learning to play

most competitive club players have probably used the last few months to explore other forms of exercise rather than training for ultimate.  for me this means doing basically anything and everything that doesn't feel like training.  this means jogging, playing hoops, surfing, hiking, tennis, etc. the one of these that i've been doing a lot lately is playing hoops, and it has led me to an interesting awakening about my hoops ceiling.  

now i stopped playing basketball when i was probably 12, and then picked it up again about 8 years ago with some frisbee guys and others.  i didn't have any skills or fundamentals, but i played good defense, liked to jump for rebounds and had pretty good court awareness.  in the last few years i've been picking up more skills and learning a bunch from talking to people who played and also from watching others.  i've gotten to the point where against shorter or slower or less-athletic players i can get a lot of boards, display a low-post move or two, maybe get a couple put-backs or even hit a mid-range jumper.  but when i start playing against better players i get easily boxed out, i have trouble securing the rebounds that do come to me, i frequently lose the ball in the post, and my shot never seems to fall.  i have this understanding that i'm not quite at that level, but i hadn't figured out what the difference was.

this last week i was in a lunchtime game and there was a guy who was about my height and build, didn't strike me as particularly athletic, but was clearly the best player on the court.  when the ball needed to be pushed, he pressed it on a fast break; when a great pass needed to be made, he always made it; he had an extremely reliable jump shot, burying four three-pointers in my team's short game against his.  it turned out that he had played division I basketball at a low-end school from a mid-major conference.  i did a little research after the lunch game and it looks from his statistics that he largely rode the pine for this school.  but here he was controlling this lunchtime game, with what i had previously viewed as some pretty competent basketball players on the court, including many who seemed bigger and faster than him.  i was impressed, and realized that i would probably never have his ball-handling, shooting or passing skills, even if i was playing pickup basketball for a few hours every day of the week.

this got me to thinking about ultimate and how i developed skills to get to the top of our sport.  we've all been out to the pick-up ultimate game where there's the guy who is pretty good, maybe even runs the show out there, but for one reason or another has never made the local elite team.  see, these people who play pick-up are not so different from me playing basketball.  they're good athletes, they have decent field sense, they may even be able to break the mark or huck really well.  but the difference between these players and the ones on elite teams, and the difference between me and this guy at basketball, is that truly good players have done the drills to reinforce the basic skills and fundamentals so that they can execute all the time.  

this guy at the pickup game probably used to do more hours of drills in a week than i have played basketball in the last year.  when i was in college ultimate i was playing in a very controlled situation for about 15 hours a week...when there was no tournament on the weekend.  these 15 hours would probably include about 8-10 hours of skills practice.  now, when i get confronted by a tight mark, i have the fundamental footwork to step out and deliver a pass.  that guy at the pickup ultimate game hasn't seen a good mark, because nobody at pickup plays that way.  he hasn't had to make hard buttonhooks, or worry about his defensive positioning, because he's more athletic that most of the people in the game.

i think what i'm tyring to say is that if you want to improve, if you're trying to work your ultimate skills up to a point that will get you beyond the pickup game, and onto the best team in your area, you're going to have to do more than play.  you need to find a group of people who are willing to work on their skills, even if it's not the most fun thing to do.  playing pickup can build a lot of bad habits because you don't have to work on the fundamentals to succeed, but at the top level you have to have those skills built in as second nature so that you can spend your mental energies focusing on the higher levels of the game.