Scobel Wiggins Photography

The first few days and weeks of the season should be spent on developing enough of the fundamental skills to get rookies to be able to play in a scrimmage. Show them how to throw, teach them the basic rules, explain your offensive positions, and throw them into a game. Playing in games helps new players understand the importance of (and often leads them to intuitively ask about) the skills and principles we introduce in drills in the first few weeks.

Every practice in the early fall is built around that principle—get them into games fast, then start introducing a new skill (typically one per practice) via a simple drill and a scrimmage in which we ask them to focus on that day's skill.

Another thing to keep in mind is to try to develop your offensive skills and your defensive skills at appropriate times relative to each other. For example, too much work on defense before new players are comfortable cutting, catching, and throwing may stifle any sort of flow in scrimmages and frustrate new players.

We introduce skills in an order that attempts to introduce players to all basic elements of the game quickly, while also making the learning process effective and fun. We try not to bore anyone with too much talking, or scare them away with complex drills too early, but we also like to expose new players to all the skills they'll need to succeed in the winter and spring.

"Chalk talks" are great for introducing concepts related to cutting and positioning. For some new players, walking through things on the field is more effective than drawings. And to reiterate, a great way to make the learning experience from a diagram or drill stick is to emphasize that concept in a scrimmage immediately after.

Aside from throwing, which we work on at every practice, the following is a typical progression in which we introduce skills in the fall:

• Offensive positions and very general principles of cutting
• Catching (go-to drills, huck drill)
• Basic principles of person defensive forcing (introduce one force at a time)
• Marking
• Faking (with the disc and as a cutter)
• Defensive positioning and footwork
• Offensive flow
• Zone offense (often introduced at our first tournament when another school plays it against us: "time out...so...this is called zone.")
• Zone defense

That progression takes us through the fall. By the time the competitive winter season starts, players have been exposed to all of the fundamentals of our system. We are poised to start refining our play with a set of new players with strong baseline skills or, at the very least, familiarity with the skills and concepts we will spend the next five months developing. Most of our system has been introduced, setting us up to work on execution and on adding nuances to our general offensive and defensive strategies.

We also spend much of the fall focusing on returning players, especially those who will be stepping into new roles on the team. We have one closed practice a week in which our A-team begins work on priorities from the previous season. In this practice, and in the open fall practices, we encourage second and third year players to be very aggressive about trying new things.

We help them identify specific skills that they should be working on (for a second year it might be handler defense, for a third year moving to a handling role it might be breaking the mark) and encourage them to put themselves in a position to work on that skill. The fall is extremely low pressure so vets should take advantage of the opportunity to play a new role and to make mistakes. Vets should line up against the best players they can, try to huck or break when they may not have previously, and otherwise get outside their comfort zone.

Finally, encouraging the returning players (not just captains) to lead drills at practice and to give advice to new players is a great way for vets to solidify their understanding of ultimate concepts and to refocus on the skill development process in a way that will help both them and the new players improve.