Monday, May 28, 2007

Over Organization

As I get more and more organized for the club season, I'm starting to think about little details and wondering how much they matter. For example, one of the things I've been wondering about is how to line up for a pull.

If pulling on offense it makes sense to line up so that you are opposite the people you'll be covering and in theory this means you'll have the straightest trajectory to your man. Otherwise you'll have to cross paths with your own players slowing you down and potentially allowing too many free passes.

When receiving a pull on defense, I think you should have your corallers (the assigned people who will catch the pull) on the outsides of the line, if you have 2 corallers, or if you have one coraller they should be in the middle of the line. The rest of the primary handler should also be close to the center and the outside receivers should be lined up on the outside.

With these basic outlines, you can think of the offense running a few set plays. For example, based on who pulls the disc, the offensive team tries to identify who the puller is covering and use this to gain an advantage like an extra pass. In theory, the puller will be the last down the field. The offense could also run a criss cross pattern to force their defensive match ups to criss cross as they sprint down the field.

I can work on these ideas forever. The reality though, is all of these ideas are minor details that have no major affect on the result of a game. These ideas, however, do provide a team with structure which I think helps everyone since organization simplifies and makes everyone feel more confident. Maybe as the game progresses and we get to the point where turnovers are at a minimum then it might be time to revisit these details.

The conclusion I've come to is that you should have a simple structure that is easy to organize for pulling. I, personally, like setting up on defense with your match ups across from you, and I like placing the coraller in the middle or two corallers on the outside. That's where I'm going to stop for this season.

3 comments:

Rahil said...

1 thing we did when I played with too bad one year was go down in waves... so we would send our first 3 down to pick up handlers, the next 3 to pick up cutters and the last to pick up the last player... usually it took away a deep huck to start and gave the appearance of a zone.

Unknown said...

One thing about lining up across is that the offense knows who is covering whom. To take a simple example, maybe there are two tall guys on O and one tall guy on D, so the O calls a huck play to the one who is not covered by the other tall guy. If they know which one it is before the point, it's easier than figuring out on the fly.

And if a team always lines up across, then when there is an obvious mismatch on the man across (short guy across from tall guy, say, or handler defender on fast guy), it's obvious that it's not a man defense.

Peter Andrew Jamieson said...

Hey Jim,

Completely true with the obvious lineup. I'm not sure all teams would catch on to this, and maybe you could use it to your advantage with switches and baits to certain players.

It seems like you can recursively think and think about theses situations.

PJ