TODAY’S ITINERARY
5:50AM: Flight from Bogota to Medellin, the site of the camp
10:00: Local team practice
2:00-5:00PM: Camp (with a mixture, both genders, ranging from raw young players to several of Colombia’s National team)
5:30-7:30: Chalk talk with the campers
8:30-10:30: Dinner
10:30-12:00AM: Strategy discussion for local team

Today’s camp was a mix of deep cutting, deep throwing, continuation, and clearing on offense, and a little bit of zone D. Later, in the local auditorium, we recapped the days work, went into several longer discussions with the 30+ attendees on spirit, designing practices, and planning a season, and then intros into tomorrow´s plan (all told, about 90 per cent was spanish with interpretation help).

It really doesn’t matter where you are, in my opinion, teaching Ultimate is fun when the players are motivated. While this is definitely a self-selecting group, the players were ready and happy to work hard. The language difficulties mostly affected me when I tried to describe the logic behind a particular drill, or description. Little words (the ’se’s, ‘te’s and ’su’s) can really change the meaning quickly, and logic is confusing anyway when it´s presented for the first time.

The most common question from the players: How does Colombia stack up against other countries? Having played against and watched the Colombian teams in Canada, I can safely say that the athleticism is there, and the skills are very strong. I was surprised by the level of flexibility in some of the skills today: changing a drill, or a balance point, didn’t confuse the player as much as it might were they more rooted into some dogma without reason. The hurdle for Colombian Ultimate is, first and foremost, the consistency of those skills. Can these players go hard into a catch and come up into a balanced pivot against a good defender? Absolutely. But can they do it 88 times out of 100, or can they do it 96? In my estimation, this means that practice habits will be crucial. If these teams can conjure the focus and planning to design and run difficult, high-level practices then that consistency will absolutely come.

We didn’t get to as much defense today, though Idaho covered some serious ground in terms of defensive footwork and anticipation yesterday. There is confusion about how much contact is permissible downfield, which we also plan to address tomorrow.

Talking about Ultimate in a lecture hall is an experience that I never would have thought I would have, but the furious notetaking tells you that there is some serious good coming of it. Whiteboard, again, was crucial to make things visible from a different angle. Those drills we ran and later drew really stuck home, and I hope that the opposite direction (drawing tonight, running tomorrow) will be equally effective. If I could make them model some of these concepts in PLAY-DOH, I absolutely would. Whiteboard drawings also slice through the language issues pretty quickly.

Is the future of a country’s team in it’s high school, university, or elite-aged players? I’m starting to think that the answer is rather irrespective of the time frame you are talking about.

Which is more effective to teach first, a defensive plan, or an offensive? D-first is frustrating for the O while learning, but builds from the solid side of the ball, and quickly eliminates bad offensive habits. O-first may be more reliable winning mindset, but encourages reactionary defense.

I expect to write about this more, but Colombian Ultimate is something like 14 years old. Where was American Ultimate at the 14-year mark? Are they comparable? What would be the methods for comparison…for instance, I think it would be difficult to argue that 14-year-old Team Colombia would beat 14-year-old Team USA, but then again, approximately 30 of the universities here have teams (out of 200 total). Did the US have 15 percent? To what degree did the earlier development of the game in the US help development here? As something of a political junkie, these are the questions that I like getting into with the sense that the methods can be applied well beyond this small sport.

And what is the first step in trying to raise funds to pay for interpretation of a small subset (maybe 1 per issue) of Huddle articles. At roughly 15 ($US) per article (which is a massively rough approximation, and assuming that an interpretation-savvy Ultimate player might give us a little deal) we would need 15×13= roughly 200 dollars for 2008. Would this be useful? From the bilingual readers here, it sounds like the answer is affirmative. Siempre buscamos mas dinero…

Tomorrow: practice, butterflies, camp, lecture, plane, Bogota, sleep.