Yungho Coaching Year 2 - cut short, but not a short post - Part One

There were a ton of question marks going into this college season, mostly relating to who would coach the A team. It was pretty clear from the end of last season that Anri and I were both interested in returning to coach Yungho. We wondered how dynamics would change with an A team coaching staff that was all new to the program, something that hasn't been the case in at least 5 years. Fall was definitely an adjustment from the Walden scheduled-to-the-minute style where it felt like everything had a purpose. We definitely had a heavier hand than B team coaches in prior years when it came to planning fall practices. This was interesting, but I wouldn't say we ended up doing things particularly differently than other years, other than some small growing pains of working together with new A team coaches.

I didn't go to any of the fall tournaments for the first time. Last year I went to 2/3, one of which got rained out after 1 day and the other one was interrupted by snow. It was nice to have those weekends free, but it meant that I didn't get to know a lot of the rookies as well, and it meant that I never really got to know the rookies that ended up on A team. This is a retrospective bummer for me, as it's fun to watch players grow over the course of their careers and I feel like I lost and opportunity by missing those fall tournaments. If I coach again, I definitely want to make sure to attend at least one fall tournament. While coaches are definitely not necessary for these, I would say it's beneficial for the coaches as well as the players to attend these.

We had a large B team roster at the beginning of the season, but I've been jaded by years of watching yungho numbers dwindle throughout the season, so I was skeptical that this year would be different. I was wrong. This year we consistently had 10+ players at each practice and that was a whole new challenge. I was used to spending practice providing lots of individualized feedback and making sure that we built in enough rest so the 5-7 players in attendance wouldn't die. This year we had to adjust to setting up drills quickly enough so that they wouldn't lose focus to socializing during water breaks. We would table discussions in favor of reps so that everyone got to practice each thing. It was amazing. It was hard to adjust at first, and we struggled a bit to run practices in a way that we hoped would allow the players to get the most out of it, but once we figured out we could have a more consistent structure with these numbers, they went more smoothly.

Skim was in charge of footwork, which was an amazing decision that basically made itself at our preseason coaches meeting. When she demo'd a ladder, you could see the players get a bit starstruck. It really showed what you COULD get out of something like that in a way that demos don't always help for footwork.

Another challenge we had to face this year was balancing rookies and returners. Last year, we had a team almost entirely made up of rookies and our consistent attendees were all rookies almost all freshmen. We got to teach them all together and no one had to be bored. This year we had to figure out how to keep those players engaged while still making sure the rookies were learning the basics. We developed a couple of strategies for this:

1. More scrimmaging: higher numbers made this possible, and returners like to play
2. When there were enough players, splitting into rookie and returner groups when we went over concepts the returners had drilled 100x last year. 

I want to emphasize for #2 that I believe that fundamentals are important at every level and these players 100% could have benefited plenty from just focusing on the basics as well, but that requires a level of commitment to those fundamentals and discipline that are not always present in B team returners due to the portion of that group that is not interested in putting in large amounts of time and effort into frisbee. I get it (well I don't given my college ultimate experience, but I do). Anyway, splitting the players into these groups allowed the returners to focus on the next level of the concept we were practicing, while making sure the new players were learning what they needed to know for the first (and what ended up being the only) tournament. It generally turned out that Anri took the rookies and I took the returners and Skim floated. This played to our strengths and helped keep everyone engaged, allowed us to sometimes teach the concept for next week to returners, and hopefully raised the understanding bar for everyone. It's hard to say how well this worked since we only had 1 tournament. I'll go into more detail about MWTD in Part 2.