After a high-speed-chase-style hour in the mountains, we made our flight last night and arrived in Bogota unharmed. We’ve left the home of Nando (Colombian international player, and currently with Mamoots) for the smaller town of Cahiqua, a quiet spot at the foot of the mountains with a polo complex big enough to house 8 fields.

This will be my first experience with a Colombian tournament, but I have already heard a lot about the tour here. There are a ton of tournaments, ranging from Disco Volador (this one) and Nationals to a myriad of smaller, more local tournaments. Ultimate is thought of as an expensive sport here, in large part due to the travel costs. The majority of our team will be meeting us after their 14-hour charter-bus ride through the central valley of the country.

Colombia is, like many emerging Ultimate scenes, feeling a bilateral pull regarding tournamnet and team rules. On one side, they have a rapidly growing community that feeds off of the easy tournament entry and informal team-management process. On the other hand, WFDF dictates that Colombia needs to push the pace into ‘legitimacy’, having rosters for teams and holding a tour from which teams can build points in order to qualify for World events. That rift of intentions has caught up, and the current strife is that the tournament decided that players, for this tournament, are only allowed to play for a team in a single division.

No problem, right? This is standard fare in the US, where only in special circumstances (like Wildwood) would anyone be expecting to play on multiple teams in a weekend. However, in the developing scene here there are many players that take this opportunity to play down into the ‘B’ open scene, or women that play on Open teams as well as Women’s teams.

Ramifications: In the long run, this is probably how tournaments here will end up being…but for now, this decision has forced the players that usually play more Ultimate now to make tough decisions. On Women’s team in particular, whose captain routinely plays high-level men’s Ultimate (seriously, she would be a major force for any women’s club in the US) has decided to forego this tournament, and instead avoid the situation (and take a deserved holiday after a long season). Tournament organizers recanted the decision a few days before the tournament (but well after the time necessary for this team to review their decision).

In the end, there is no perfect solution here. WFDF wants European organization now, and more formality means less playing opportunities. The tournament organizers are being pulled in two different directions: the one WFDF wants in order to fairly allocate bids, and the one more likely to grow the game at a grassroots level.

On the field: We are playing at 8600 feet, and trust me, you can tell the difference. The ability to throw end-to-end, even on these very large fields, is present even in the lowest level teams. You simple will not impress a Bogota team with large throws. Pulls are routinely floating down in the back, and based solely on hangtime and height I would say that the average pull here is better than at UPA Nationals. Leading throws are more difficult, because the air doesn’t seem to want to stay under the disc. Hammers are more difficult to float then I am accustomed to.

We play a Venezuelan team first, and they have some great athletes but run an offense with cutters at least 30 yards away from the throwers, leading to a lot of necessary 30-yard flat throws. When those inevitably float, we take advantage and hold a 4-point lead for most of the game. Handler-cutter separation is especially difficult to maintain in a flat stack offense, as all 4 cutters must equilibrate to a more useful (shorter) distance in order to be a threat cutting both ways.

The wind blows in for our game against Matanga (Bogota), and you can tell who bends at the waist (rather than the knees) when they want to throw low….those throws get tossed us into the air. Lots of injuries in this game for this reason. We are a bit more consistent (willing to huck) upwind, and ride this one out to a 3-4 point win.

Our team is exhausted, both by the change in air and the long bus-ride. This is going to be a strong night of sleep, and then three games tomorrow.

Uncoupled thoughts from camp today:

Middle cutting in a flat stack, and the inevitable question: why doesn’t our flat stack work? Often, I think the goals for the middle cutters start with “get the disc.” And where is the easiest place to get it? On the live side, coming towards the disc. The biggest problem is that this doesn’t meaningfully change the angles of defense for the other defenders on cutters. Their readjustments and vision are almost exactly the same. We’ve been discussing sending that first cutter, as often as possible, to the break side, or scorching across the field on a flat cut, so that the angle for defenders is changed and their readjustments are more difficult, allowing a better chance for continuation. This means we need to stop telling young middle cutters to get the disc, and start telling them to get the disc in the best position possible. And that is a lot to think about right off the bat, but I’d wager that the yardage gained on the next cut after the live side initial move is, absent a massive mismatch in speed or height or skill downfield, minimal.

I believe, and I am pretty sure Idaho does as well, that defensive fundamentals are going to change the game. I think this is most evident right now in zone D. Camp today was a long series of zone drills, and we avoided (wherever possible) teaching how a certain position should play in a certain system. This teaches a technique, but not a general and fundamental skill. We focused on seeing the field, especially behind us. We focused on communication lines, and how to respond (move, don’t check!). We focused on how to take risks, and where and when they can be useful, and how to communicate their need quickly and effectively. We focused on baiting and closing off angles to convince an offensive player that the 2 v. 1 they are looking at…it really isn’t for them, and they should check out some other part of the field (for as long as it takes for help to rotate over).

These are the kind of fundamentals that I (we, I believe) think go into the great zones, and do not change between teams; similar to the fundamentals that all great offenses share. And are equally important. The Buzz Bullet zone, and the seek-and-destroy of the old Squid teams, and the diamond that Rhino and Furious use, all are more dependent on a subset of fundamentals than on how they might be drawn onto a whiteboard.

Today’s chalktalk was a great experience. My most important thought of the day is that the questions we are taking in Colombia are incredibly precise, seeking, and get right to the heart of the matter. We haven´t heard, “What is the best _______?” Instead we are hearing, “Why do you do this, against this, in this situation, and how do I know how to choose between these options?” It has made for lively and engaging discussions.

A personal note: I was asked today for an honest opinion of a team, and I promised it to the player, though I asked for the weekend to make a judgement. I’ve been incredibly lucky to experience so much in this game (NOTE: I’ve been living and thinking in Spanish for several days, so I think I might be writing some pretty clunky phrases, for which I apologize). I feel like I owe it to my hosts, and to my experience (the product of some hard work and a lot of luck) to give an honest answer when it is asked for. I also feel like that is the kind of answer that might just go on my headstone. My mother has frequently warned me that one of my personality flaws is that I sometimes think what I do is the right thing, even when I know it is not the smart thing. Not that I think my honest opinion, in this case, is going to get me in trouble here, but I do think that frequent inability to exchange discretion and valor is, as it has before, not going to ingratiate me to many people. Even those people for whom my opinion might actually be valuable (that particular sentence just caused about 200 of my former teammates to roll their eyes).

For those that take an interest in ECC, big things are on the horizon, I hope.

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.

As part of an ongoing project under the direction of Colombian Ultimate organizer Mauricio Moore, I am in Bogota, Colombia. I will be here until December 10th, and in that time I will join with several other coaches to put on a clinic in Medellin and attend (and play in) the Colombian National Tournament.

Colombian Ultimate burst onto the scene in the last 4-5 years following a bronze medal in the World Junior Open Championships in Devens, MA. A strong showing in Vancouver this past August saw all divisions of the Seleccion improve their performances over past World tournaments.

While I am here, I hope to talk to as many players and coaches as I can, and get a sense of how this community is progressing, and where the next steps might be. Based mostly on background reading—I’ve been in the country for four hours now, and all but a little of that time has been spent talking Ultimate in my excited, but broken Spanish—the Ultimate players of Colombia form a diverse and often fractious population. And like Colombia itself, the understanding of global Ultimate would be incomplete without a picture of the history, talent, drive, and potential of this country.

I hope to be able to write-in daily; internets abounds, but opportunities may not necessarily be available each evening. My goal is to give a complete and objective sense of what Colombian Ultimate is, and what it might be. Keep checking back throughout this week, and with any luck I’ll be able to return with a full recap and pictures when I am back in the States.

Until tomorrow…

· The New York Times does a story on the current state of things at Columbia High School, the birthplace of Ultimate.

· ABC News has the usual rundown from Joel Silver on his involvement with the sport.

· Matt Mackey: If you haven’t strolled past his blog yet, go ahead take a gander.

· Greg Husak reflects on Jam’s victory at this year’s Club Championships.

· Flickr: Ultimate in HDR, from Matt Benson.