Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Read and react

It's the new Ultimate offense! Actually, it seems to be all the rage in basketball these days for developing teams. I don't own the DVDs yet, but I'm considering the purchase. Still, the concept seems to lie around the fact that the majority of plays don't work and players who learn to be robots aren't useful in the game flow.

Pictured Above: More Goaltimate action in the scramble.

I've known this for years, but knowing it and developing Ultimate systems around the concept of developing reactive players is not easy. This doesn't mean I haven't made attempts at it, but I don't have a great system yet, and this tempts me to look into the basketball system more to get some ideas from more experienced coaches, even if it's in another sport.

From what I've been able to piece together, "Read and React" is about seeing the ball carrier's action and reacting to it with a reasonable options. This means we need to break apart our game into reactive moments around the disc, received discs, and cuts. The trick is how do we initialize actions and what are the right responses.

Well, back to the drawing board, and if anyone has more ideas and want to discuss this one, I'd be interested.

PJ

1 comments:

Frank Huguenard said...

This is a large part of the basis for the Motion Offense. Taking it a step further, the motion offense establishes a framework whereas the players force a defense to make a decision and therefore the options proceeding that action are followed by a relatively small set of counter options.

It's unstoppable and pretty much obsoletes Ultimate Frisbee.