Houston Ultimate Community

Hey Rabbits,

Congrats on our first win and our amazing turnout! We had the single biggest turnaround on numbers of any team out there. In fact, with only 2 players not coming out, we were the second biggest team out there on a day when most teams were averaging about 10 players.

This week, we are playing on field 1 then 6. Again, let's try to get out there by 9:45 so we can do a warm-up. Also, please bring a toy for the Toys for Tots gift drive (you are crazy to spend more then $5).

Last week we played very well. I was particularly happy about how much more movement there was on offense. We really made significant improvements on our possession game offense while still incorporating deep cuts to open the field. The clear turning point for our team was our use of the "kickout" or immediate handler cut upfield after throwing. Using kickouts, we were able to keep the disc from stagnating or getting pinched on the sideline. As well, the kickout presents us with the highest percentage shot deep. This week, I want to emphasize the kickout and trying to time our cuts off of that disc motion. As I have said many times now, the most important thing to be mindful of as a cutter is initiating your cut before the kickout handler has the disc. In this way, the cutter is coming out of his break (direction change from setting up a cut) as the kickout handler catches the disc and looks up field. If we can get this timing down, then we can make use of the most important benefit of the kickout offense: the 1-2 seconds of uncovered handler before the defense can catch up. The next major offensive issue to tackle is our red-zone offense. We had a lot of trouble getting scores from 5-10 feet outside the n-zone. I want to try a new offensive set in the red-zone: 3 handlers horizontally across the field with 4 cutter in a vertical stack in the n-zone. I think that moving a cutter out of the n-zone will help us with our clogging problem and I hope the the extra handler will allow us to be more effective swinging the disc around and setting up a good look rather than forcing a shot.

As for defense, I though we played much better than weeks past as we stayed closer to our men/women. We still had some issues with maintaining the mark, which needs to be corrected in order for us to be successful. We had vast improvements in help defense with multiple people attacking the disc on deep throws. The only other problem was matching up appropriately. There were a couple matchups that we stuck with throughout a game which were mismatches. If you are getting beat by an opposing player consistently, we need to make a change on coverage. I will attempt to be more selective in matchups this week. On this same vein, we need to make use of our mismatches as well. I would really like to start calling more isolations for Jessica as she has been tearing up opposing women all winter (Great work Jess!). If we see matchup which are to our advantage, I would like to exploit them so please tell me if you are mismatched will we are on the line.

Ok. Sorry for the length, but I guess I had more to say than I originally thought. Reminder, please email me if you are not going to be available for Saturday's games (mike.flum@gmail.com). According to our roster, we should be only missing 3 people, but I feel like more people said they weren't coming last saturday.

See yah on Saturday,

Flum