Time to get on the same page

Hey Folks,

This is a pretty simple post about the value of the teams playbook and what should be included in that book. We will start out with the why and then go into the what.

Pictured Above: Torontula and McGill boys going up on mass. The disc held in the air and drifted over to a McGill player outside the scrum who caught the disc.

The playbook exists in pretty well all team sports. I've seen them in basketball, football, hockey, and volleyball. The main idea is that the playbook provides information about what will happen so that more of the time at practice can be served to executing actions as opposed to explaining them.

Not only does the playbook provide explanations about actions on the field, it is also a point to express the philosophy behind many of the systems. This provides reason why systems are used and provides points of how to argue why such and such a system is correct and why it is bad.

So what belongs in the teams playbook. I, recently, had the opportunity to have a brief look at the University of Westerns Football teams playbook. The book was actually about 200 pages. Sections that I saw and remember:

• Plays
• Season Workouts
• Offseason Workouts
• Team Logistics
• Team History

The playbooks I've created for Ultimate don't include all of these sections. My latest playbook created for the University of Toronto open team (torontula) includes:

• Basic Skills Needed
• Philosophy for coach, team, offense, and defense
• Offensive plays
• Defensive sets including zones
• Drills

This is a base book that I find serves the purpose of providing the minimum amount of information so that everyone has a good base to start from.

Finally, the last thing we recently tried with the playbook was releasing it after the second day of tryouts. There are two reasons for this were: one, this would make people read the book and memorize so they wouldn't look the fool at tryouts, and two, early release would get everyone on the same page.

You've got to have a playbook. In the future I'll discuss some of the finer points o f the playbook

PJ