If you look on the practice plan for Saturday you won’t see the fourteen 40s we ran. Or the 60 crunches. Or the sets of push ups. Because those are things we earned throughout the day.
I will start with a note that I hate running. In high school my less-than-pleasant basketball coach would run us into the ground when she felt like we deserved it. Running has always been a punishment. Miss a free throw, run a suicide. Scrimmage in practice and the offense doesn’t score, you run. Don’t try hard enough on defense and the offense scores you still run. It was a delicate balance of trying to keep yourself out of the doghouse and rarely succeeding. Being punished because the “other” team, also my teammates, did well.
But there is also a time and a place for extra sprints, workouts, push ups etc.
The last hour of a long practice Saturday we made things a bit more interesting and worked on focus as well as skills. During drills when you are focusing on just one or two things there is no excuse for silly mistakes. Every time one of the following happened we would run a 40 yard sprint. (I know I was responsible for at least two of our 40s. No excuse.)
- Not talking to the mark
- Not yelling up after the throw
- Cutting deep too early
- Dropping easy passes
Round one of our last drill of the day we ran eight 40s. Not one person complained. That was a very conservative number, the coaches were gracious. We did the exact same drill with the exact same people and the second time ended with two. It’s amazing what focus does.
Accountability. I can’t always run faster but I can at least time my cut. I might not be the best thrower, that takes years, but I can watch a disc into my hand. There’s something about seeing your teammates forced to run because of a silly mistake that makes you focus a little better. It’s easy to forget that in a real game one drop means one more time your whole team has to play defense. Another point you could have scored that might go the other way. In a real game it costs more than a 40 yard sprint. In a real game it can mean the difference between the last bid to nationals or the end of a season.
I’m going to contradict myself (see earlier post) and state that ultimate is, in fact, 90% mental and 10% physical. (Assuming you are healthy.) I hold myself and my teammates accountable to that 90% and I will run with them all day long until they understand we are in this together. Hopefully sooner than later because I still hate running.
Today I am proud of my team. Pleased that we sat down together for a lunch break on Saturday as friends. I love the emails flying back and forth between our A and B teams about the weekly breakfasts and lunches people are setting up just to hang out with each other. I am proud of the fact that we are accountable to each other because we want to be, not because we are told to be. We are building a team. We are building a program.