are putting your feet. Therefore it is advised that you don’t go and use Stanmer Park either.

I propose that we all go to Falmer Bar (I will be there from 2pm) and have an afternoon of watching ultimate (I will bring DVDs), playing pool/darts, playing mafia or anything else you like doing after a Wednesday training.

See you later.

Blog Posts

Excuse Me, But You’ve Got Some Bad Spirit in…

  • 6th February 20129th March 2022
  • by megan

This weekend, we took two women’s teams to indoor regionals. It was quite possibly the best weekend of my ultimate playing career. I had more fun than I realised you could have at a competitive tournament, and not to be all ‘Andrew Fleming Disc 5’ but I LOVE THIS TEAM. And for me, our spirited play as a team and as a club is a huge part of what makes playing with this group of women so amazing. Our first team won spirit, and I won an individual spirit award, which actually almost made me cry because (as most people who know me know) I’m pretty keen on spirit, and it’s something I think is hugely important in the game. But way more importantly, of the 10 or 11 nominations for that award, three of my teammates also got nominated, and one of our second team players as well (yes, yes, before you ask, I got emotional again when someone told me that). I’ve been trying to think about what we did as a club, a team and as individuals that other teams recognised this weekend, and I’ve come up with quite a few points so this will be a three-parter post (I think). One thing which links all of these points is that they are less about ‘what is spirited behaviour’, and more about spirited thinking, which I hope I’m going to make a pretty strong case for over the next few posts. So here it is:

 

Spirited Thoughts: Part 1

 

I watched a TED talk recently which changed how I approach a whole ton of things in life. TED talks are basically short talks (10 mins ish) by people who are really passionate, and really good at talking, about something. This one was by a video blogger called Jay Smooth, and it’s about how to deal with being called racist (see it here).

Errr, so how the heck does that relate to spirit?

In this clip (you should watch it, because he’s far cooler than me), he’s talking about the fact that we take being told we have just done, or said, something racist as being told that we are racist, and therefore by extension that we are bad and terrible people. But, he argues, only in the case of racism would we do this. If someone told you that you had something in your teeth, you wouldn’t respond with ‘Nope, you’re wrong, I’m a clean person’ – you’d thank them and pick that piece of spinach out of your teeth (because it’s always spinach). And if we could react to being informed we had said or done something racist in a similar way, Jay argues that we’d be a lot better at discussing race. He talks about this as ‘a dental hygiene model’ for talking about race.

I think it’s a genius way of conceptualising the issue, but I also think it’s a more valuable distinction than just for talking about racism. I would argue that this ‘what you did’ vs ‘what you are’ dichotomy is applicable to almost every moral issue. There’s a lot of psychological research which suggests that one of the most important ways we evaluate ourselves, as individuals and as groups (like, say, a sports team) is in moral terms. We are very invested in wanting to feel like moral people, so we are very defensive about being told that we are not moral people.

In our sport, to be spirited is to be moral. And we very much want to be moral.

Jay Smooth’s ‘dental hygeine model’ of moral judgement has two implications for being a spirited player and how we talk about spirit, in my opinion. Firstly, approaching spirit as a behaviour, rather than a personality trait, means we can recognise that it is something we must continuously do and put effort into. Just because I won a spirit award this weekend, that does not mean that I will be spirited next weekend. The fact that I will consciously monitor and regulate my behaviour on and off pitch next weekend is what will help me be a spirited player next weekend. I’m not saying that takes no effort – I’m saying that we need to remember to put that effort in every game, and not take for granted our ‘spirited nature’. This weekend, I saw Beth, probably our feistiest player, regulate her reflexive response to an aggressively called ‘foul’, and instead of snapping back with ‘contested’, give her mark the disc back and calmly say ‘yup’ – I definitely don’t find that situation easy, and that’s why I am so proud of how she responded to that call made in the heat of the moment (hey, Beth, how’s it going). Beth put the effort in and behaved in a spirited manner, and I feel that this behaviour was repeated across the tournament this weekend by our entire club.

The second implication is that it means we can have a new, less emotionally charged way of discussing spirit, by moving our conceptualisation of it away from essentialism. When we critique another team, we can tell them that their behaviour was unspirited in a game – and accept that there may be situational factors influencing it – without calling them terrible people. As a general culture, the West absolutely loves essentialism – the idea that you behave the way you do because of who you are – but personally (and scientifically, as there’s plenty of evidence to back me up) I don’t buy it. Good people do bad things, often accidentally, and if we can’t explain to those good people that they’ve done a bad thing without calling them terrible people, how are they going to learn and not do that bad thing again? The reason we’re so defensive about being called badly spirited is because we want so badly to be spirited. Being told we’ve behaved badly in the current essentialist conception means not that we messed up one time, but that we are horrible people who will always mess up. And then we tell the people who give us this very hurtful, personal criticism to… go somewhere else, shall we say… and ignore their feedback. This means we’re less likely to learn how to behave more spiritedly in future.

In contrast, if we talk about spirit as a behaviour, which we can and will sometimes get wrong, we can improve our spirit (by improving our behaviour) when others let us know that we’ve behaved badly (but aren’t bad people). Feedback about spirit becomes meaningful and useful, and helps us to regulate and monitor our behaviour – that thing that we need to do to behave spiritedly.

 

For Squaws, ‘spirited’ is not something that we are. It is a perpetual goal, which we must constantly strive for. This weekend, I think we worked really hard, and we got it right. Great work, team – I am so proud of all of you.

Blog Posts

ACL Blog: Part 1 – The Injury

  • 4th February 20129th March 2022
  • by robbie

Let’s face it. Injuries suck. Spending time on the sideline when you want nothing else than to be on the pitch playing your friends really is a terrible feeling. I am still to decide whether watching ultimate is keeping me eager about playing or is slowly destroying me inside knowing that it will be over a year until I get to participate in a competitive game. It is a waiting game, but you can’t take time off because of it: you have to work harder than ever so as to recover properly and not draw out the length of time you’re stuck on the sideline for.

The recovery process is also a lonely one, and I am sure there are many hours ahead of me training away from the team, with the aim of trying to get myself back to competition fitness before I can contemplate getting back into the game. In a sense, writing this blog is a chance to connect with both my teammates and other people in a similar position. I have read a few blogs from people who had suffered from an ACL injury and reading about how they recovered really helps me see the long term rehabilitation. A few of them comment on how they started writing their blog so that they could compare their recovery to that of others, and I guess this is probably the main reason  why I’m writing this.

So. I guess I should start with how I was injured.

We had come out of our pool at Uni Indoor Nationals, which we believed to very much be the ‘pool of death’, with 3 wins from 3, 2 of which came in sudden death points. We had moved into the power pools with our 1st seed and faced another difficult game against an old foe that we have played a lot over the last few years, often in close games that we were victorious in. I felt the game had begun in a bad way:  early on one of their players had failed to get a block on high disc to me, but had managed to scrape his studs down my ankle next to my Achilles – this is something that is actually still painful now, 8 weeks after happening. There were calls, as there had always been between us, and we had fallen behind after taking an early lead. We had just gathered the momentum and I made a lateral cut (I cannot remember whether it was to the open or break side). There was a poach coming out the end zone and my defender was trailing me by a couple of yards. A sort of pop pass scuba was put into the space ahead of me and I got up early and took it down well away from where any of the defenders could ever hope to reach it. As I was landing one of the defenders managed to land on top of me, putting a lot more weight on to my leg than I was expecting. The extra force caused my leg to buckle. I remember feeling a sort of pop in my knee. The next thing I remember was being in agony on the floor with a lot of people around me – it’s not that I passed out, but I think my brain has decided to black out any memory I may have had of the immediate aftermath. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t know how much trouble. I could feel that my knee was causing me a lot of pain and after being asked by the TD, I thought it would be best to get an ambulance to the hospital so I could get my knee checked out.

It was the first time I had ever ridden in an ambulance and I will be very happy if it is also the last time I ever have to ride in one as well. After a lot of waiting around at the hospital (and a lot of having to explain to the paramedics what Ultimate Frisbee is) I was eventually seen and left the hospital on crutches with my knee in a brace and a copy of my x-rays to hand – not that anyone had really worked out what they meant. I might have a meniscal tear, I might have fractured my shin, I might have dislocated my knee. The staff at the hospital weren’t entirely sure. I eventually managed to get a referral to go see a knee specialist in Havant and after an MRI scan he was able to diagnose exactly what I had done. I think his first words to me were along the line of: “Yes, you certainly have damaged your knee”. Always reassuring to hear.

Every injury is different. Even if the recovery is the same, the initial treatment may be different. It is exactly the same for ACL injuries. The most common is when the ACL ligament simply snaps in half. This is known simply as an ACL tear. Occasionally the ligament is strong enough that the tension causes the ACL to rip from the bone which it is attached to, usually the femur (thigh bone for those not knowing). This is known as an ACL avulsion. My ACL ripped from the tibia (shin bone) which I was told occurred in less than 20% of patients who suffer from an ACL avulsion. It had also taken a chunk of the bone with it, hence why there were fractures visible in my x-ray.

As I said, every injury is different, and again this rings true about mine. As well as suffering from an ACL avulsion, I had also suffered a lot of damage to the rest of my knee resulting in meniscus tears (which is the cartilage in the knee) and slight strains in my lateral collateral ligament.

Treatment is again all so similar yet is different from one person to the next. Before I could have surgery I had to reduce the swelling around my knee. I was instructed to go to a physio where I was attached to some electrode stimulators which helped fire my quads so that blood could pump more freely from my knee. I also had some ultrasound on my knee to help reduce any scar tissue that was forming.

Surgically, the most common procedure for younger adults is to ‘reconstruct’ the knee by replacing the ACL with a similar tendon or ligament and pinning it into place by threading the replacement ligament through drilled holes in the femur and tibia. This can be done with a part of your hamstring, a patella graft or even a tendon from your foot.

I had kept my knee elevated and supported in a brace in the 6 weeks from my injury up to the surgery, and when it came to the operation, the surgeon decided that he was not going to reconstruct my knee. This is because the bones had started to fuse back together as I had kept my leg straight in the support.

That was the surgery done with, but the physio was to start almost immediately.

Blog Posts

SotD: Giving Back

  • 3rd February 20129th March 2022
  • by dude

A few months ago during one of our practices Felix was berating us, the experienced players, for not helping freshers enough, people were not staying after the experienced practice and were not helping freshers. One thing he said at that moment still sticks with me and I think it will for a very long time. He had said “This is your way of giving back to the club, this is where you learned the game and now you give back by helping other people.”. These weren’t his exact words but you get the idea. For experienced players the importance of giving back might not be so apparent so let me try and explain.

I started playing ultimate in Turkey, a country with a population of over 75 million. The number of ultimate players in the country: around 200 is my guess (it’s growing very fast though). There are so few teams (6 active teams -4 uni, 2 club-  in 2 cities, 3 or so teams are trying to be formed) that Club and Uni teams play together in tournaments and we always play Round Robin. I’m giving all these numbers so that you can guess the amount of experienced players: very few. Apart from the 21 (plus a few more) players that have played at Windmill last year, no one had played outside the country.

Ignore my alien looking arm please
Left: Me Throwing a low release forehand. Right: The person who I learned it from both through watching him and asking him why his toes faced another direction while throwing. You can see how much of his throw is in mine. He never taught me how to look good while playing though.

In an environment like this, it’s very hard to develop skills beyond a certain point (which isn’t too high), there aren’t many players you can ask questions to. If we had an experienced player visiting, I would stick right behind them (well not in-game), watching their every step, asking everything I can think of and talking about tactics. I was obsessed but didn’t have a lot of people to teach me. I watched highlight videos over and over again, tens of times, watching every small detail in players’ movements, fakes, throws, cuts.. I watched this highlight video of Oregon Ego hundreds of times, at least twice a day (they have good videos btw). I watched Cody Bjorklund (6) obsessively, he’s still one of my idols, showing me that big guys can play really good ultimate too (I was a tad fat when I started playing ultimate). I learned forehand hucks watching him and trying his throws with my girlfriend. Guess I should start doing it again since something’s wrong with them these days.

So what does all this have to do with anything? Well now that I am in Brighton where ultimate is really good (tons of national players, lots of amazingly good players and athletes and all of them extremely friendly) suddenly I was in heaven. I wasn’t the one helping people out, I was the one being helped out. I could go and ask someone what I was doing wrong and immediately get an answer. To have a coach like Felix with years of experience, amazing people like Shim and Rich helping you out at every step.. Well forget all that, just even having the chance of being able to watch players like Ash, Callum, Robbie, Rich, Felix, Dyno, Meg, Bob, Longface, Pencil, Fetu, Mental, Edgars etc. etc. (just a few of the names that popped, so many more).. All these amazing players not just playing great but trying to help you if you ask for it. I can not emphasize enough how important this support is to a beginner, even just having the chance to be around these people is huge.

I remember at one of my first practices, I asked Bob how to throw a push pass. I had been trying since I started playing and had had no success. She just explained it to me in one sentence and suddenly I could throw them. It was never explained to me in the right way before, so she didn’t even have to show me, it just worked. All I needed was a definition that made sense to me instead of hours of practicing the throw in a wrong way (of course now I have to practice it the right way for hours).

I think that even beginners who are serious or will become serious about ultimate are not aware of how lucky they are in Brighton, or anywhere where there is good ultimate with nice people. One can work really hard, do the physical, the theoretical and the mental work but experience can only be gained on the field and the input of experienced players can triple or even quadruple the pace of the learning curve for beginners (does this sentence make sense?).

All this is why I was really struck by what Felix said about giving back. Not just to a club, but also to the sport of ultimate. I know that all these people who sacrifice so much for ultimate do it because ultimate changed their lives one way or another. That’s why we give back to this beautiful sport, so that others can get injected with the poison too.

So I’m talking to you experienced players, give back.  For the people who need and want it it means much more than you can ever imagine. Never forget what ultimate did for you and what it can do for others too. Spread the word, help out, give back (instant karma gain guaranteed).

Dude out, peace.

(Shimmy did not edit this one, that’s why the English is even worse than the previous post, sorry guys)