Category Archives: Coaches

Coaches, Coach development, Co-ed, middle school

Matt Tsang on coaching middle school ultimate

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As I launch into the fall season of coaching at Eckstein Middle School in Seattle with a great group of new and experienced coaches I’ll be reviewing helpful resources, including curricula, drills, and videos.  To set the stage and delve into how to develop team culture with middle schooler, here are some notes on this great talk by Matt Tsang, a coach and teacher at a middle school in Berkeley, from the 2014 Youth Ultimate Coaching Conference.

Matt’s goals (and talk outline):

  • Team Culture
    • How to be a good teammate
  • Expose diverse group of kids to a new school
    • Gets them hooked
    • Goal was at least 1/3 girls
  • Teach ultimate

Ways to build team culture

  1. Make good mistakes
    1. In drills, explain that some mistakes still leave a play possible (while others are worse).
    2. For example, in a passing drill over-leading a player is better than throwing it behind them.
  2. Learn from your teammates
    1. Encourage players waiting to run the drill to actively observe their peers.  (This gave me the idea to ask them to line up along a sideline so they can all see, rather than orthogonal to it where the end of the line has nothing to do but chat.)
  3. Acknowledge players at the end of practice
    1. Not just for skill, but more importantly for spirit or team work
    2. For example,
  4. Talk it up (14:00)
    1. Demonstrate and incorporate supportive phrases to say when someone makes a mistake (important in middle school dynamic which is often critical or judgemental)
    2. For example:
      1. Good bid
      2. Nice try
      3. Way to go to
      4. Plus let them invent their own (builds team identity)

How to teach ultimate (23:30)

Goals for his 8 week season (most coaches try to teach too much in Middle School)

  • Throwing
  • Catching
  • Stack (these are the types of cuts you do from the front/back of the stack; front into the lane; back downfield for yardage)
  • Switch fields (when trapped on sideline)
  • Mirror defense
  • Force
  • Not zone.  (Instead counter zone offense with a dump swing and turn the corner)
  • Not plays, except maybe a pull play (what should be happening in our normal offense) to ensure we don’t always turn it over near our end zone
  • Don’t talk about positions.  (Everyone or no one wants to be handler.  Habitual cutters won’t even look up field!  No dumps to habitual handlers.  Rotate to build depth.)

A 6th grader might start with the just the first 3, but would tackle most of these topics by the time they’re 8th graders.

38:00 Groups share thoughts about a few key middle school issues

  1. How to deal with disparate skills and size?
  2. How do you get a couple disrespectful kids to not poison the whole practice or team? (42:00)
  3. How to convince kids to share the disc to develop other players and their team. (44:15)  [Try drills without a disc, or scrimmage with 2 discs!]

Good ideas:

Warm up with Monarch or tag.  Don’t limit throws, at least during free play.  Part of the joy of throwing is all the creative ways you can throw the disc.

Managers, Coaches, Players, Parents, All audiences, elementary, middle school, high school

Seattle parent’s guide to DiscNW accounts and child registration

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Parents: jump to the 2015  2016 2017 DiscNW registration guide

As a coach and team manager I know it’s always a challenge to efficiently use the cool tools that DiscNW offers to the parents of of elementary and middle school players.  The process of rostering players and getting parents and players to all sign their on-line waivers and concussion forms is the logistical crux of the spring season.  But it’s worth it, because if you do it right the web site will do wonderful things, like automatically sending out game reminders with RSVPs, and bypassing reams of printed paperwork.

So, here’s a guide to creating a parent account at discnw.org and then adding your child to your account.  If you can get through this step, then it will be easy for your coach to put your child on the team roster.  Only after the coach is done will e-waivers auto-magically appear in your account for you and your player(s) to read and sign.  The good news is, once the process is complete, you’ll get nifty functionality, like: automated game reminder emails; handy calendars with all your game times and locations; and RSVP emails and back-end so the coach knows who is playing in a particular game.


2016 DiscNW registration guide

Get your child ready to play in a DiscNW leage by following one of the following options, depending on if you DO or DON’T already have a parent account on the DiscNW web site.

(If you’re not sure if you have one or not, you can go to this link and enter emails/usernames to see if you’re in the system and/or to re-set your password.)

If you DO already have a parent account
  1. Login to the DiscNW site here — https://www.discnw.org/login
  2. Click on the Hello message in the upper right corner to reveal a menu like so — Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 12.32.45 PM
  3. Click on “Your Profile” and you should see a page with an “Edit profile” menu which — if clicked — will show an “Add child” option like this —Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 11.49.09 AM
  4. Click on the “Add child” link and fill out the form that loads.  It should look like this:Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 11.52.26 AM
  5. Email your coach or team manager to let them know your child is ready to be added to the team roster.  To grease the skids, be sure to give them the first and last names you entered, and the child’s gender.  That way they’ll be able to quickly add the right child to the roster (by using the nifty auto-complete functionality provided by the DiscNW rostering tool).

If you DON’T already have a parent account
  1. Create one here — https://www.discnw.org/@@create-account
  2. After you create your account you should see a handy link (within a light green highlighted message) offering to “create a player record for one of your children” like so — Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 11.37.03 AM
  3. Click on that link and fill out the form loads.  It should look like this:Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 11.52.26 AM
  4. Email your coach or team manager to let them know your child is ready to be added to the team roster.    To grease the skids, be sure to include the first and last names you entered, and the child’s gender.  That way they’ll be able to quickly add the right child to the roster (by using the nifty auto-complete functionality provided by the DiscNW rostering tool).