I had the great pleasure of captaining The Tribe Of Miniature Horse at AMUC last weekend and it was the most fun I have ever had at a tournament. The team vibe was awesome. Everyone gave 100% on the field while remaining relaxed and jovial between/during games.
Spirit Scoring
After having spent the last few weeks sharing spirit scores with the other team straight after the game it felt weird not to and I think that the practise should become mandatory for all leagues/tournament. How else are teams supposed to know that they are doing good/bad things and therefore continue/change their behaviour accordingly?? Spirit Captains are the future!! The only potential downside I see is teams inflating the spirit score to avoid having to have an awkward conversation with the other team.
MVP and Spirit Prize
Not to maliciously take anything away from the winners, but it seems that these prizes still go to strong players from weak teams and the to the most ‘fun‘ teams. The MVP system the used AOUC is still one of the best I have seen and I think it is perfect for a 3 day tournament (could be adjusted so you only vote for the teams you played against). I don’t even know if there was a spirit score system (I didn’t see one) but WFDF needs to make a standard one and it needs to be easy to use but also reward spirit appropriately. I heard someone mention the other day that some league had a rule that a 7/7 couldn’t be given unless the other team had actually retracted a call –not a bad suggestion. For me, teams don’t get full scores for spirit unless the scores are really close and things like this happened - a player had a chance to abuse the self refereeing aspect of the game, but didn’t – a player told a team mate to retract a call and it was retracted – players actually discussed what happened rather than just yelling “foul” and “contest” – these things need to be rewarded in spirit scores, not that they laughed and joked as they got bagelled.
Different styles of play
I specifically recruited aL Don for this tournament because I wanted to go back to playing Ultimate how I learned to play it. In Brisbane I learnt to play with handlers like Jason Ray, Chris “Buzz” Burwell and aL. Every time, and I mean absolutely EVERY TIME, they had the disc as a handler, they would looked to huck it for a goal. And if no one was cutting for it they would get pissed, so you learnt very quickly that as soon as the disc was heading their way – go deep! In Melbourne the style of play seems to be much more based on handlers moving the disc around until it gets to an upfield cutter who then looks for the long option. What a waste of time. The whole point of Ultimate is to get the disc from one end to the other and if you can do it with one throw – DO IT! Now this view may be slightly biased on the fact that it takes players with exceptionally good throws for this type of play to work, but it is possible and it does work! This difference in offensive mindset was made very clear to me when I called a line and then told aL just to huck it to me for the goal. Someone then suggested that maybe aL should be the primary cutter in that case! aL and I just looked at each other and smiled. That’s not the way you play the game up there in QLD!
To be continued...
5 comments:
I completely agree with your comments about spirit.
I think there has to be some sort of feedback mechanism for teams otherwise what is the point? I know the AFDA requires team's average scores to be published after Nats/Mixed Nats (whether this happens or not????) but that doesn't necessarily tell the full story. Getting immediate feedback is a great thing - provided your captain is in the appropriate state of mind to take/give the feedback. I've recently been involved in some discussions where a team I've played with was advised they'd received a couple of low spirit scores - we've had discussions about why that might have been but we don't know if the reasons we've come up with are why we were scored low or whether there are other factors which haven't even occurred to us.
I think the other thing that a chat immediately after the game does is puts things into context. If there was a couple of crap calls in the game but you've been given an extremely low score if may make the captain reconsider what they are really scoring on.
Having a method for deciding on a spirit score is crucial. We've had this discussion elsewhere but worth rehashing again. It's crap to give teams a low score 'because you didn't enjoy the game'. Why didn't you enjoy the game? Because your team didn't play well? Because the other team made dodgy calls? Because it was too hot? Or if you're giving a very high score what has the other team actually done to warrant that. Was it just that they gave you a slab of beer at the end or was there actually demonstration of knowing the rules, interpreting them fairly, resolving issues well etc.
I like the spirit scoring system BULA had in place a while back, where there's a checklist (for want of a better word) you go through. Starting with a score of 5 you add 1 for each positive act and subtract 1 for each negative act. I wanted to have it in place for AUG, particularly for inexperienced teams who have no idea what they should be basing the spirit score on, but couldn't find a copy of it.
"but WFDF needs to make a standard one [spirit ranking system] and it needs to be easy to use but also reward spirit appropriately"
see: http://www.wfdf.org/index.php?page=rules/spirit.htm
or http://beachultimate.org/blog/2008/05/sotg.html
Perhaps if the organisers were to post a spirit ladder along with the tournament ladder then teams could see how well they did spirit-wise over the tournament. Those at the bottom then might start to think about improving their spirit. At the moment, if you didn't win, probably everyone assumes they were the second most spirited team :).
Rubes, you're so right. aL is amazing, taught me nearly everything I know. Plus, his throws are purty.
I would love watching that offense. Oh aL has it - I wonder what's going to happen? Yep, there's Rubes. Goal!
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