Tournament 8 - Lesson 2 - The big debate with trust and the game plan

In our quarters against Mephisto, we went in with a huck and pin game plan. I'm sure most teams did this under the conditions we were playing at on Sunday at No Borders.

We kept to our plan and were right in the game until we dropped a throw on a downwind situation close to our end zone. Mephisto capitalized and scored one of two upwind points. The second coming from a similar scenario.

Pictured Above: Eric Sheid of Wormtown making a spectacular D against GT at No Borders. This D was off a throw by yours truly to what I thought was an open poach (photo courtesy of Darren Mace).

The question at hand for our team was should the thrower have just hucked to nobody but moved the disc deep, or do you trust your teammate on the obviously open in cut?

This debate really comes down to what the word trust means. We use it in many sports discussions and it's obviously one of the pillars of building a healthy team. Trust means that you believe someone will perform to an expected result. But what if the previous track record proves otherwise or you have no previous record to go on. In this case, you would be using blind trust, where you expect a result based on no previous or poor previous results.

Being the Cultimate Opinion my take on our game situation was that we were in a state of blind trust (based on previous up and down results). I think it was too big a gamble on the in cut, and we should have hucked the disc to nobody.

It should be understood that those two breaks alone were not the only reason we lost, but they were the most significant factor. Each time Mephisto scored upwind they got to pull to our upwind line meaning we didn't have a chance of getting a similar D close to the upwind endzone, which made it even harder. Alas, another hard lesson learned.

PJ