Boston's Liên Hoffmann: Picture Perfect Deep Cut

So I'm going to try to get back to posting a bit more often. Partially because I (theoretically) have more time, since I am in offseason for the first time in 5 years.  Partially because Walden Nelson told me he reads my writing and enjoys it, which is pretty cool.

This quick post comes from the highlights recently posted by USAU from the Brute Squad v Molly Brown semifinal.  It's a slight elaboration on one of my earlier posts (http://joemamaulti.blogspot.com/2015/10/learningteaching-how-to-cut.html)

Check out Liên Hoffmann's deep cut for the score here: (EDIT: I figured out how to embed gifs!! game-changer right here...)

There's a lot to see here that doesn't just include Hoffmann, but I'm just going to focus on her cut here to keep this (relatively) brief.  First, lets see when she starts her cut.  As the thrower is looking at her reset, Hoffmann is mostly still, while remaining on her toes and ready to cut.  Since the thrower isn't looking at the cutters, there isn't a reason for her to start moving and potentially get in the way.

As soon as the upline throws goes up, Hoffmann recognizes that Leila Tunnell, one of the top throwers in the women's division, is about to catch the disc in power position (momentum moving forward, her mark behind her). Hoffmann starts making her deep cut, running at ~70% speed.  When she sees Tunnell catch the disc, she buries her head and starts all-out sprinting towards the end zone, cutting parallel to the line of the field.  Her full-speed cut ensures that she and Tunnell are on the same page - as a thrower, there's nothing worse than having an open huck but being unsure if the cutter is actually making that cut.  Second, her cutting angle leaves a larger throwing lane for Tunnell to exploit - many less experienced cutters make their cut diagonally out to the space they expect the throw to go, but by doing so, they make the throw itself much more difficult.

Next, let's take a look at where Hoffmann starts her cut.  At both the time of the upline throw and the time when Tunnell catches the disc, Hoffmann is about 15 yards away from her thrower.  This leaves a ton of deep space still in front of her, even allowing enough time for Tunnell to fake a forehand, pivot and throw a backhand for the score.

Next, check out how Hoffmann checks back over her shoulder when she is ~15 yards into the cut.  By doing a quick check, she can get a better view of the throw going up (or not going up - in which case she would turn this awesome deep cut into a yardage-gaining under), but doesn't sacrifice a ton of her running speed. This eye contact with the thrower can also prevent the occasional miscommunications.

Finally, check out how she attacks the disc.  Even though the defender isn't super close to the play, she is sprinting full speed until the disc is in her hands, and attacks it far out in front of her body.

Thanks for providing an awesome example of deep cutting, and congrats to Brute Squad for their championship run!

Update: I finished watching the USAU natties highlight reels, and found another great example, this time from Revolver's Simon Higgins:

How to watch film (of yourself or others)

In all sports, players that want to improve watch film of themselves playing and watch film of others playing so that they can learn from mistakes they make and from things they or their team do well. Through the efforts of Ultiworld, Ditch/NGN, and injured college students, film in ultimate is growing rapidly.  More and more, coaches and captains are encouraging their players to watch film of themselves, and of other teams; Ultiworld's ability to offer "team" video packages are more evidence of this.  However, I think there are still a lot of people who don't really know how to watch film; what they should be looking for, where they should be looking, etc.  Watching an exciting game can be fun, but if your goal is to learn and improve, you have to be on the lookout for specific things to make the most of it.

In this post, I'll look at some clips of myself playing and go over some of the thoughts that go through my head when I watch them happen.  Hopefully, you will be able to follow my thought process and it will be helpful when you watch your own footage. Remember that since all of these clips are on gfycat, you can watch them in slow motion, pause, and go frame-by-frame.

There's a lot going on here, so before I dive into it I'll try to give you a little bit of background.  I am in the red hoodie and white tank, guarding the furthest guy from the disc.  There has just been a contested stall, so the disc was coming back in at stall 8.  Generally speaking, at a high stall count, the last thing you want to give up is an open huck.  Therefore, in most cases, you should be positioned on the "high" side of your defender, so that you are taking away the deep cut, but still in a position to pressure an under. Note that when the disc is tapped in, I was on the "low side" of my cutter; in many cases, I would say that a defender in my position should immediately adjust to be on the high side.

In this particular case, there were a number of other factors that led to me maintaining my position. First, I was actually guarding one of their primary handlers, and our team had found some success when I kept him out of the handleset, forcing other players to make throws and forcing him to make big cuts downfield.  Second, the thrower had eye contact with his dump, and I incorrectly assumed he would be looking to throw a reset.  Third, I did not believe that the thrower would be able to consistently place a same-third huck accurately over my head.  However, with all of that said, I made a couple crucial mistakes that led to my opponent getting a relatively easy score.

(1) I misread the thrower and the space
Clearly, the thrower here was good enough to make a throw to an open cutter.  However, it is also important to see that had I adjusted my position to take away the deep throw, there was nowhere for my cutter to cut in -- two other players were already in that space, and I have help from my teammates if he decided to go there.  Unfortunately, I did not have any help over the top for a huck, so I needed to take away that space rather than giving it up.

(2) I turned a full 270˚ when the throw went up, losing precious time that put me just outside of the range where I could safely make a layout attempt on the throw
This one is pretty easy to see, and is pretty frustrating for me to watch. Despite being slightly out of position when the disc is tapped in, I still had a chance to make a play; I see the throw go up, but clearly turn the wrong way, causing me to lose half a second of acceleration time that may have made the difference.  Although turning the other way would have made me lose sight of the disc (not always a good thing), since I saw the throw go up, I would have been able to do so safely and still get a good read on my man and the disc.



Let's take a look at another clip:



This is another one of those that is painful for me to watch, since it involves me getting beat upline.  That being said, these kinds of clips are the ones I usually learn from the most, since my own frustration makes it easier to improve and avoid making the same mistakes again.  If you pause the clip right as the handler starts his cut, you'll see that my positioning isn't terrible - I'm triangulating the disc and the man, allowing me to see both and, in theory, react to a cut or a throw.  However, you can also see that my hips are facing towards the thrower, rather than towards the cutter. This puts me in a slightly more awkward position where I have to choose which way to turn: I can turn towards the thrower, but in doing so would lose sight of my man.  Or, I could turn towards my man (which is what I do), but in doing so, have to turn an extra 90˚ and am too slow to make a play.  If my hips were open towards the cutter when he started is cut, I would have been able to turn much more quickly and probably would have been able to get a hand on the disc (or prevent it from being thrown).

It's also important to look at why I was in that position to begin with.

At the start of the clip, the disc has just advanced up the field, and the player I am defending is still behind the play and not immediately threatening.  I increase the distance between myself and him to give a bit more of a cushion and to be able to help a little bit in the around throwing lane.  However, my mistake is that I reel back in towards him too late; as a result, I start moving towards him just as he starts cutting upline, allowing him to blow by me and get the score.

Finally, let's take a look at one last clip.  Here, I am defending a situation that is very common, but I often see mis-played by handle-guards.



There are a number of ways to defend this position, and a lot of factors that influence that choice.  Generally, I will look to put more pressure on the backfield, leaving the upfield window a little more open, since that throw is generally much more difficult to make, especially with a good mark.  However, it is also important to recognize that although the throw is more difficult, it is much more threatening since it results in a power position for the thrower, with no mark.  Thus, how you defend that position will also depend on your team defensive philosophy. Many teams are willing to give up/force this throw since it is relatively difficult to complete.

Watching the clip again, you can also see that my teammate on the mark does very little to help me on defense.


There are tons more clips that I could go through, and I'm hoping that soon I'll be able to go through some other video in more detail either here or on twitter.  For now, I hope that this is helpful for some people to get an idea of some of the things I think about when I'm watching film and trying to pick out individual things I can do to get better.

Some ideas for advanced ultimate stats

For a long time, ultimate players have tracked performance using incredibly simple metrics: D's, goals, and assists.  Many teams also track playing time, even differentiating between O and D points.  Recently, some more advanced apps have allowed for more advanced statistics tracking, which includes tracking every single throw (who threw it/caught it, where it was thrown/caught).  Although these can give some great information, they still lack a lot of things I think are important.  At the moment, the difficulty and time commitment required to collect these advanced stats is definitely the limiting factor (see recent 538 article), but I'm going to go through some stats that I think would be pretty cool to see in the future.  Some of them are fairly simple and could be implemented in USAU events right now, while others are a bit more in-depth and may require more volunteers (or paid employees... looking at you, AUDL/MLU).

Also, for a lot of these I basically made up names that I think sound cool and capture the basic idea of the measurement.  If you think there are better names for some of them, feel free to let me know.

So, in no particular order:

Handblocks/Footblocks

It's pretty crazy to me that nobody tracks these.  There is a pretty significant difference between a D downfield and a D on the mark, and it's also very easy to track.

Defensive Mark Efficiency

This is one that would definitely be more difficult, and would require that somebody with a trained ultimate eye be watching the game.  Basically, this would be a measure of the ability of a defender to limit break throws from the thrower.  I'm envisioning it being calculated by the equation below, which divides the number of break throws the person you are marking completed by the total throws he/she attempted.

^{(Break throws completed )}⁄_{(Total throws attempted)}

Although this wouldn't always be a perfect measure of how "good" your mark is, if aggregated over multiple games it should be a pretty valuable metric.  Note that in this case, having a smaller number would be better.  You could also just subtract this number from 1 to make it a slightly more intuitive stat, where having a higher number (closer to 1) would correlate to having a better mark.

Offensive Break Efficiency

We all know how important it can be for an offense to have potent break throwers that can change the angle and attack the whole field with their throws.  However, there still is no way to quantify the impact this can have in a standardized way.

Similar to above, offensive break efficiency would look like this:


^{(Break throws completed)}⁄_{(Total throws attempted)}

Of course, in this case, it is the number of break throws you completed divided by the total throws you attempted.

Offensive and Defensive Sky Percentage

Pretty self-explanatory; the main issue would be the subjective nature of what you count as a sky. Personally, I'd say any play where both players are close enough to each other to make contact would count as a sky.  If the offensive player drops or misreads the disc (with the defender in position to count it as a "sky" attempt), that would count as a sky for the D.

Effective Assists

I'm still not totally sure what the best way to measure something like this would be, but my thinking was that it would include goals score more than one pass away in the statistic.  So, if you throw a pass to someone who gets the assist, you might get 0.5 added to your effective assists.  Two passes away, you get 0.25 added.  Not sure if this would be useful, but it may help show what players are facilitating offense even if they aren't throwing all of the assists.

Offensive Usage (touches based or yardage based)

I think a similar statistic has been calculated before by Ultiworld, but I'll go through it anyways.  The way I see it, there are two ways to calculate Offensive Usage:

1) Based on touches
For this calculation, your offensive usage would simply be the ratio of touches you got compared to the total.  So, if an offensive point was a one-throw score, both the thrower and the receiver would have an offensive usage of 0.5 for that point.  An "expected" usage, when calculated like this, would be 1/7 for each player (although there are many other factors that would change this, like weather conditions, team strategy, player position, etc.).

2) Based on yardage
This is one that I believe has been measured before and can be measured using stat-tracking apps currently available (though I'm not positive on that - if anyone knows for sure, let me know in the comments).  For this measurement, your offensive usage stems from the percentage of the team's total yards you are responsible for (either based on throwing or receiving.   Let's imagine that a player catches the pull, then throws a 50 yard huck down the field.  The cutter then throws a 5 yard pass for a score.  The handler would have an offensive usage of 50/110, while the first cutter would have 55/110, and the last cutter (who scores the goal) would have 5/110.  Notice that you have to double the total yards covered, since you count both throwing and receiving yards.  The next level would be to separate throwing and receiving efficiencies to see which players are bigger threats downfield vs with the disc.

Another application of a metric like this would be allowing teams, coaches, and analysts to have a quantifiable measure of players' involvement with the disc.  If a team's game plan is to limit the amount of damage Beau Kittredge does downfield, a coach would be able to look at this statistic and immediately know if their team is being effective.

Defensive Usage (touches based or yardage based)

Defensive Usage would simply be the offensive usage of the opposing player while you are guarding them.  By itself it may not be super valuable, but when used with Offensive Usage, it can give you more information, such as...

Defensive Efficiency rating

This would measure the impact that a defender has on the player they are defending.  It would be the percent difference between the average offensive usage of the offensive player and the offensive usage of that player when being guarded by a particular defender (so, percent difference between offensive usage for O player and defensive usage for D player).  Because of the way this is calculated, this would be a measure of "shut-down defense", which is something that is not usually captured by keeping track of D's.

As an example: if Opi Payne's normal Offensive Usage is 20%, but her offensive usage when being guarded by Kelly Johnson is only 18%, that would give Kelly Johnson a Defensive Efficiency Rating of 10%.  You could then average Kelly's Defensive Efficiency rating for each player she guards, and get an overall measure of her shut-down defense.



There are a couple other half-ideas that I have floating around in my head, but haven't fully fleshed out yet; maybe these will be included in a future post.  For now, I'd love to hear what other people think about these stats, and any way to track them.  Personally, I'd like to try tracking some of these with my winter league team (all of our WL games are filmed and uploaded online, which would aid this process immensely).  If you'd like to try tracking some of these, I'd love to hear about it!

Why You Are Not Making Progress (by Yuri Marmerstein) [Part 2]

This is part 2 (of 2) of this post; you can check out part 1 here.

My brother recently wrote this post, where he talks about some of the potential pitfalls and mistakes people make when they are trying to make progress in hand balancing.  As is the case with many of his posts, I think there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between hand balancing and ultimate; I go through some of Yuri's points below, with my comments in italics.

-You train with the wrong methodology
Always remember what your goals and expectations are.  Are you training as a competitive gymnast?  If the answer is no, it may not be worth learning your handstand like one.  The same applies with yoga, circus, breakdance, and other handstand styles.
Ultimately, this is an individual practice, so find what works for you without getting caught up in too many dogmas.
Different acrobatic skills will also require different variations of the handstand.

Remember that we are ultimate players, not cross country runners or football linemen.  Make sure you are training appropriately.

-Your view of 'progress' is too narrow
There are many ways to get better at a skill, and many of them are not as obvious as you would think.  Handstand hold time and body line are pretty obvious things to work towards, but things like efficiency in entry/exit, cleanliness of balance, consistency, fluidity of transitions and ability to save a fall also very important elements.
Improving on these is just as important, even if you're not actively improving your line of hold times by doing so.

This is something I see a lot with younger players, and some more experienced people as well. Often, players can get frustrated because they don't see exactly the results they want to see - for example, they still aren't able to complete 60 yard hucks, but they don't realize that as a result of the practice they've been putting in, their 30 yard throws are much more reliable.  This is one reason that I think it is very important to talk to and get feedback from teammates, captains and coaches - self-assessing is great, but usually you need an outside perspective as well.

-You get too caught up in PRs
Unless you were performing a feat of endurance, your longest hold time is not something you should get too caught up on.
Hit 60 seconds?  Great!  How many attempts in a row can you hit that same number?  Ascending skill levels is going to take thousands of repetitions, so what we're looking for is consistency.  How long can you hold your handstand on the first attempt after rolling out of bed in the morning?  That's what I would be more interested in.

If you're playing ultimate, it doesn't necessarily matter how far you can throw a disc, or how high you can jump, or how quickly you can change directions.  As Yuri points out, consistency is the name of the game.  Can you still throw that forehand 70 yards with a mark in your face and a cutter open by 2 yards? Can you learn to holster that same throw when the matchup isn't favorable? What about when the wind picks up - does your 70 yard huck turn into a 90 yard huck that sails out of bounds?

Don't get me wrong, you can be a good player with just the raw skills I listed above.  But if you want to be great, you have to be able to execute them again and again, and to integrate them with other skills and with situations that are presented to you in a game.  To finish off this point (which is likely one I'll revisit in the future), here's another quote from "Relentless" by Tim Grover:

Most people are ready for one scenario, they can't even envision ten; they're completely paralyzed by all the possible variables, and when one thing goes wrong, they can't adjust.  You can practice the same shot over and over, until you can do it blindfolded.  Great, now can you do it if I hit you with a sandbag while you shoot?  Can you focus if I blast horrible music or scream in your face?  When you always go according to plan, you get robotic and lose that innate ability to know what to do when plans suddenly change, when you're confronted by the unexpected. 

-You spend too much time training on your own
I love training alone, but it has its pitfalls.  It reminds me of this quote:

"Solitude has but one disadvantage--it is apt to give one too high an opinion of one's self. In the world we are sure to be often reminded of every known or supposed defect we may have."
- Lord Byron

We all have a skewed perception of ourselves, so there are simply things we cannot notice or correct when it comes to our personal form.  For this reason, it's useful to have a teacher or training partner, at least every so often.

On this note, I think it's important to seek out new opportunities to play with new people. Whether that is local leagues, organizing teams for tournaments in the off-season, or just going to pick-up, try to play with as many different people as you can.  If possible, try to play with and against people that are better than you.

-You don't do enough research
You might be someone who just likes to try something to see what happens.  In handstands, it's possible to progress this way for some people.  However, eventually there will come a point where some guidance is needed to continue progress or correct bad habits.
This is where it helps to observe, watch videos, and take notes to get ideas from other sources.

There are very few ultimate players who watch enough film.  If you listen to or watch interviews with players from more popular sports (e.g. basketball), you can get an idea of just how much they watch film and prepare for each game and opponent.  We don't necessarily have the ability to do that in ultimate, but for some opponents you can sometimes gain an upper hand by watching them play (either in person or on film).  What moves do they use to get open? What are their favorite throws? What do other defenders do that seem to bother them or shut them down?

-You do too much research
Knowledge is important, but ultimately meaningless without proper implementation.  I encourage vast amounts of research, but there should be a good ratio between researching and doing.  There are too many people well versed in theory but with little practice in it.
Don't be that guy.

Again, I doubt there are any players (maybe some coaches) that watch "too much" film or read about ultimate too much.  Especially now, during the offseason, take advantage of the extra time you have not being able to play outside and read up on the game.