Sooo, here I am attempting to join the Blogging World, specifically the Ultimate focused one. I still struggle in deciding if my venture into such a task is because I want people to read all of my rants about this or that or whether it is best used for my own personal way of processing/ growing as an Ultimate player. Either way it doesn’t really matter.
As it is Winter season where teams have now moved indoors (unless you live in some ungodly warm place that is unaffected by “Winter”) and break from school approaches, many teams will face a big issue: getting everyone to actually put in time when you might not have scheduled “practice times”. There are many ways to try to encourage teammates to workout/throw/learn such as:
-Google Docs
-Accountability Partners
-Accountability Pods
-Phone calls from leaders
-Workout plans posted for all to refer to/do
I am positive teams have thought of other ways that are probably more creative than the above listed, but choosing a venue to encourage participation generally isn’t the hard part- getting every person to actually do it is where, in my experience, the struggle comes in. Such a big lapse in actually practicing the things you have been learning (new and old players alike) will hurt how fast your team will be able to progress in the Spring. I always think 2 things to myself.
1) Damn Brit, stop being so lazy.
2) I wish everyone could just put their lives on pause for one year and full-out commit to Ultimate practice, conditioning and tournaments. One year.
And although it’s apparently not the most possible for the second to occur, I have made much greater efforts toward fixing the “Damn Brit, stop being so lazy” problem. That is probably the most effective way to get the job done anyway. As Pat Niles always preached for the ladies of Sol to “internalize what we are doing”. It puts the focus on what YOU, not every other person around you, are doing. That is what you can control and in the end if each player does their job by truly playing to their strength your team will find success. Now “success” is a very broad term, it doesn’t mean you are going to Nationals or finally finish somewhere besides last place in your Region. But you will be utilizing each players strengths (that they have taken upon themselves to develop) to meet a goal which is achieving some level of success.
So don’t just do yourself a favor this Winter Break and Indoor season (we all know you want a fly ass body for Spring Break, blah blah blah)! By making yourself be productive and actually holding yourself accountable for what you do over break you are setting your team up for each success and failure you will experience during the season (on both the College and Club level). So what are you doing right now?!?! GO.
Brit