Practice Recap

Practice Recap

Team X showed up in big force today at practice; however, their fearless leader Joel disappeared during the middle portion of practice. No one exactly knows where he went, but sources say he was doing school work. (Not an excuse for leaving practice). Non X factor players also showed up, it was a good turnout even with the tourney over the weekend. It was good to see people practicing hard. It will make the difference at the next few tournaments.

Anyway, today’s practice started off with some break mark cut-to’s in response to the Illinois teams having trouble marking opponents at glory days. It was pretty tough to determine the success of the marks in the drill because the team had one of its windiest practices to date. (Key note- everyone needs to work on both their forehand and backhand inverts especially with a mark. Remember to grip the disc tight to get that much-required spin).

A problem Illinois had with marking relates to the fact that everyone is trying to get hand blocks on every throw. This is not the goal of marking. Remember marking needs to take away a portion of the field while the downfield defends take away the other portion of the field. Positioning and sidelines are the biggest keys to a good defense.

Next, Illinois moved to an inside out box drill to continue its work on throwing in windy conditions. The side with more veterans surprisingly got to 20 completed backhands in a row first BUT lost to the other side in the race to 10 forehands. How this happened is beyond me.

Trap Zone Defense

Key problems- 1 and 2 not working together in the zone. It is important for 1 to be marking around 90 degrees and 2 to be at 60 degrees. We have the 0 spot guarding the dump so 1 doesn’t need to bite as hard on a straight behind dump pass. Secondly, the gap in between 60 and 0 degrees is handle by the middle flat, so 2 cannot bite as much on the up field fake, stay at home. Finally, the strong side flat cannot be in the middle of the field when the trap is on. We cannot have an easy up field pass past the cup. ( This paragraph is technical so if you don’t know the numbers or positions yet just let a captain or vet know and they will help with numbers).

Scrimmage- There were some upwind breaks on both sides as the wind really died down from the beginning of practice. There wasn't as much intensity as the scrimmages on Wednesday but was to be expected since everybody was sore from the long weekend. Hopefully this gets fixed on Wednesday when people have had enough time to recover and the Fall-out teams are up.