Scobel Wiggins Photography

If a year ago someone had told me that I would have the opportunity to spend a weekend learning about Ultimate from a slew of Callahan winners, Team USA members, and big names in Women's Ultimate, I would have said, yeah, maybe in Seattle, but I go to school in rural Iowa. When I found out last fall that my team could actually have that opportunity a mere six hour drive away in St. Louis, I hurried to fill out an application, and was delighted to find Grinnell College had been chosen as a participant in the Roundup Division of Midwest Throwdown. My teammates and I marveled over the list of guest coaches announced in the weeks before the tournament and were excited to learn we would be paired with Cara Crouch.

Cara was, to the best of my knowledge, the first coach Grinnell has ever had, and the skills she taught us in one weekend of drills and games will be with the players on our team for a long time. We covered a lot in two days: cutting mechanics, basic vertical stack offense, cutting in a horizontal stack, zone offense, defensive positioning, and marking, not to mention other important aspects of ultimate like a good warmup routine.

Everything Cara taught us that weekend was useful, but I would like to focus on two examples that illustrate the type of influence her coaching had on us. On Saturday, she taught us how to cut. This sounds simple, but it turns out there are a lot of detailed movements your legs and torso go through to make a clean, explosive cut. This is a fundamental skill no one had ever broken down in great detail for us before, and we all needed help with the mechanics. And if one Callahan winner teaching us wasn't enough, Anna Nazarov came over and modeled good cuts for our team. Cara changed all our play by teaching us something so fundamental, and maybe humbled us a bit by demonstrating just how much even the basics gave us to work on.

That's not to say that our team focused only on the basics that weekend. Cara also taught us a new approach to zone offense. We were used to running a zone offense based on dumps and swings, but she taught us a more aggressive strategy, based on cutting into the cup and focusing on upfield handler movement. This took some getting used to, but we managed to break through more than one zone using her advice during the course of the tournament.

The new zone offense strategy is just one example of how she changed the way our team thinks about the game. There were many times after Cara would finish explaining something, and someone on our team would say, “That makes so much sense!  Why didn't we think of that ourselves?”  Having an outside, expert perspective was something our team had never had before, and I cannot describe enough how much her coaching helped everyone, from the most seasoned veterans to the newest rookies.

In fact, one of the best moments of the weekend came when Cara called a rookie line. Our seven newest players took to the field and scored. They used the new skills they had learned, but also displayed the confidence Cara gave our whole team. Having her cheering from the sidelines, making in-game adjustments, and telling us about her own experiences helping to build the Texas team into the powerhouse it is today all helped us realize the potential we have on our team. That was maybe the most important lesson I took from the weekend.  We have enormous potential for growth and now, more so than ever before, we have the tools and knowledge to improve, along with the excitement and desire to work hard that come from spending a weekend with a world champion Ultimate player.

Hanna Liebl, current Grinnell College captain