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It is the responsibility of the captains and/or coaches to create a well-thought out plan for team development and to design practices within this framework. Early fall practices should help players develop a base skill set to take with them into tryouts and beyond. It is important to build a few key elements into the first days and weeks of practice:

1. Critical skills development—Dedicate time to throwing and catching.

2. Confidence building—Skill building, especially throwing, can be frustrating. Design other drills to highlight rookies' athleticism and let them run loose a bit.

3. Fun—Develop a sense of camaraderie and keep practices challenging. Build "fun" aspects into them; this usually involves a lot of head-to-head drills.

My college practices typically consisted of: warm-up, conditioning, drills, scrimmages, strategy, and cool-down. Early fall practices were lighter on the conditioning and strategy and I liked to break up the drilling and scrimmaging. Scrimmages to 3 interspersed with drills that build upon one another focus practices and help players to make the connection between drills and the bigger picture. 3 v. 3 was also a big part of practices, especially in the early fall when we wanted to get players lots of touches.

Here are some thoughts and ideas about a few specific elements of fall practices:

Warm-up
I am a big fan of focused throwing during warm-up. My club team borrows from Stanford / Fury with a throwing medley warm-up: ten of each throw, at varying distances, with punishment for drops. The focus should be ZERO turnovers and developing good throwing mechanics. Coaches and/or captains can give younger players specific feedback during this time. Both of my college teams (and judging from Slackjaw, most college women's teams) love to chat it up at practice. The Berkeley women always did a "circle question" during stretching. The question usually had absolutely nothing to do with ultimate, but it served as an outlet for some of this chattiness and helped to create a more focused environment for the rest of practice.

Drills / Strategy
Here are some drills that my college teams used heavily in the fall. These drills served as building blocks for critical skills development:
1. Continuous go-to
2. 3-man marking
3. Diamond: Two lines facing each other, with rotation- mark, throw, cut. Cutter fakes deep 5 yards, cuts under to the open side.

And for confidence building:
4. X: Cutter / defender pairs line up on the sideline and cut about 20 yards for a 50/50 type disc.
5. Hot (see my article in College Development, Part I)
6. Shoulder-to-shoulder (see previous article)

While there is certainly some crossover in what each drill strives to accomplish, the critical skills drills focus more on repetition with throwing and catching, while the confidence building drills allow rookies to show off their speed and aggressiveness. Both sets of drills also create opportunities to focus specifically on offense or defense or to introduce more advanced concepts (e.g. breaking the mark). The goal is to build from skills development to running the team's offensive and defensive sets. The focus of the first month is on creating an understanding the smaller pieces of these sets—setting up cuts, marking technique, hitting the dump, defending the last person in the stack. We introduce the bigger picture and ideally, I want the new players to understand it, but I am more concerned with them understanding the pieces of the system, even if the can't yet put them all together. About 4-6 weeks into the fall season, we introduce zone offense and defense. Again, we want them to understand the concepts—handler motion, how the cup works as a unit, how we talk to the wing from the sideline. We build on the most basic drills, adding complexities and slowly adding the building blocks of our offensive and defensive sets. There is very little emphasis on more advanced concepts (e.g. junk D) or set plays in the fall.

An extremely critical piece of team development and something that can easily be lost in the chaos of the fall is the development of younger returning players. My focus with these players is improving their throws. Allow for segments of practices to be split into two tiers of skills drills. Give these players a clinic on how to break the mark or on the mechanics of hucking. Put the disc in their hands in scrimmages and help them with their throws outside of practice. They need to be able make things happen with the disc and many of them are not yet out of the rookie mindset of dumping the disc immediately. The fall can be an incredibly productive time for these younger vets; invest in them and build their skills and confidence because you are going to need them to be strong off the bench and next year, they will be the ones running the show.