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When planning practices during the college season, it's important to strike a balance between getting better at how you want your team to play, and getting ready for how other teams are going to play. It's almost impossible to work on both at the same time, unless you work exclusively on basic fundamentals. Coming from a series of teams that traditionally have not run a lot of zone defense, it's clear that our zone offense has struggled during the course of the season, despite shredding our zone defenses in practice. It's hard to work on beating a good zone defense when you're playing against a disorganized and undisciplined zone at practice. As much as veteran players should be able to cope with any defense your opponents throw at you, knowledge is no substitute for reps at practice and in games.

There are a limited number of practices during the season, and just working on what you want your offense and defense to look like, a team will run into diminishing returns. Your offense will figure out how to beat your defense, and in return your defense will start cheating more, because they know the offensive players. Practices soon stop being effective when your players start focusing on beating their teammates and not on improving. This is when you work in the knowledge you gained from the first couple tournaments of the season. How did teams beat our defense? How did they stop our offense? At our practices, we tell our throwers not to throw risky deep shots when players are too deep. But lots of teams play that way, and they can be very effective against a defense that has learned not to follow their players more than 40 yards deep because they're not expecting the throw.

So how do you work on gameday defense without losing your offense focus? There are several ways. You can run drills where injured players/coaches play like other teams. It's a start, but it's not quite the same. You can run scrimmages where you tell one team to play a different style of ultimate than they're used to, but only for part of a practice. My favorite, though, is bringing in seven or more alumni or local players to scrimmage the team, and tell them what's been beating you in tournaments. Is it ill-advised but completed deep shots? Is it poachy defense? Is it an unorthodox zone? Let the alumni know in advance to prepare, and let your team get the reps they need while still playing their game.

Players are most effective at tournaments when they don't receive a dozen tips about their opponent right before the game. They play best when they've already played against the styles of play they're about to face in practice and in previous games, and they can rely on muscle memory and instinctive actions to do most of the work. Keep it simple and give the most important lessons at practice.

Ryan Thompson currently plays in the college division with Stanford.