Science, Reading, and ...

Actually, I've decided to write about the science of reading the disc. I've read a few posts on the science of baseball, and this post in particular analysed the science behind fielding a baseball.

Pictured Above: The boys I miss. good luck to you all this weekend, and Chua, don't put Martinis in your eyes (photo courtesy of Marc Hodges).

From the above article, it's clear that there is controversy about theories of evolution and how it applies to a specific skill like fielding. There are two things that I think we can take from these ideas.

The first, is that these types of skills are learnt from practise. Each repetition helps you develop your intuition on reading the disc. This is good news since we can train the reading skill. What I think we do wrong in training is we don't vary the reading angles as much as we should. At least in my experience, the majority of reading drills we do are hucking drills. There's nothing wrong with hucking drills, but teams tend to do the same drill over and over from similar angles. I would suggest, reinventing a few hucking drills to improve disc reading skills.

Pictured Above: A joust between Bodhi and Goat. I like the Bodhi jerseys, and once again VC shows off more exciting jersey desgins (photo courtesy of Marc Hodges).

The second idea that might be useful to take from the science of fielding is rethinking the mechanics of reading the disc. How can we break down the read a little more? My first thought is on the release of the disc, like the crack of the ball off the bat, the throw is probably the most important thing to see for your read. How many times have you seen a misread disc based on the receiver not seeing the initial huck? Along the above lines it might be useful to train the read from a disc already in the air to develop that second chance intuition.

PJ