How to play in the wind Оглавление

How to play in the wind 1

Intro 2

Part 1: Throwing And Catching 6

Throwing In The Wind 8

Catching 12

Team Strategy In Wind 15

Part 2: Points Where Offense Is Going Upwind 16

Fielding The Pull 16

Hucking Upwind 19

Tacking 20

Downwind Defense 22

Pulling Downwind 22

Downwind Defensive Team Strategies 24

Intro

Johnny Bravo’s Jimmy Mickle playing at the historically windy 2015 Pro Flight Finale in Blaine, MN. Photo: Alex Fraser — UltiPhotos.com

Ultimate is rarely played in perfectly calm conditions. Let’s stop pretending it will be and learn how to appropriately prepare and strategize for the elements.

BY BEN WIGGINS AND MATTHEW “SKIP” SEWELL

Here is a scenario I’ve seen and heard reported countless times in the past two decades:

“We were playing a team we can beat. We were right with them early in the game, and both our O and our D looked good. We had a small lead right at halftime, but then in the second half we made some dumb mistakes. Our D gave us plenty of chances but we couldn’t convert and we had some unlucky drops and they caught a couple of lucky ones, so we lost by two. We just need to play a little crisper and harder next game. Oh, and it was kinda windy, too. We’ll beat them in normal weather…”

If you’ve felt like this after a game of ultimate, then you are not alone. We’ve all been there. We conceptualize ultimate as a game of skill and speed, and our mistakes are things that happen in the instant while an opponent’s successes are similarly rolls of the die.

We are wrong.

Here is that same game, reported from the other team of less talented but more experienced players in the wind:

“The wind was variable, so obviously we wanted to use it to our advantage since they are more athletic and probably better throwers in calm weather than we are. We tried several Ds in the first half, and some of them got shredded. Once we learned who their best players were, we shifted strategies to take away their best stuff in the second half. This forced their less-skilled players to make more plays in unfamiliar positions, especially with forces that called for throws and cuts that played against the wind. Predictably, they gave us a few drops. We made sure to get the disc in good positions so that the wind helped us, and we played heads up ultimate to keep plays alive when the disc was blown to the downwind side. They crumbled, like they always do when there is wind. Good thing Sectionals and Regionals are on windy fields in Oceanville.”

Ultimate is not a game that unfortunately sometimes happens in bad weather. Ultimate is fundamentally a game in which teams match up their talents and often succeed by using the conditions better than their opponent; it is occasionally punctuated by unusual examples of low-wind, perfect-conditions play in which the two teams have only their talents and execution to match. Ultimate is less like basketball, chess, or Legend of Zelda and is more like naval warfare, football, and Settlers of Catan in that the environmental conditions (including human conditions like attitude) change the playing field. If you want to win in ultimate, eventually you are going to need to understand and use the wind.

Interestingly, playing in the wind is seldom taught early, thoroughly, or well to young players. This is for a combination of reasons, including:

• Many players fall in love with the game in those rare perfect-weather situations

• Learning ultimate in the wind is complex and difficult to teach

• It is far easier to express “always do this” than to express conditional tendencies for variable situations

• The weather rarely cooperates, so it is more difficult to practice plan for coaches until we have a viable field-sized wind tunnel to use (compounded because of the associated likelihood of canceling practice in related dangerous or field-damaging conditions)

• Basic throwing skills are a mental stopping point for many players; once we emotionally worry about our throws fluttering, we stop learning about the rest of the game

• Younger players are often tasked with simple or redundant jobs in the wind so that older players can do the fun and complex decision-making jobs like throwing and poaching

Instead of learning comprehensively, the vast majority of ultimate players learn windplay through experience. Being on different teams with different levels of experienced players in different levels against different opponents will eventually give you a library of questions to ask and tactics to use depending on the situation. By your sixth full year of ultimate, you’ll have picked up much of it intuitively if you’ve had diverse experiences and you’ve been paying attention.

The purpose of this set of articles is to help a few people to shorten the learning curve of windplay. If this helps you to enjoy the game more, great! However, you should probably stop reading now if:

• You don’t learn well from long, poorly-written tomes

• You don’t believe that the authors are a good source for this information

• You are the kind of learner that needs to feel the wind in order to visualize it

• You have a better resource somewhere else

Ultimate is not a game that unfortunately sometimes happens in bad weather. Ultimate is fundamentally a game in which teams match up their talents and often succeed by using the conditions better than their opponent.

If you are still interested, then I will try to lay out the basics of windplay over the next five days. I’ll discuss general features of throwing and catching in the wind, and then go into tactics and strategies involved in three main scenarios: offense moving against the wind, offense moving with the wind, and playing in a crosswind. Last, I’ll discuss what you can do differently in endzone situations and extremely windy games.

I do have a few important caveats here. This is an incomplete work based on my experiences: there is no single right way to play the game, but I hope putting this together in one place is helpful. Instead, I simply want to get everything I’ve learned onto paper and let other people do with it what they find useful. I’ve been lucky enough to play with and steal from a huge number of players and teams, so virtually none of this is my own creative original thought. I am not going to include every detail; there is simply too much to include it all, so I am going to hit the important points while balancing size and depth here. I am also trying to balance and speak to new players as well as experienced players; it is likely that much in here will be either too obvious or too complicated for you, depending on you as a player. I’m using the US system of measurements because I am lazy and uneducated, but I hope this advice works equally well in the sane metric world. Most importantly, no player will become better just by reading these articles. I leave it to you to extract value for yourself by applying this in game situations of all kinds and finding out for yourself what works with your teams, your opponents, and your hands. Let’s get started.