Category Archives: All genders

Conference, News, Coach development, Coaches, Women-girls

2016 Youth Ultimate Coaching Conference (YUCC) theme: Developing Girls’ Ultimate

1 Comment

The new Executive Director of the Bay Area Disc Association announced in his 9/30/15 welcome letter that the theme for the 2016 Youth Ultimate Coaching Conference (YUCC) will be “Developing Girls’ Ultimate.”  The conference is to be held next March (2016) in the Bay Area and plans to “convene inspirational role models from around the country like Qxhna Titcomb (All-Star Ultimate Tour founder and World Champion) to present…”  Watch their youth ultimate event calendar for further details.

In anticipation of learning more about how to coach girls, here’s a related presentation from the 2015 YUCC by DiscNW’s Heather Ann Brauer entitled “Giving Girls a Voice: Tools for empowerment and confidence on and off the ultimate field” with my notes appended —

1:05 Asked 7 girls and 7 boys why do you love ultimate

  • girls: community, spirit, friends, athleticism, fun
  • boys: similar themes (though also + layout, callahan, greatest, aggression, intensity)

2:00 More important than these differences is how we approach the off-field culture and connectedness of the team.

Girls (and women) often under-rank themselves

How do you empower them?  CLEAR

  • Culture – giving girls tools to create a culture they want to see in their team
  • Language – e.g. not saying “sorry,” saying “person-defense” instead of “man defense”
  • Emotions – talking about empathy, connectedness; being able to be where you’re at and valuing those emotions
  • Agency – giving girls a voice or say, adds to the buy-in they have in the team
  • Role models – getting women to be role models, but also giving girls a chance to be role models themselves (e.g. GUM clinics)

4:55 Tips and tricks

  1. Create a team charter
    1. How do you want to feel as an individual (at practices, at games)?  [Challenged to learn; happy and social; enthusiastic, excited; valued; accomplished; improved/better; successful]
    2. Narrow down to 4-6 words and create actionable items, e.g. for “confidence” the high school girls came up with: “We will consistently attend practice and hold one another accountable.  We will not say “I’m sorry.” We will be stars.  We will give one another positive feedback. We will give each other high fives.  And we will conduct ourselves with the utmost swagger.”
    3. (11:55) Establish a buddy system
      1. Usually not established friends
      2. Check-ins throughout the season; ask buddy if you missed practice; share personal goals
    4. Coaches can help create tangible goals (e.g. 50 completions in a go-to drill) and remind team of the goal, especially if they are straying away from the key-words of their charter
    5. Attendance at practice went from ~8 before charter to 12-14 afterwards because they felt bought-in
  2. (15:40) Check-in/Check-outs
    1. At beginning of practice let each player say one word describing how they’re feeling (or using thumbs up/down/sideways)
    2. Check-out? [presumably the same process, but at the end of practice…]
  3. (17:35) Interactive warm-up
    1. Variation of team USA U23 warm-up
      1. (19:30) Demo of paired, interactive plyos
      2. hi-5s are the most important part!
  4. (22:35) I’m a star!
    1. If a player makes a mistake and says “I’m sorry”
    2. Teammates say “What did you say?”
    3. And player jumps up and says “I’m a star!”
    4. To which teammates respond “Yes you are.”
  5. (23:35) Collaborative challenges work really well
    1. Try to meet a goal.  Each time you make it as a team, reduce your 10 planned 40-yard sprints by one.
    2. Create drills that have progressions to create challenge: dishy pass + look to huck + add defender + a fake + under pass…
    3. Supportive drills: e.g. 3 or 5 lines with people cutting towards you.  By saying names and making eye contacts, you make a social connection every time.

 

 

Coaches, Coach development, Co-ed, middle school

Matt Tsang on coaching middle school ultimate

Leave a comment

As I launch into the fall season of coaching at Eckstein Middle School in Seattle with a great group of new and experienced coaches I’ll be reviewing helpful resources, including curricula, drills, and videos.  To set the stage and delve into how to develop team culture with middle schooler, here are some notes on this great talk by Matt Tsang, a coach and teacher at a middle school in Berkeley, from the 2014 Youth Ultimate Coaching Conference.

Matt’s goals (and talk outline):

  • Team Culture
    • How to be a good teammate
  • Expose diverse group of kids to a new school
    • Gets them hooked
    • Goal was at least 1/3 girls
  • Teach ultimate

Ways to build team culture

  1. Make good mistakes
    1. In drills, explain that some mistakes still leave a play possible (while others are worse).
    2. For example, in a passing drill over-leading a player is better than throwing it behind them.
  2. Learn from your teammates
    1. Encourage players waiting to run the drill to actively observe their peers.  (This gave me the idea to ask them to line up along a sideline so they can all see, rather than orthogonal to it where the end of the line has nothing to do but chat.)
  3. Acknowledge players at the end of practice
    1. Not just for skill, but more importantly for spirit or team work
    2. For example,
  4. Talk it up (14:00)
    1. Demonstrate and incorporate supportive phrases to say when someone makes a mistake (important in middle school dynamic which is often critical or judgemental)
    2. For example:
      1. Good bid
      2. Nice try
      3. Way to go to
      4. Plus let them invent their own (builds team identity)

How to teach ultimate (23:30)

Goals for his 8 week season (most coaches try to teach too much in Middle School)

  • Throwing
  • Catching
  • Stack (these are the types of cuts you do from the front/back of the stack; front into the lane; back downfield for yardage)
  • Switch fields (when trapped on sideline)
  • Mirror defense
  • Force
  • Not zone.  (Instead counter zone offense with a dump swing and turn the corner)
  • Not plays, except maybe a pull play (what should be happening in our normal offense) to ensure we don’t always turn it over near our end zone
  • Don’t talk about positions.  (Everyone or no one wants to be handler.  Habitual cutters won’t even look up field!  No dumps to habitual handlers.  Rotate to build depth.)

A 6th grader might start with the just the first 3, but would tackle most of these topics by the time they’re 8th graders.

38:00 Groups share thoughts about a few key middle school issues

  1. How to deal with disparate skills and size?
  2. How do you get a couple disrespectful kids to not poison the whole practice or team? (42:00)
  3. How to convince kids to share the disc to develop other players and their team. (44:15)  [Try drills without a disc, or scrimmage with 2 discs!]

Good ideas:

Warm up with Monarch or tag.  Don’t limit throws, at least during free play.  Part of the joy of throwing is all the creative ways you can throw the disc.

Co-ed, elementary, Spirit of the Game, spring, Tournament

Seattle Waldorf is Spring Reign 2015 Spirit Champion

Leave a comment

This last weekend, Waldorf United not only were the spirit champions at Spring Reign 2015, but also placed 2nd in the playoffs!  The team of Seattle Waldorf 5th graders is coached by David Steiner and Jan Harris.

First word came via the @SpringReign Twitter feed —

Tweet announcing Spirit Champions
Tweet announcing Spirit Champions

An earlier Tweet announced that Hazel Wolf’s team were the skill champions (maintaining their Champion status from Spring Reign 2014), beating Seattle Waldorf in a very close game (7-6).  They had previously beaten SCDS (11-7) and Evergreen (13-6).  The elementary team from Hazel Wolf (K-8) is coached by Jamshid Khajavi and  Lori Frey Butler.

Here is a screenshot of the final standings —

2015 ES bracket w/scores

All genders, Co-ed

Getting everyone involved in elementary ultimate

1 Comment

I’ve been coaching elementary school ultimate for 5 years and to my continued displeasure, every year I face the same issue – getting all my players involved and improving their skills.   The good news is that co-ed ultimate presents a rare opportunity to get boys and girls to play an organized sport together and work on their strengths and their challenges.   Every time we play, we’re demonstrating that sexist ideas about athletic ability are outdated. Still, the problems persist.

In general, boys are more socially conditioned to fully participate in sports. This can lead to the exclusion of others and to diminished team play.  Many boys appear to not see girls on the field when they look for an open cutter. Again, generalizing, some girls tend to hold back when they’re playing co-ed. Boys and girls tend to group themselves together at a practice or on the sideline at a game.

There’s no single solution to a problem that’s rooted in culture, historic inequity, and to a much lesser extent, physical make-up.

Here are some things that have worked for me:

  • Briefly discuss the value of getting all players involved.   At the start of the year, it’s a great time to let kids know that successful teams use all their players and that you intend to make sure that everyone’s time is well spent. This should be totally positive and not heavy handed. Keep it fun and listen to their ideas too.
  • Create interactions at practice. Trust and comfort in one another’s throws and catches comes from repeated contact and many chances to hang out. I mandate boy/girl throwing partners at least every other practice to make sure that players get used to each other.
  • Build teams within teams. Creating teams of handlers (or cutters) that rotate through practices and games allows kids to face off in a friendly way and again, see the skills of teammates that they may have ignored otherwise. Some coaches have girls play single-gender for some part of the practice to build confidence.
  • Focus on skill-building. This may be less of a gender issue than an experience issue but I find that putting coaching resources into bringing up the fundamentals of every player on the team allows many leaders to emerge from the group. Even the most gifted elementary school player has work to do on his or her basics. If you’re committed to giving as much playing time as possible to every kid, your team will be stronger if every player feels confident.
  • Take time during the season, possibly at the start of the practice to reflect on how it’s going. Ask questions like, ‘How did we do at distributing the disc? Did everyone get a chance to do something awesome?’ You can again show your kids that you hold up teamwork as a value.

I’d love to hear ideas from other coaches that have worked well and if you’ve seen lasting changes on your teams.

Coach development, Conference, Co-ed, elementary, middle school, high school

2nd annual Youth Ultimate Coaching Conference

Leave a comment

I’m really sad I can’t fly down to San Jose for the 2nd annual Youth Ultimate Coaching Conference (YUCC 2015) this weekend, but I was glad to hear that some content will be online via Skyd.  The theme this year is Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD).

Background/description of Youth Ultimate Coaching Conference

Registration is $95

Video of select presentations from the 2014 Conference