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What factors are indicative/causative of success in the Women’s division specifically?

First, a few caveats. I haven’t played college Ultimate since 2001. In 2002, I practiced with a college team in the Midwest for a while and went in a pseudo-coaching role with them to Regionals. It was the coldest I have ever been, and I had no idea that sleet could somehow appear to be both coming down at you from the sky and up at you from the ground. Since then, I have watched some college Ultimate each year, but not at Nationals. A number of my teammates over the past seven years have coached various college teams—including Davis, Santa Cruz, Stanford, and Berkeley. I have played club with some players who recently played in college or were even still in college. But most of my biases stem from my experience in college myself, which I have already admitted was a while ago.

The first question I was most interested in is where are the biggest differences between teams with coaches and teams without. I went through the data and highlighted those where there were differences of at least 10% between the answers of teams with coaches and teams without. A major caveat about the data itself—while having 68 women complete the survey is fantastic, it is still not the biggest sample size. For some questions, not all teams answered so it becomes even smaller. So some of these differences, even though they look big in terms of percentages, may just be a matter of chance. But of course that’s no fun, so I will proceed with making guesses about what the differences might mean. I have a special place in my heart for college teams without coaches, because that was the bulk of my experience in college, so I tried to think specifically about what un-coached college teams could take away from this data to make their programs better.

My initial assumption was that Women's teams with coaches do better than those without. The data bears this out, but not as strongly as I might have thought. Of the teams that have coaches, 23% went to Nationals in 2008, as compared to 14% of the teams without coaches. Interestingly, 50% of the teams that have coaches anticipate going to Nationals in 2009, as compared to 33% of the teams without coaches. Clearly, everyone thinks they are going to do better in 2009, but this seems to be exaggerated for the teams with coaches. Perhaps this is the first intangible benefit of having a coach—you are more likely to believe you will be successful with a coach, which we know can translate into better results on the field.

If you buy into the idea that teams with coaches do better, then it’s interesting to see what it is that teams with coaches are doing differently. Of course, only some of these things may be causative of success, but that’s where all the fun speculation comes into play.

Here are the main areas where I noticed a significant difference between the answers from teams with coaches and teams without:

Ability to practice outside year round: 48.9% of teams with a coach can practice outside year round, while only 21.1% of teams without a coach can practice year round. Stated the other way around, of teams with coaches, about half can practice outside year round and about half cannot. Of teams without coaches, more than ¾ of them cannot practice outside year round, and less than ¼ can. There are many reasons this could be, and very little any team could do about it, but it is a remarkable difference.

Practicing hucking/Depending on hucking: 31.1% of coached teams practice hucking once a practice, as compared to 21.1% of uncoached teams. This is consistent with the fact that 20.5% of coached teams’ offenses are “primarily dependent on hucking for scoring” as compared to 10.5% of un-coached teams. I do think that field position is particularly important in college women’s Ultimate—particularly in even slightly windy conditions, and I have always thought that hucking is a good strategy for college women’s teams. I have always thought college teams could do a lot more to improve their hucking game through practice. I have wondered whether the best strategy would be to spend time working with the whole team to increase the distance of everyone’s throws across the board, or whether it might be more effective to take the few best huckers and really work with them to develop some distance on their throws. I also think college teams could do far more to develop their best pullers—a huge pull can be devastating in college Ultimate (Tufts benefited hugely when I was playing from Joanna Neuman’s pulls)—and I don’t see teams paying much attention to that aspect of the game—but again they might be and I just might not be in the know.

Practicing breaking the mark: 46.7% coached teams practice breaking the mark once a practice, while only 31.6% of un-coached teams practice breaking the mark that frequently. From my personal experience and observation, I think this is a big one and I would have to think that this relates to the relative success of coached teams. Breaking the mark is so tied to how often you practice it, and in college, breaking the mark is particularly useful .That said, I’m actually surprised that less than half of coached teams practice breaking the mark once a practice. It seems like such a worthwhile activity, and can be done in fairly little time (e.g., a ten minute straight up marking drill), that I’m surprised it isn’t a part of every coach’s regular warm-up and drills. I also think breaking the mark is something where more creative drills can really lead to breakthroughs for players. For example, we had a guest coach give us some variations on the straight up marking drill—one variation was you were allowed only one fake. That was incredibly helpful to me and without that suggestion I might have just kept faking uselessly for the rest of my life.

Type of offense: not surprisingly, more coached teams run both horizontal and vertical offenses (72.7% vs 52.6%). Close to half (42.1%) of un-coached teams run only a vertical offense. This raises a few issues. For one, I think it makes it even more important for un-coached teams to practice breaking the mark. While a broken mark is always a huge benefit, it’s arguably a bigger advantage when running a vertical offense. Second, if you only run one offense, presumably you are only used to defending against one type of offense. 43.1% of coached teams say they practice defense against specific types of offense at least once a week, compared to 31.6% of un-coached teams. However, an additional 31.8% of coached teams and fully 57.9% of un-coached teams practice this once a month. Obviously, this means that at least some of the un-coached teams that only run a vertical offense are still practicing defense against “specific types of offense” at least once a month. I wonder if those teams practice defending against a horizontal offense, and how they go about doing that without running the offense themselves.

Practicing dumping: 53.3% of coached teams practice dumping once a practice, as compared to 36.8% of un-coached teams. I think this is right up there with breaking the mark in terms of importance and potential benefit to a team. At the club level, I believe this was definitely one of the keys to our success—we practice dumps until we were so sick of them we could hardly take it, but it was all worth it when we were able to hit the dump over and over again with ease against the Japanese defense we faced in the finals of worlds. I also think this is one where it is very helpful to have a coach forcing you to practice dumps. As a college captain, even if I had been sold on the importance of practicing dumps, I’m not sure I could have made my team (not to mention myself) practice this every practice. Even though un-coached teams close the gap when you look at the percentages of teams that practice dumping at least once a week (84.4% of coached teams vs 78.9% of un-coached teams), I think this is one of those skills that you get exponentially better at if you do it every single practice.

Running set offensive plays and having a specific strategy for moving the disc off the sideline: in both of these areas, a notably higher percentage of coached teams have employ these strategies (68.2% vs. 47.4% run set offensive plays after a turnover, 86.4% vs. 73.7% have a strategy for the offense to move the disc off the sideline). These were two areas where my college team could have used a ton of help, and coach really would have helped. As a sophomore captain, I tried to make up some set offensive plays, but I’m sure I would be very embarrassed to look at that now. I have vague memories of presenting them to the team and getting a bunch of blank stares, perhaps because they were based on nothing other than my own imagination. I think these are also two areas where un-coached college teams can try to get some of the benefits of having a coach by approaching local club players and asking them to “consult” with the team, even if they can’t commit to coaching. If an un-coached team could get a local player (or even, perhaps, a Huddle author ) to help them come up with one or two good set offensive plays and a solid strategy for moving the disc off the sideline against a sideline force and a middle force, they could then practice those on their own. The same would apply to hucking and breaking the mark—getting an experienced club player to come do a one day clinic could give the team some new ways of thinking about how to improve in those areas, and then they could practice them on their own.