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What is crucial for my team?

1. Good Leadership. That means having captains and coaches that display good work ethic, motivation, great field skills and a positive attitude. I find that the players on the team often emulate the attitudes of the leadership and it is important for these attitudes to be hard working and positive. Having a coach is crucial for a team's success. Coaches are important in being able to bring out the best in every player on the team. Coaches are crucial during tournaments where strategies have to be adjusted on the fly and it is often hard for players on the field to realize where adjustments need to be made. It is also crucial to have a coach to call lines and deal with scoring and time-caps so the captains and all the other players can focus on their own game. It takes a lot of pressure off of the captains when a team has a coach.

2. Strong fundamental disc skills (throwing, catching) and good fitness. Since most college teams only practice about 3 days a week, it is really important for players to get in extra throwing and workouts outside of practice. We always preached on UBC that practices were a time to improve team strategy and team skills and not a time to work on individual fitness. Tournaments like NW Regionals and Nationals are a strong test of depth on a team. It is crucial that everyone has a strong fitness base and fundamentals in order to be able to use everyone as best possible throughout these grueling tournaments. I think it would be very difficult to win either of those tournaments without having contributions from your entire roster top to bottom.

3. Good defense. Championships are won on sound defense. When you are on defense, the other team is expected to score. Messing up this expectation by getting D's and scoring your defensive points will win you games. With that in mind, when on offense if you turn the disc over you need to get it back since it is your job to score your offensive points. Make man-on-man defense a priority at practices.

What motivates your players?

It's hard to generalize what motivates everyone on the team. I think everyone finds different things that motivate him or her to become a better player. I think the biggest motivation for players is seeing individual and team improvement over the season. It is a big motivation for a team when they are able to reach small goals throughout the season. This might mean beating a team for the first time in multiple seasons (ex. when UBC beat UCLA this year) or it might mean making semis in a pre-season tournament when the furthest you've made it is quarters. I found that the biggest individual motivation for me, when I was playing with UBC, was to always consider my one-on-one match-ups that I would encounter throughout the season. There were certain players that you develop friendly rivalries with and I would use these players to motivate me to go outside and throw in the rain when I didn't want to or go for an extra run when I didn't want to. I wanted to win my one-on-one battles and in order to do that I had to make sure I was pushing myself to be a better player than those that I knew I would be matching up against. You only have 5 years of college eligibility, so it is important to find ways to motivate your team and yourself in order to make every season count.

What is your biggest hurdle in a specific year towards reaching your team goals?

During any given year, I found that the biggest hurdle in reaching our teams goals was commitment. The UBC ultimate team does not receive any funding from our school so commitment to the team requires a lot of out of pocket funding. Considering that the team travels to the USA 5-6 times per year, the season can end up being incredibly expensive on the players. This year the UBC team never had more than 70% of their team at any given pre-season tournament mostly due to financial reasons. I strongly believe that any tournament is equal to at least a month worth of practices and there are a lot of things that you learn at tournaments that cannot be learned at practices. To constantly be missing teammates from these learning experiences becomes a big hurdle in trying to improve and reach your goals as a team. Along with financial commitments, it is often hard to get players to commit when the real reason that most people are in college is to get an education. A lot of players find it hard juggling ultimate and school and we often find that players start to skip practices around midterm exams and at the end of term when assignments are due and finals are coming up.

Kira Frew finished an extremely successful career last year with the University of British Columbia, and she continues to be a top handler for Traffic and Team Fisher Price.