Category Archives: Co-ed

Seattle DiscNW spring elementary league coach meeting

Notes from the mandatory pre-season meeting run by Jude Larene, Youth Coordinator for Disc Northwest, on Wednesday, March 2, 2016 from 6-7:30.  Impressively the number of teams has increased by ~20% this year (including 5 new teams within Seattle) — the fastest growth of all the youth spring leagues run by DiscNW.  The meeting was attended by ~40 coaches, as well as Jude and the DiscNW Account Manager, Kate Speck.  A highlight was receiving 5 free J-star 140-gram discs with an entrancing rainbow print of the DiscNW logo!

140-g J-star youth ultimate disc with RAINBOW DiscNW logo!
140-g J-star youth ultimate disc with RAINBOW DiscNW logo!  You can buy more for $7/each!

Here is a (low quality) audio recording of the meeting…

Jude on spring season orientation

  • Private Facebook group: DiscNW youth coaching forum
  • 11th edition rules
  • Gender ratio
    • Always at least 3 girls on the team in 7v7
    • In 5v5 teams, offense chooses 3:2.
    • Goal is to ensure equal playing time for girls and boys
    • Jude’s team has an all-girl line
  • Non-contact sport
  • Encourage egalitarian subbing (no “kill lines”)
  • Kids make the calls (coaches need to educate parents about this)
  • Coaching Code of Conduct (Archived PDF of 2015-2016 DiscNW Coaching Code of Conduct)
    • Revised last year after a lot of work
    • Please read it before you sign it!  (Feedback is very welcome)
    • Consider the role you play as a coach in the lives of your players
    • Set the coaching bar very high!
  • You may also need to sign a coach’s liability waiver
  • Spirit scores
    • Average will be visible after 3rd week of play
    • Please enter after each game, along with point score
    • Get your team together at end of game and ask their opinion
    • Provide feedback to the opposing coach via on-line form
    • Score of 2 or 1 will require a comment this year; please provide a detailed explanation; Jude will contact the other team and help educate.
  • If you can’t field a team for a Saturday game, please notify other team and Jude by Thursday
  • Games to 11; 75 minutes; hard cap at 60 minutes.
  • Only one field marshall hired for whole league!
    • So, don’t expect timing horns (except at Magnuson); bring cones & keep time; know field dimensions (It’s OK with Jude if agree with other coach on smaller field, e.g. in high winds!!)
    • Send responsible high school seniors to Jude to be additional marshalls!
    • Please manage your own lost and found items (use Facebook group if necessary, not Jude!)
  • Weather hotline

Kate on rosters & waivers

  • Hard copy hand-out
  • Minimum roster requirement is 3 girls and 4 boys (by Saturday deadline)
  • There is sometime a ~1-2 hour delay between roster additions and waiver availability
  • Advice if you are still placing kids (e.g. by skill) onto teams: put them all on one roster so they can sign waivers, then re-organize later.
  • Paper waivers can be scanned and emailed, or snail mailed; be sure to use current version of waiver!
  • Encouraged but not required: Have medical authorizations on hand; there is a template on the DiscNW web site
  • Report incidents to Jude so he can check in and utilize DiscNW insurance coverage (can help improve access for future emergencies)

7pm

Jude on other topics

  • J-star discs (one for free to each coach tonight!)
    • Can get thumb further on top to help stabilize forehand
    • New throwers have a lot of success with them
    • May be less stable in high winds
    • Kids may develop better form and throwing mechanics using smaller discs
    • Buy more (rainbow!) for ~$7 through Disc NW
    • Vision is for all 3rd and 4th grade teams to use
    • If you like them want more, there are some emerging options for buying J-star discs in bulk (but they’re much less pretty than the DiscNW ones)
  • Issues with our growing youth population
    • Field access
    • Coach shortage
      • If one coach of multiple teams needs sequenced games in one location, it increases scheduling challenges
      • Working on Coach Development Program (but may be ~5 years behind)
    • May need to make league changes
      • E.g. go to 5v5 in elementary
        • fixes field problem by allowing
        • but requires even more coaches
      • E.g. go to 4v4 to for gender equality
      • As one of biggest youth program in world/U.S. we have a chance to influence

7:30 end

  • More growth and teams will require more financial aid to maintain access for all
  • Save the date and start planning bid items — 2016 Fall Bid is Saturday Nov 12 is Fall Bid

Questions:

  • Are there AEDs available at major fields like Magnuson?
  • Phillips deal through Michael Lapin on AEDs for kids (cardiac risk is relatively low for elementary students; risk increases dramatically around grade 9)
  • John Leahy: is going to 5v5 a sacrifice or not?
    • Jude personally thinks it works better for elementary kids
    • Scores are higher; more touches per game; more success
    • Jenn
      • voluntarily signed up new 4th graders
      • expectation is that girls will have a more equal experience
    • Shannon’s 5v5 fall league packed a lot of kids onto the Roosevelt field

Ideas:

  • What about playing on other days of week, e.g. after school?
  • Could elementary teams play in other seasons?  (Conflict with soccer?)
  • Field advocacy group (in 80s?) used to go to city council meetings and wave discs around (John Beal is still at Seattle City Parks)
  • Jude: City wants to put turf only where lights already exist (due to NIMBY light pollution concerns)
  • Sometimes less is more
    • Maybe 3 game tournament once a month is as good as weekly Saturday games
    • Do playoffs make sense for elementary school?
    • Maybe play 2 weeks out of 3?  Weekend conflicts are tough, e.g. jazz
    • Fridays?  Some elementary soccer teams like a Friday evening practice
  • Could fields along I-5 corridor expand capacity (e.g. Shoreline)?

 

2016 Junior World Championships venue and coaches

The 2016 Junior World Championships will be held in Wrocław, Poland.  The event will be held from July 31-August 6, 2016 at the facilities at the Pola Marsome fields and the finals will be staged in the Stadion Olimpijski (Stadium), a venue of the 2017 IWGA World Games.  The sponsoring organization in Wrocław has budgeted for 40 teams from 20 nations (about 1,000 players) while the previous events (combined with other European Youth Ultimate activities) were slightly biggger: the 2014 event in Italy hosted 25 nations (1,200) and the 2012 event in London supported 47 teams (1,100 players).

Satellite view of Olympic Stadium complex in Wrocław, Poland.
Satellite view of Olympic Stadium complex in Wroclaw, Poland.

The coaches for the U.S. U-20 Open and U-19 Women’s teams will be Chase Sparling-Beckley (Portland, OR) and Jamie Nuwer (San Francisco, CA), respectively.

Matt Tsang on coaching middle school ultimate

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.

Seattle Waldorf is Spring Reign 2015 Spirit Champion

This last weekend, Waldorf United not only were the spirit champions at Spring Reign 2015, but also placed 2nd in the playoffs!  The team of Seattle Waldorf 5th graders is coached by David Steiner and Jan Harris.

First word came via the @SpringReign Twitter feed —

Tweet announcing Spirit Champions
Tweet announcing Spirit Champions

An earlier Tweet announced that Hazel Wolf’s team were the skill champions (maintaining their Champion status from Spring Reign 2014), beating Seattle Waldorf in a very close game (7-6).  They had previously beaten SCDS (11-7) and Evergreen (13-6).  The elementary team from Hazel Wolf (K-8) is coached by Jamshid Khajavi and  Lori Frey Butler.

Here is a screenshot of the final standings —

2015 ES bracket w/scores

Getting everyone involved in elementary ultimate

I’ve been coaching elementary school ultimate for 5 years and to my continued displeasure, every year I face the same issue – getting all my players involved and improving their skills.   The good news is that co-ed ultimate presents a rare opportunity to get boys and girls to play an organized sport together and work on their strengths and their challenges.   Every time we play, we’re demonstrating that sexist ideas about athletic ability are outdated. Still, the problems persist.

In general, boys are more socially conditioned to fully participate in sports. This can lead to the exclusion of others and to diminished team play.  Many boys appear to not see girls on the field when they look for an open cutter. Again, generalizing, some girls tend to hold back when they’re playing co-ed. Boys and girls tend to group themselves together at a practice or on the sideline at a game.

There’s no single solution to a problem that’s rooted in culture, historic inequity, and to a much lesser extent, physical make-up.

Here are some things that have worked for me:

  • Briefly discuss the value of getting all players involved.   At the start of the year, it’s a great time to let kids know that successful teams use all their players and that you intend to make sure that everyone’s time is well spent. This should be totally positive and not heavy handed. Keep it fun and listen to their ideas too.
  • Create interactions at practice. Trust and comfort in one another’s throws and catches comes from repeated contact and many chances to hang out. I mandate boy/girl throwing partners at least every other practice to make sure that players get used to each other.
  • Build teams within teams. Creating teams of handlers (or cutters) that rotate through practices and games allows kids to face off in a friendly way and again, see the skills of teammates that they may have ignored otherwise. Some coaches have girls play single-gender for some part of the practice to build confidence.
  • Focus on skill-building. This may be less of a gender issue than an experience issue but I find that putting coaching resources into bringing up the fundamentals of every player on the team allows many leaders to emerge from the group. Even the most gifted elementary school player has work to do on his or her basics. If you’re committed to giving as much playing time as possible to every kid, your team will be stronger if every player feels confident.
  • Take time during the season, possibly at the start of the practice to reflect on how it’s going. Ask questions like, ‘How did we do at distributing the disc? Did everyone get a chance to do something awesome?’ You can again show your kids that you hold up teamwork as a value.

I’d love to hear ideas from other coaches that have worked well and if you’ve seen lasting changes on your teams.