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What sorts of things are needed to build a top flight Ultimate program, and are they the same for college as they are for club play? Do college teams succeed by effectively training and developing new players, while club teams focus instead on attracting and utilizing pre-existing talent? The Huddle's recent survey offers an opportunity to find out.

What might an elite[1] team do to develop talent? Practice? Elite teams reported more hours of conditioning but average practice time was nearly identical. Train rookies on B teams? The average number of promotions a year was low relative to roster size and nearly the same between elite and non-elite teams. Attend more tournaments? After accounting for longer runs in the series, elite squads weren't traveling to more tournaments[2]. Funding? Roster size? No, and no. So what WAS different between the best and the rest?

Well, better teams do have better players, right? Yes, they do. Teams finishing higher in the series reported better evaluations of individual throwing skills and athleticism. The effect might be even bigger than reported, since captains of good teams could have higher standards. Fair enough, but how do we explain the talent gap?

One theory might be school size. The more students attending a school, the more chances a team has to find talented players. Indeed, average enrollment increased almost perfectly with each levels of post-season success in the survey[3]. That's a bummer for small schools not named "Carleton," but it's hard to refute the evidence.

So are the bigger schools doing better because they're finding experienced rookies? By the looks of it, yes. An average team in the survey reported 3-4 players with club or HS experience prior to college. That average rose to 6 for Nationals, 7 for pre-quarters, 8 for semis, and 16 for eventual champions. School size helps explain this, since larger schools ought to have proportionally higher numbers of experienced students. Another reasonable theory would be a network effect where good high schoolers choose schools based on Ultimate programs. Finally, there are surely regional effects where colleges benefit from being in areas with well-developed high school programs.

What about strategy? Elite teams were more likely to have a coach and reported use of more advanced concepts on the field. The more advanced the concept, the higher the correlation. On offense, better programs were much more likely to use set plays off of turns and sideline traps. On D, they reported higher usage of straight-up marks, transition zones and alternative zone/junk looks. Coaching and player experience are factors here. If a team doesn't need to instruct basics like throwing, catching and marking, more time remains for a good coach to work through plays and team defense.

So the elite college teams don't seem particularly reliant upon home-grown talent. Instead, it looks like they are attracting better players from the start and then using their superior personnel to implement more advanced strategies on the field. If this sounds familiar, it might be because club teams do the same thing. The best club teams are in major population centers, draw the best talent from nearby cities or even across the country, and depend on sophisticated strategies as well as athletic skill. The Huddle survey seems to confirm a basic truth about athletics: recruiting is key.

[1] Unless otherwise noted, I use "made Nationals" as the dividing line for "elite."

[2] At least it doesn't seem that way. Many teams chose the response "7 or more" for the tournament question, so there is some numeric ambiguity here.

[3] Actually, the positive association would have been perfect if not for one respondent: Carleton's Women's team. Other notable outliers were the open team from Carleton and the Ivy League schools (Harvard and Dartmouth)

Occasionally, we ask authors to write who would rather use a pen name. mrpinto is one such author; he's a very smart guy (who is good with numbers)