Review from Sept 4th Practice

For those of you not familiar with TULA's blog format, we generally provide practice summaries so that those absent can get an idea of what we worked on. So, here's the review from Tues, Sept. 4th. Blogalicious.

We got started a bit late today- mostly a reflection that most of us are having to set out alarms for the first time in a few months. Let's make an effort to get there early so we can tend to our body management issues (water, food, braces, cleats, etc.), your social issues (chatting, hittin on the TULA ladies, etc.) and your warm-up (warm-up throws, getting the left knee to bend without pain, etc.) before practice. You should be ready to go full-tilt by 7:30.

Today we ran Lotto v.2.0 beta. The old lotto drill was comprised of "dump drill", "3-man" and the "Berkeley drill". Today we simply ran the latter two components. Here are a few tips to getting the most out of these drills.

LOTTO (groups of 4)
3-man
Players form a triangle with a thrower/marker, a receiver in a second spot and an "observer" in the third spot. Roles rotate with the disc. The observer should watch for travels (better to be called in practice than in a game).

3-man is a marking drill. When marking 1) get your arms out straight (it makes you bigger), 2) bend your knees and shuffle 1-step in either direction to cover the flick/backhand throws- if you are smaller than the thrower, then add a foot-kick to the end of your shuffle step to buy another 10-12" of reach. **Don't bend at the wait (ie, lean) to attempt blocks. It's too slow and you'll get broken a lot doing this.

When you are the thrower focus on: 1) good extension, 2) convincing fakes, 3) different release-points.

Berkeley
Thrower trapped sideline with a mark and a dump standing perpendicular and 10-15yards out towards the middle of the field with a defender. The marker tells his team-mate (the person covering the dump) which way he will force.

Berkeley is a cutting drill for the dump position. The standard cut is: hard upfield- if it's not open then reverse the cut back. Don't be afraid to use another dimension on this cut and button-hook back and towards the middle of the field. This will give even more separation from your defender. Throwers: try throwing to space vs. throwing into your receiver's chest. Floating a throw to space allows the receiver to sprint hard to the disc. Throwing directly at your receiver leaves little room for error and gives the defense a chance at a layout D.

As we get more comfortable with this drill we will add a reward/punishment component. Every mistake (drop or throw away) is punished with +10 pushups. Every point block is rewarded with -10 pushups. At the end of Lotto, do the math and then do the pushups (or enjoy watching others do them).

Throw for Scores.
This involves 3 lines --- a flick huck line, a backhand huck line and a cutting line. All throws should be marked. As we become more comfortable with our "force side" marks we will start marking "straight up" so that the huck is more difficult.

Throwers, this isn't a "throw as far as you can" competition. See who your cutter is and make a throw that forces the cutter to catch it in full stride. If you can only huck 20 yards then try to get the throw off right away. Throw in a fake before you huck it. Good hucks die flat (ie, it falls flat and slow buying the cutter more time to run it down -- vs. falling in a blade).
Cutters, time your cuts properly. Make eye-contact with the thrower, make a quick fake backfield and then cut hard upfield. If the huck is stopped by the mark, don't dismay -- simply pull back the reigns and reverse your cut back in towards the thrower.

Lastly, we scrimmaged. One take-home point from today's scrimmage is: keep the disc in the middle of the field when running the horizontal stack. If you receive the disc on the sideline, look to dump it to the middle asap.

Good stuff.

Remember, tryouts start tomorrow!

Kirk.