Home : Education : Raise Your Game! : June 2004

RAISE YOUR GAME

Know Thy Enemy

[2004, No. 10]

The best team is not always the one that is most physically gifted: tallest, fastest, biggest or most athletic.  All things being approximately equal, the team that wins is usually the one that plays the smartest with the assets they have. 

One important aspect of the game for players who have already mastered the basic skills is being able to assess your opponent.  The goal of this article is to provide a framework for how you might think through your individual match-up with another player, and to provide a framework for team managers and captains to think about their game strategy. 

Firstly, there are three general questions you should ask yourself when you match up with someone man-to-man across the pitch. 

• How fast are you compared to the other player? 
Basically, this is the first question you need to ask yourself, even if you only think about it while sprinting down the field during the pull.  This will inform how close you need to guard your opponent and how much help you can give the rest of the team.  If he/she is much faster, you will have to do a better job at anticipating where he/she will want to cut and get there earlier if possible.  You also know that you need to be very open to get the disc because of their closing speed.  In college, we always assumed an opposing player with a knee brace was super slow so we’d go deep on whoever he was matched up with.  Of course, in Southeast Asian Ultimate it usually means a more serious player or veteran, so watch out!

• What is the experience level of the opposing player? 
You can get the gist of what type of moves the other player will make based on their experience level.  Newer players are usually more uncomfortable with a tighter mark, and may be significantly less comfortable with a force toward one side.  Poaching a newer player may be less of a danger because they may not know where to go to get open and they may not be a strong throwing threat anyway. 

• How good of a thrower is the other player? 
What are his/her throwing preferences?  Just by observing a game, you should be able to pick up a player’s throwing tendencies.  Which throw does he/she like to break each side with?  Where is his/her release point?  Should I watch his foot on a huck because he/she tends to travel on long throws?  Does he/she throw a hammer, and in what situation? 

These are the basic questions you want to ask yourself whenever you match up with someone.  Additionally, some questions you might want to consider include: Who is better in the air?  Who is taller?  Who does the player like to throw to or cut for?  Who is in better shape?  Is the player left-handed – left-handed players cause right-handed players all sorts of problems because we’re all used to how things work for right-handed throwers.

In aggregate, if you are formulating the team strategy the key questions you want to ask yourself about the opposition are:

• What is the experience level of the other team?
• What are the throwing abilities of the other team?  Can they break the mark?  Throw deep?  Who are the biggest threats?
• Which team is faster?
• Which team is in better shape?

When coming up with a game strategy, you need to think about your individual match-ups by gender and what that means in terms of what you do on Offense, Defense and transition.  In many ways, the co-ed game is much more strategic than in the single sex game because you have some constraints on defensive switching and covering the Deeps, and because you might have some advantages in one gender and other advantages with the other.  This will affect whether when and how you set up your zone and what types of defenses to set up.  It should also affect how you want to organize your offense: who you want to go deep, who you want to make your primary cuts, who you think you can break against?

Andrew Chang learned Ultimate in summer camps as a teen-ager growing up in the States. He started a team in high school with friends and captained their varsity Ultimate squad while attending college at Duke University. He went on temporary retirement after a second shoulder surgery but just could not get disc out of his system and started playing again when he moved to Singapore in 2000, officially coming out of retirement at the 2001 Shanghai Burn Tournament. He's currently getting his MBA degree at INSEAD in Singapore and is now considered one of Singapore Freakshow's best.  He loves the Asian Ultimate scene where he has managed to spawn a fan club with groupies who now sport his trademark black gloves while playing...