The Ultimate Resource

By Travis Norsen

Like soccer, basketball, and other continuous action sports, high-quality ultimate frisbee requires not just physical skills, but also field-awareness, lightning-fast decision-making, and creative improvisation.  Yet the traditional, stack-based style of play that is almost universally taught to beginners approaches the game with an American-football-inspired, "set play" mindset that de-emphasizes and indeed undermines the development of these important qualities.  This book presents an alternative style of play – dubbed "Flow" – that abandons scripted set plays and instead emphasizes the basic principles of intelligent game play.  It also explains in detail how and why to skip the traditional pre-choreographed drills and instead center training sessions around activities designed to develop players' cognitive skills.  Purely physical traits such as size and speed are valuable resources, to be sure, but from the Flow point of view it is players' ingenuity that constitutes "the ultimate resource".  The book will be a ray of sunlight for ultimate frisbee players and coaches who want to develop that resource in themselves and their teams. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pig Pug Press
• Release date: Jun 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781734528077

Book preview

PREFACE

The goal of this book is to present an alternative approach to playing, training, and coaching the sport of ultimate (that is, ultimate frisbee).

The traditional approach focuses on progressing the disc though what amounts to a series of planned set plays, with the elements of those plays having been rehearsed, in training, through a variety of tightly choreographed drills. As I will discuss in the first chapter, this traditional approach sculpts ultimate in the mold of American football, which after all has been the most popular sport in ultimate's country of origin for virtually all of the time since ultimate began its incredible worldwide growth.

The alternative approach that is systematically developed here, by contrast, views ultimate as more akin to continuous action sports like basketball and, especially, (non-American football, i.e.) soccer. The style of play that is advocated focuses on generating and maintaining the initiative (that is, the advantage that arises from constantly dictating the play and making the defense react) with lots of quick, shorter passes (rather than prioritizing and hence waiting for big-yardage hucks), creating and exploiting spatial advantages by making every player a potential passing option at all times (rather than having players disengage to create space for a single designated cutter), and generally trying to let the disc (rather than players’ legs) do the lion’s share of the work.

And this alternative style of play implies and requires an alternative approach to training and coaching, which shifts emphasis away from physical skills and toward players’ more cognitive capacities such as spatial awareness, decision-making, on-field communication, and reading the defense and reacting accordingly.

If this approach to ultimate sounds vaguely reminiscent of the approach to soccer that was pioneered by the legendary Dutch player and coach Johan Cruyff (and then perfected by Cruyff’s disciple Pep Guardiola) at FC Barcelona, that is certainly not a coincidence. I have been playing ultimate since I first learned about it while in high school in the early 1990s. But I’ve been a player and fan of soccer even longer. About a decade ago, around the peak of Barcelona’s utter domination of world football, I started coaching my kids in youth soccer and developed a passion for learning from, and passing along, not just the Cruyff/Guardiola style of play, but (perhaps not surprisingly given my day job as a college physics teacher) also and especially the underlying revolution in training centered on developing players’ game intelligence. This journey led me to eventually write a book (aimed at kids and young teens) espousing and explaining some of the fundamental principles of Cruyff’s approach to football. The title of that book, Play With Your Brain, is based on Cruyff’s witticism that, contrary to what it might have initially occurred to you to say, Football is a game you play with your brain.

A few years ago, with my kids having moved on to more serious and less local soccer teams, I decided to shift my coaching energies from soccer to ultimate and agreed to start coaching my local high school girls team. In the first year that I was involved, the team had a lot of potential and positive energy but couldn’t win a game. After taking over as head coach the following year and implementing a ton of soccer- (and in particular Cruyff/Guardiola-) inspired ideas about playing style and training methods, the team improved tremendously and we over-performed our seeding to finish third in the end-of-season state tournament. In my second season we continued to improve dramatically and finished second in the state. And in our most recent season, my third, we not only won the Massachusetts state championship but also placed 5th at the High School National Invitational tournament. So the soccer-inspired ideas seem to have worked quite well, at least for my team.

My original motivation for starting to put some of these ideas into writing (and pictures!) was to share them with players in the form of a team handbook. This did, I think, help many players understand things more clearly and did contribute something to our team’s recent successes. So I would certainly expect the present book, which grew out of this team handbook, to be of interest and of use to players. But the quest for clarity and completeness led inevitably to a final product much longer than I would force on even my most studious team members, and aimed, realistically, more at fellow coaches than players.

I have tried to explain a little bit about who I am and how this project came about. I should also stress that very little of what’s in this book is original to me. As I’ve said, the main ideas are adopted and adapted from things I’ve seen lead to success in other sports — especially the Cruyff/Guardiola approach to soccer, but also, for example, the quick-passing philosophy implemented by the 2014 San Antonio Spurs (an NBA basketball team widely regarded as the best team ever) coached by Gregg Popovich. Furthermore, the application of these ideas to ultimate is also not novel. While the overall philosophy certainly remains unorthodox, most elements of the alternative approach presented here have been slowly growing within the ultimate community for decades. And many of the concrete tactical and training ideas I present are not original to me, but instead things I’ve learned from various friends and fellow travelers who are mentioned (but perhaps not sufficiently credited) elsewhere in the book.

My contribution, such as it is, is thus not so much in presenting original ideas, but rather in arranging and presenting these ideas in a systematic — and, I hope, compelling — way. I hope this will help more people appreciate them not just as isolated tidbits (new moves you can try on the field that seem to work well, or new training exercises that players might enjoy at practices) but as parts of a coherent whole that is based, fundamentally, on recognizing their individual decision-making and intelligence within a relatively unstructured system (rather than mere physical size, strength, and speed) as players’ most important attributes.

The title I chose for the book is borrowed from the economist Julian Simon, who famously argued against the Malthusian view that an increasing population’s increasing demand for food and natural resources would inevitably lead to shortages, starvation, death, and disaster. Simon (dubbed the doomslayer in a nice 1997 Wired article) suggested instead that an increasing population would lead to increasing abundance and prosperity, because more people means more human creativity and ingenuity, i.e., more of what Simon called the ultimate resource.

So this phrase seemed a fitting title for a book about ultimate whose central thesis is precisely that traditional approaches to both training and playing the sport have over-emphasized physical skills and rote action sequences and under-appreciated players’ capacity for intelligent decision-making and creative improvisation.

Hopefully that gives you a sense of what this book is intended to be, and what I mean by describing it as presenting an alternative approach to playing, training, and coaching ultimate.

Let me finally explain a few nuts and bolts things about how the book works before jumping in.

The first five chapters focus primarily, though not exclusively, on offense, which is the heart of the alternative approach. Subsequent later chapters develop related themes in the context of defensive and transition play. Each chapter includes, under the heading How to Train It, explicit discussion of how (and why) to re-orient practices around (typically not drills but instead) interactive exercises and games that teach and reinforce the skills and ideas being presented. I have also included, at the end, an Appendix for Coaches which gives a more big-picture overview of how I’ve typically structured training sessions around these exercises and games.

As mentioned above, I coach my local high school girls team and hence tend to think of the players described in the book as girls. For that reason, I default to using she/her pronouns throughout the book. If you or your team use different pronouns, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble translating.

The book includes dozens of Figures, which I regard as essential to the presentation. Sometimes you will have to click ahead or back to see the Figure that is referenced in the text; you really need to do this to achieve the full, deep understanding that will allow you to translate the ideas into improved on-field performance. Indeed, just like in real life, there are often more interesting details in the visuals, than in the prose that refers to them. So I urge you to slow down and study the Figures carefully.

The richness of the Figures is made possible by the fact that, unlike the Figures in most writings about ultimate and other sports, the players are not represented as mere dots or other purely abstract shapes. Partly because I wanted to be able to show not just where each player is, but also which way they are looking, how they are pivoting, etc. — and also, I admit, partly just because it makes them kind of adorable — I started with white circles (for one team) and black squares (for the other), but humanized them with eyes, feet, and arms. The White Circles team usually has the disc, while the Black Squares team is usually on defense.

Here, as an example, is what it looks like when a White Circles player holding the disc near the goal line looks to complete a pass to a teammate in the endzone:

White Circles player throws a push pass score to a teammate.

To pre-empt any possible confusion, the White Circles player is not holding a dinner plate with a juicy, pink brain on it — that’s the disc, which just happens to have a picture of a brain printed on it. I chose a disc with this emblem for two reasons. (1) The first real ultimate team I played for, in college, was the Claremont Braineaters, and one of the most prized discs in my real-life collection is a Braineaters disc that basically looks like this. (2) The cover of my earlier book, Play With Your Brain, is graced by a player with a soccer ball for a head kicking a ball that is in fact a brain. Since the heads of the White Circles players already look a little bit like discs, I thought letting them also play with their brain (-emblazoned disc) seemed appropriate.

Note also the curves and arrows in the Figure. Solid lines/curves indicate the movement of players, while dashed lines/curves indicate the movement of the disc. Black lines/curves indicate movement that is about to happen, while gray lines/curves indicate movement that has just happened. So you can tell that, in the above image, the white circles player has run hard toward the front corner of the end-zone, but has just changed direction, leaving her defender stuck at the corner, and is about to continue running to the left, across the front of the end-zone, and catch a cheeky little push pass for the score.

Incidentally, the White Circles team is always attacking the end-zone at the top of the page, while the Black Squares team is attacking the end-zone at the bottom of the page. And I will occasionally refer to the directions north/south/east/west as meaning the top/bottom/right/left of the page, respectively.

OK, you get it and are ready to rock, so let’s jump in!

CHAPTER 1

FRISBEE FOOTBALL?

The sport of ultimate was invented in the northeastern United States in the late 1960s. An Amherst College student introduced the game to the kids at a nearby New England summer camp; one of these kids brought the idea home and started the first ultimate team at Columbia HS (in New Jersey); the idea then spread to other nearby high schools and eventually to the colleges these students subsequently attended.

The first inter-collegiate ultimate game occurred in the early 1970s between Princeton and Rutgers — the same two schools, coincidentally, that had faced off in the first inter-collegiate (American) football game a little more than a century earlier. Since its beginnings, the sport of ultimate has grown exponentially and is today a truly international phenomenon.

Like American football, basketball, (regular) football (i.e., what Americans like me call soccer), and a number of other sports, ultimate is an invasion game in which two teams attempt to infiltrate one another's territory with a ball (or, in the case of ultimate, a flying disc — i.e., frisbee — i.e., flatball) and accomplish a specific task. In terms of the field layout and the nature of that specific task, ultimate is probably most similar to American football, where the aim is simply to achieve possession of the ball in the end-zone being defended by the other team.

The purpose of this book, however, is not to teach you about the rules of ultimate or the basics of how to play. I am assuming that you are already pretty familiar with the game. Instead, the goal is to develop a point that is hardly original to me, but which I think deserves a much fuller articulation and a much wider audience than it has so far received. Namely: since its inception more than fifty years ago, the sport of ultimate has been conceived and practiced, both in terms of the dominant styles of play and the approach to training, too much in the mold of American football. I will try to convince you that the future of ultimate lies in an alternative approach, influenced instead by soccer.

The alternative approach embraces not only a non-traditional style of play but also, and more fundamentally, a non-traditional view of the traits and qualities young players should work on developing if they want to improve and excel.

Before jumping into my favored approach, however, let’s set the context by reviewing ultimate’s most traditional style of play and then some of the reasons I dislike it.

1.1 THE VERTICAL STACK

The first tactical concept I learned, when I started playing ultimate as a high school student back in the early 1990s, was the stack — in particular, what is now called the vertical stack (or just Vert) to distinguish it from some other formations with stacks in different locations or orientations.

Thirty years later, this remains the first tactical concept — indeed, the primary framework for playing ultimate — that most new players learn.

The vertical stack

Figure 1A A typical implementation of the vert stack offense: offensive players line up to create open cutting lanes on either side, and then take turns, often from the back of the stack, trying to get open for a forward pass. (Recall that solid lines/curves indicate movement of players, while dashed lines/curves indicate movement of the disc.)

The vert stack idea, pictured in Figure 1A is pretty simple: (most) offensive players line up, parallel to the sidelines, downfield from the thrower. The intention is to create a lot of open space on either side of the stack into which offensive players can cut to try to get open for a forward pass.

Often (though not universally) offensive players will take turns cutting from the back of the stack, as indicated in the Figure. This makes sense for at least two reasons. First, the offensive player at the back of the stack is the most obvious potential deep threat, so typically that player's defender will start behind them. So with just a little initial movement away from the disc (to threaten the deep cut toward the end zone), the cutter can usually get open under — back toward the disc — for a significant yardage gain. And second, because the cutter at the back of the stack starts farthest downfield, they stand to gain the most forward yards even despite having to cut back under to get some separation from their defender.

If that first cutter does successfully get open and receive a forward pass, everybody shifts downfield and the offense runs the same play again from its newly improved field position.

On the other hand, if that first passing option doesn't pan out, the first cutter is now instructed to clear — i.e., vacate the cutting lane by getting back into the stack — so another teammate can try to get open. See Figure 1B for an illustration.

Vert stack clearing pattern

Figure 1B If the first cutter fails to get open for a forward pass, she should clear (back into the stack) to make room for the next cutter. (Recall that the gray lines/curves indicate movements that have just occurred, while black lines/curves indicate movements that are about to occur.)

If two (or maybe three) cutters all fail to get open in this way, the stall count will surely be getting high. At this point, the thrower will look for a designated reset option, typically either a dump (backwards pass) to the player who was not part of the stack but was instead lurking out of the way roughly even with the disc, or perhaps a short forward pass to the previously-not-too-active player at the front of the stack. Completing a relatively easy, short pass to one of these players resets the stall count and thus gives the offense a new ten seconds to start over and try again to complete a pass to a cutter coming out of the stack for a big yardage gain.

And then, pretty much, that cycle just continues until the team scores… or turns the disc over.

In just a minute I'm going to explain what I don't like about the vertical stack approach, especially considered as the way to introduce ultimate tactics to newer players.

But, before turning to that, let's acknowledge some of Vert's positive traits. What does Vert have going for it that has given it, across many decades, Ultimate 101 status throughout the community?

The first thing to say here is that the vertical stack is a simple concept, easily grasped and implemented already by beginning players, that provides organization, structure, and some rudimentary semblance of teamwork. In the absence of any such organization, what tends to happen is that all the offensive players