Tarr's Blog

I was pretty intrigued when I read Idris saying that he doesn’t like to answer “what if” questions. The idea was that you want people developing instincts, field sense, whatever you want to call it – and giving people too much of a script to follow gets in the way of that.

Jim touched on this topic, but his “applications” don’t definitely support either the “principles” camp or the “scripted” camp.

I find this interesting because, for the most part, I am firmly in the "scripted" or, perhaps better, the "specifics" camp. I think that in the short term, you help players be effective by giving them simple rules on the field. Only as a player develops and becomes comfortable playing some role will they develop real “field sense”. The obvious question is, does giving a newer player specific rules on what to do on the field impede their learning more nuanced rules? My opinion is not only no, but utter diametric disagreement – by giving them rules, you give them a framework upon which to hang exceptions and additions, until their internal, instinctive “playbook” develops into a fully nuanced field sense. By giving rules, I am building a young player’s field sense from the ground up.

As I said before on the coaching blog, the Purdue Women’s offense last year had a rather rigid structure. In particular, it was possible for a cutter to be effective by following extremely simple rules – when the handlers do A, I do B; when the handlers do X, I do Y. Now, the more experienced cutters did break out of this at times, and that was OK. As the season progressed, more patterns in the offense started emerging as players found consistent effective strategies within the offense. I even designed a couple new drills last spring specifically to reinforce good flow patterns that I had seen for the first time on the field.

To me, the idea of teaching someone field sense by just making them figure things out on their own is as likely to create bad habits as it is good field sense. Just keep adding to your players’ internal playbooks. Eventually, if they have any instincts, they will be able to start applying all those rules to different situations. That’s how you teach field sense.

In my previous post, I focused on the different buttons a coach has to push in order to motivate and connect with players. But beyond those questions of style, there’s a ton of different roles that a coach (and other leadership) needs to fill. The following is an incomplete list:

- recruiting/retention of new players
- designing team strategy
- organizing/planning practices
- organizing training
- explaining things at practices
- working on fundamentals with individual players
- in-game strategy and in-game adjustments
- sub-calling
- sundry administrative details

Very few people can wear all these hats and really pull it off. At the same time, if the roles are ill-defined, you can have the “too many voices” problem, which is often worse than one person muddling along themselves. It’s important for a coach, or any other leader, to recognize their strengths and their limitations. Figure out where others should take the role, and where you should take charge.

As those who have worked with me in team administration in the past will tell you, I’m pretty terrible at team administration. Fortunately that was not my job last year.

Last spring, I had essentially no role in recruitment/retention. The fall is the big recruiting season for college. In the four fall seasons where I have been somewhat in charge of an open college program (Georgia Tech 2000, Purdue 2002, 2003, 2004) I have really only had one good recruiting class (Purdue 2002). The logical conclusion is that this was a combination of luck and the work of others around me. So, this is not my thing. Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to help, but it does mean that I’m probably not the sort who would be extremely successful building a team from scratch on my own.

Sub-calling is, in my opinion, very hard to do well without several people involved. I am a pretty good tactical sub-caller, but I have a hard time keeping track of who’s been in a lot and who hasn’t, and balancing egos and PT. Eventually we worked things out last year to the point where there were few complaints, but this was after a lot of drama, a long meeting with the team leaders, a designated clip-board holder, and the emergence of a clear starting seven that simplified things. I have a lot of respect for people who can do effective sub-calling while playing, or teams that can work out subbing without anyone making the calls. It’s certainly beyond me.

So, I guess those are my weak points. Training is something I’m getting better at, although I’m no George Cooke. I gave some advice in this area, but I was not in charge. This was to a degree just a matter of delegation because I lacked the time to tackle it. I rarely made a strong effort to plan practices ahead of time, but I’d have an idea of what I wanted to get out of a practice and I’d have enough drills in my back pocket to get it done. And the other stuff – strategy, adjustments, explanations, fundamentals – are my strong suits.

Once again, I’m not sure I really have a point. Maybe one good question that can come of this is, what is the ideal leadership structure for a team? It varies from team to team, of course, but are there any general rules? Can a team ever be effective if there are three or four voices in the huddle? Can a team deal with having one person in charge in training, one in charge during practice, and a third on game-day, and maintain a consistent message?

- Remember when I said my basement was finally done? Irony, thy name is a burst pipe. We noticed after a couple hours Monday morning and shut the water off, but even with the pump pushing water out, most of the carpet was FUBAR. Back to concrete floors for the next couple days. Fortunately, the tide stopped short of my computer, and the drywall was still dry. We're very lucky that we couldn't find a hotel room in the mountains Sunday night, or we would have lost a lot more than a carpet.

- For the RSD afficionados among us, Hector's latest post is pure gold. A brilliant synthesis of the Onion's advice columns and the insanity of RSD. I actually remembered all the posts referenced, which made it all the better. Of course, rec.sport.disc is pretty much the motherlode of people saying stupid, indefensible things. (No offense to Hope college, that was just the first one that came to mind. I mean, that was a team that finished third in their SECTION with a full roster.)

- Does anyone still like going to movie theaters? I think they suck horrendously. Planning your day around the movie, dealing with the traffic and the lines, getting a shitty seat and/or sitting through 15 minutes of commercials, paying through the nose for lousy food/drinks, dealing with the obnoxious people around you, not being able to pause to take a piss or blow your nose... how is this even remotely comparable to the experience of watching a DVD at home on even a reasonably good home theater setup? Or just on a regular TV, even? There are very, very few movies that I would not wait three months for in order to see it at home, if left to my own devices.

I hope everybody enjoyed President's day - more than I did anyway. Back to more useful thoughts tomorrow.

Now I come to a series of coaching-related thoughts.

If you’ve read the last few posts, you probably get the feeling that I’m both long winded and analytical. This happens to be true. I’ve also been described as somewhat blunt – I’m quite willing to tell someone exactly what they did wrong and how they can do it differently. I know that these are my strengths as a coach – my ability to analyze play and suggest specific improvements. I’m a good “X’s and O’s” guy; this is who I am.

On the other hand, I am decidedly NOT a great inspiration/motivation coach. I know this; this is who I am. I am perhaps comfortable with this limitation to a fault. That is, as a coach I play to my strengths and avoid my weaknesses. I don’t spend a lot of time doing motivation stuff because I know this is not my thing. Here’s the thing – some players need that different sort of coach, and I have a hard time being that guy. You could make the argument that I should try to play against type a bit more, spend more time trying to motivate players 1-on-1 as oppose to just giving them tips 1-on-1, et cetera.

While almost all of the players on the Purdue women’s team last year improved from the perspective of working within the new offensive and defensive systems I put in place, two or three players stand out as having improved dramatically on an individual level. The common thread between these players is that they are all great academic performers, and very level-headed, rational people. These are the players for whom my usual long-winded explanations were not sufficient, and they would ask more questions after I was done. (One of my favorite pictures from the season is a picture of the team during a half-time at regionals, where I’m talking and every visible player is looking somewhere else, except two of these players. I would guess that one or two other players might have been looking at me, but you can’t tell. To me, this picture is hilarious.)

The point is, while I think I was an effective coach overall, I was most effective in helping people who were naturally inclined to respond to my somewhat pedagogic style. This is unsurprising, and I can’t say I really do anything special to fight it.

So what does all this mean? I’m not really sure. Should teams have more than one coach/leader when it is needed to cover for a certain coach’s stylistic shortcomings? It’s possible, I guess. To a degree, this can just garble the message. Moreover, it’s not like there’s only one sort of motivation. Catt Wilson (CU Mamabird) and Michael Baccarini (Paideia) are both very good motivators, but their means of motivation could not be more different. There are an enormous number of variables involved in this.

This will be my last throwing-specific post for a bit.

A lot of people don’t make effective throwing fakes. The classic poor faking technique is people who pivot all the way out, fake forehand, pivot all the way out, fake backhand, and so on. The idea at the core is solid – to get your marker moving the wrong way in order to open up the throw you want. There are a couple problems, however:

1) Most people who fake this way aren’t doing it in order to set up a particular throw to a particular place. In fact, faking this way can cause you to miss an open throw because you are faking the wrong throw, and you don’t have time to get to the right throw.

2) Against a good marker, this approach is not terribly effective. You are extending way out to fake. Your marker, on the other hand, has the advantage of being able to move both feet, and can move back to the middle just as quickly as you do. A good marker can just go back and forth with you.

If you have “Stacked”, watch the first clip in the “fakes” highlight reel for a classic example of this sort of “bad” faking. A Fury player catches the disc on the sideline against the zone. She throws a forehand fake, backhand fake, and forehand fake, to nobody in particular. Then Liz Penny comes in to set the trap. Another forehand fake and backhand fake barely move Liz at all. Finally the thrower just drops a dying quail of a high-release backhand over the mark and back to JD. It gets the job done, so I have no problem with the throw. But the point is, the previous five fakes did literally nothing to help the thrower get off the throw she ultimately used. She may as well have just stood still until she put up the high-release.

Basically, the only times a good thrower should be making a full pivot and throw fake are:
- when you’re setting up a big throw against a very aggressive marker who’s trying to block too much. The big fake will get an overaggressive marker to move way out, and open up the huck from the other side.
- when you’re trying to move a defender other than the marker. Sometimes a deeper zone defender will turn their hips or dive due to a full throwing fake, which can open things up behind them.

A weaker thrower can also sometimes use a full throw fake to set up a dump throw, especially if the marker is overaggressive (angling for a point block on the new player). Also, big pivot fakes of this sort are sometimes the only sort of fake a new player really understands how to do. But generally, this sort of fake is not too effective. It just takes too long to recover from.

Now, Al and Idris both claim to not fake at all. Well, Idris admits to faking, but only in the sense that it is a throw that he does not release. There’s no motion before the throw if he’s not at least considering throwing it. Obviously, these are a couple of the game’s best throwers, so there is something to what they say.

But as a way to teach people to break the mark, I think this overstates things. If you have great pivoting, great extension, great balance, and a fast release, you’re going to be able to break a lot of marks without throwing fakes, sure. But proper faking can allow you to still throw in rhythm, and can do a lot to open up your breakmark throws.

Unless you’re breaking using a quick-release or flip under or over the marker’s hands, breaking the mark comes down to being more balanced than the marker. As a thrower, you are trying to make the marker fail to react in time to your pivot and throw. A well-balanced marker can stay with you on pivot after pivot – again, they can move both feet and you can’t. But get them leaning the wrong way while you’re moving the other way, and it’s all over. So a great fake, to me, is a quick motion that forces your marker to commit to stop the wrong throw, without making you shift your weight too far off center. If you have to go all the way out, then the marker has time to get back along with you. In stead, you want the marker to shuffle all the way out to defense your throw while you are already going back the other way.

A perfect example of a good fake is this clip of Shank from Furious. After Shank catches it, he has a cutter moving breakmark. He has to get the disc to a specific spot at a specific time – he knows it and his marker (who takes a peek at the cut) knows it too. Shank throws a quick abbreviated forehand fake, twisting his shoulders and loading his weight on that side, before coming across to break with an inside backhand.

Watch it frame-by-frame. Shank pivots out to the forehand side for just three frames. He is back to the middle by the fifth frame, fully pivoted to the backhand side by the twelfth frame, and releasing the disc on the fourteenth frame. Meanwhile, the marker only STARTS moving with the fake in the third frame (just as Shank starts coming back), and spends the next eight frames moving the wrong way. I could point out at least two or three other video examples of Shank using this exact same fake and throw to great effect.

Now, Shank probably breaks this guy even if he had been moving the right way for those eight frames. His extension is so good and his release is so fast that the mark has basically no prayer unless he just camps out on the inside backhand. But for the rest of us, that sort of temporal advantage is pretty huge. The key is to make the fake believable (i.e. looks just like the beginning of your throwing motion) while it is abbreviated enough to allow you to quickly come back the other way.

I’m going to build into this topic with a long discussion of golf, a game I am terrible at. (Wait… uh, nevermind.) I guess I started thinking about this after reading posts like this one.

Tiger Woods won the Masters in 1997 as a second-year pro, utterly dominating the field in the process. 1997 Tiger had a big exaggerated swing that wrapped around his body on the follow through. It was fundamentally the same motion that he had had when he appeared on the Tonight Show as a five year-old. So there were two obvious things going for this motion:

1 - Tiger had been using it for at least 17 years and was obviously totally comfortable with it.

2 – This motion (in Tiger’s hands of course) was good enough to absolutely crush all of pro golf on one of the two or three most storied courses in the game.

And yet, a little over a year later, Tiger made the decision to basically dismantle the motion he had used for 18+ years and build a new one. He went through a bit of a mini-drought as a result (by his standards), not winning a major for a year and a half. But when he emerged from his cocoon, he went on a tear at the majors: W, L, W, W, W, W, L, L, L, W, W. Given the context of era and competition, this run is unparalleled in golf history. He’s had his ups and downs since then, but the bottom line is that nobody can reasonably question the success of his decision to re-work his swing.

So, the obvious question is, why did he do it? What was he trying to change? One of the biggest things he was trying to do is found in the title of this post. He was trying to become “swing-neutral”. Like many power hitters in golf, 1997 Tiger’s natural motion led to a small hook – sidespin that carries a righty’s ball from right to left. There are times when this is useful - most obviously when a hole has a left turn in the fairway, but other times as well. But most of the time, a straight shot is best, and at times you want a slice (right to left carry) as well. One of the primary things Tiger achieved with his reworked swing was a motion that does not naturally carry the ball one way or the other. He can still use a hook or slice, of course, but now both are equally available to him.

By now you’ve probably pieced together the connection to ultimate. If you have a “swing-neutral” throwing motion, then your natural throw (in relatively calm conditions) is a straight shot, and all options are equally available to you. However, the concept in ultimate extends beyond just inside-out and outside-in. I think the ideal, neutral motion would allow you to easily adapt to a variety of throwing stances and release heights. A perfectly “swing-neutral” motion should allow a whole range of curves from a whole range of release points.

“Wow Tarr. Being ‘swing-neutral’ sounds awesome. Tell me, how I can achieve this?”

I’m glad you asked. Well, really all the advice that goes into having a good throwing motion applies. But it is possible to be a good thrower and not be at all swing-neutral. (Conversely, somebody could be swing neutral, but have really weak snap and no control on their throws.) I would probably boil my advice on this subject to three fundamental pieces:

1 – A backswing that gets back and away from your body, NOT wrapping around it.

2 – Throwing in a fairly linear motion, with extension. A nice, natural arm swing that stays away from your torso.

Idris has touched on these points before.

3 – A wrist snap that imparts spin without pitching or rolling the disc out of the plane that it starts in at the end of the backswing.

Basically, the result of these three things is the disc moving in a very simple motion. If you were invisible and all I could see is the disc, I would see the disc moving straight forward in the direction of motion, and not tilting at all as it moves forward. Once you capture that in your basic motion, you can adapt it to all sorts of throws.

As an aside, I don’t think I’ve fully achieved this personally. It’s something I think about when I’m working on my throws. I’m getting closer, but I’m not there. But I am increasingly convinced that it's a good thing to think about when you're working on your throws.

Disclaimer: this post contains nothing useful. (Arguably) useful content will resume shortly.

- My basement, after over six months of work, has finally been converted from a brick and concrete cellar into a fully furnished floor. I'm finally able to move all my crap out of the garage and into the house. This makes doing doctoral research a lot easier, so that I'm not wasting my time while job hunting.

- Of course, my comupter has decided to konk out (power supply is fine, but no post) as of last night. So, so much for that. Hopefully not a big (expensive, time-consuming) problem.

- Rainy dragged me out to a Flamenco dance performance downtown last Friday. Holy fucking shit, those people are good. At the end of the day you're still watching people dance on stage, but holy fucking shit. They make the best tapdancers and Irish step dancers look like they're stumbling around drunk. And the guitarists are flat-out amazing too. If your significant other tries to drag you out to such a performance, I advise you to not resist.

I occasionally get accused of throwing floaty, piece-of-shit hucks. OK, more than occasionally. But I would argue that my huck completion percentage is a fair bit higher than a lot of throwers who have "prettier" deep throws than me. Why is this? Simple, really.

The ideal huck is one that leads the receiver enough so that they can run full out, maintain their separation from the defender, and catch the huck in-stride. Assuming you get the throw off and into space, there are basically two ways a bad throw can deviate from this ideal. At one extreme is the "uncatchable disc", which flies out of bounds or just too low and fast to be reached. At the other extreme is the "hospital pass" that floats above the receiver and defender for an eternity, forcing the receiver to win a jump ball.

So, when I mess up a deep throw, I nearly always err toward "hostpital pass" as oppose to "uncatchable disc". While this doesn't make me look that great (and in fact, I am not that great), it has a positive impact on my stats. I'd guess that last weekend, I had something like three nice hucks (all caught), four completed hucks that were too floaty to catch the cutter in stride, five turnovers on floaty hucks, and one uncatchable huck. In my (lukewarm) defense, probably six of those nine floaty hucks were in wind games where getting the disc down the field was priority. Still, even this rather unflattering line highlights the value of giving your receiver a play on the disc, as almost half of my floaty mistakes (or intentionally floaty punts -- whatever) were converted into goals by the receiver.

The point is not that you should lean back and toss up garbage all the time. Rather, the point is that, as a thrower, as a cutter, and as a designer of your team's offense, you should think about how your bad hucks will end up. If you are constantly cutting deep (and/or throwing to cutters who are going deep) at tight angles, with the priority on getting the disc out in front of the receiver, then you should expect lots of turnovers on uncatchable discs. Think about setting up your offense such that your receivers will have a chance to redeem your throwers' errors.

And now, I begin my deep thoughts about ultimate. I have a few different thoughts about throwing, so this topic seems like a good place to start.

Like the title says, it is not hard to change your throwing motion. Seriously. It's not. People get so hung up about this. If you don't like something about your throws, change it. Think about the change during some time off, implement it in practices and league play, and before long it will be instinctive.

I had utterly terrible mechanics on my forehand for a long time. A long time. I toyed a lot with it my first two years playing, but then I sort of let it be for a while. I made an effort to change my fourth year playing, but didn't stick with it (mistake*). It wasn’t until my seventh year that I finally decided to break the motion down completely and build it again. Within a few months I had a better forehand than I ever had before.

Just this summer, I made the decision to re-work the way I gripped and released the disc on both my backhand and my forehand. I felt I was getting lazy with my backhand grip, letting the fingertips slip to the middle of the disc too often, so I made the commitment to throw all my throws except short high-releases with a pure power grip, and on my forehand side, I had switched to a power grip a while before, but I rotated my grip so that the pads of my fingers were more forward, so that I could use a finger snap to add spin on the release. I immediately lost a lot of control on both throws, but within a few months, I got it back, along with more power.

At the most fundamental physiological/mechanical level, the throwing motion is not all that complicated. (Compared to, for example, a golf shot, or even writing in cursive.) What really makes throwing difficult is decisions, timing, and precision in a fast-paced game. But these things are not as tied to your mechanics as you might think. Once you are comfortable with a new motion, your brain will make the adjustments to throw it at the right times without too much difficulty. It’s just a matter of a few weeks of practice.

* of course, part of the reason I gave up fixing my forehand in my fourth year was that I didn't really understand HOW a good forehand is produced. But once you know, you can change.

So, I spent the weekend at trouble in Vegas. The pickup team I played on "Renegades", turned out to be a fairly high-quality squad. Palmer Porter provided some star power, as well as the best introduction: "Hi, I'm Palmer Porter, I played five and three quarters years at Florida, and I didn't go to nationals because of that guy (pointing at me - a reference to the 16 teams, 3 advance format changing in 2003, such that they had to beat Georgia twice and lost the second time)." Fetch from Chico put the squad together and got a boatload of D's while roaming in the back of the various clam looks that we spent most of the weekend playing. And we got pretty solid contributions all the way down the roster, which was 13 players most of the weekend. As an added bonus, our team had the guy who was suspended by the UPA for socking Dar at 2004 club regionals.

First two games were fairly uneventful defeats of a college team and an Idaho State reunion team (headed up by Idaho). For our third game, we rolled over to the fields of the Wisconsin alums, leading to this exchange:

Hector: "are we playing you guys next?"
Me: "Yep."
Hector: "Muhahahahahahahaha. (long pause.) Was that ominous enough?"

It was, and the Iceholes (who had brought in a few ringers from Sockeye and Bravo since, you know, Wisconsin doesn't have enough good alumni) jumped out to an 8-2 lead before trading with us in the second half. In the crossover game to make quarters, we beat the Oregon State alums, and that was it for Saturday.

Saturday evening was probably more eventful for most than it was for me. There was a "party" that was little more than a meeting place and a drink line. Skip, I appreciate the thought, but save the money next year. If I want to get drunk, I can play poker at the Excalibur and get drinks for the price of tips. Even if I fold every time that's maybe four bucks an hour in blinds.

Anyway, I schmoozed with the Wisconsin guys and the Lawless Guile Committee ladies, met up with some Purdue friends, wandered around the Bellagio for a while, saw Doyle Brunson (the trip was worth it right there), played a couple hours of $3-$6 limit poker at the Alladin, won exactly one dollar, and called it a night. Best starting hands I had all night were pocket 7's and Ace-Jack offsuit, neither of which got me anything. My big winner was Queen-4 suited in the big blind, where I flopped a pair of queens, then drew a backdoor flush to beat the guy with pocket Aces. I made about $70 on that hand.

As chance would have it, Sunday's brackets were pretty unbalanced. This was by no fault of the format. Somehow, Wesleyan alums and William and Mary alums had beaten Santa Cruz Alums and Texas alums, respectively, in pool play, and Wesleyan alums had gone on to defeat Oregon alums. Maybe it was the effects of a night in Vegas, but when the teams stumbled on to the field Sunday, the best four teams in my estimation were Texas, Santa Cruz, Wisconsin, and Oregon, and they were all on one end of the draw. Furthermore, the strong upwind-downwind of the early rounds made upsets more likely. Capitalizing on our unconventional defensive looks and our willingness to jack it into and against the wind, the Renegades managed the early round upset of Wesleyan, and Harvard did the same to William and Mary.

Our tentative plan had been to lose our second game regardless of the result of the first game, so that we could get off the fields in time to enjoy the Super Bowl in its entirety. Somehow, this idea got lost, and we continued our winning ways in upwind-downwind affairs against Harvard. In the finals, we moved over to the crosswind field (although the wind was much weaker at this point anyway) and ran into the buzz saw of C-K, Idris, Cram, and the rest of the Santa Cruz alumni. Thus ended the dream of a pickup team winning the inaugural Vegas tourney.

Personally, I played OK considering I hadn't played in almost three months. I played terribly in the first game (early jitters) and the last game (nothing left), but reasonably well in between.

The Super Bowl brought my only money loss of the weekend - I put $20 on the money line ($20 to win $53) for the Seahawks. I still think it was the smart bet. Fucking phantom holding call. Sunday night was another typical night in Vegas for me. Played $2-$4 at the Tropicana, this time for about three hours, and again won exactly one dollar. Best hand I got was pocket queens, and they treated me right, giving a set of queens to beat the guy who had A-Q and flopped Aces and Queens. I out-kicked the same guy on another hand with A-J suited. I lost a bunch of money with middle pair and a flush draw in another hand.

Monday turned out to be the good day for my gambling. My legs were in agony, so I decided to delay Air Alert workouts until Tuesday morning, and get well at the Poker tables in stead. After hanging out with Tom and Katie for a while, I sat down at a $3-$6 game at Caesar's palace, with a nice view of Mike Matusow and Sean Sheikan at a mixed game table. If you know who these guys are, you know I was in for a treat. Best line came from Sheikan, talking to the next table over - "he's lost fifty thousand dollars in the last half hour. You couldn't play any worse, it's not possible." Anyway, this session was the big winner, for me, as I netted over sixty dollars in not much more than an hour of play. I love loose players, and Caesar's has plenty of them. I topped off my gambling at the spread limit game at the Excalibur, where I made a little over $20 in pretty short order. My total winnings on the trip were $70, including the $20 lost on the Seahawks bet. Of course, take away the club on the river at the Alladin and I only make $10, but so it is.

I tend to consider most large exercise machines a waste of money. They tend to be really expensive, and all the new research seems to suggest that dynamic pylometric workouts are a better way to build strength and prevent injury anyway. I suppose if you're a powerlifter or football player you need to have some heavy weights, but the heaviest thing us ultimate players need to lift is ourselves. If I were going to get a big machine I suppose I might spring for a Nordictrack - they give a good full-body cardio workout, and my dad's has survived 20 years of regular use.

But for now, I've just ordered a bunch of random stuff from bodytrends.com, a pretty well-stocked fitness equipment website. Crap I bought:

- A large (75 cm) inflatable ball. Useful for stretching and for some core exercises. Also, I'm sitting on it right now. A hell of a lot cheaper than an Aeron.

- A 5/16" thick workout mat. It wasn't cheap ($47) but it's amazing how much less impact I feel when I do the Air Alert jumping exercises on this mat.

- Some of those stretchy rubber bands to do strength work with. Also handy for all sorts of rehab exercises.

- A 10 pound rubber medicine ball. I need to look up some workouts to use with this (the Rival guys mention one possible source). I also currently lack a nice spot to throw it against, although once it gets a little warmer I guess I could throw it against the brick wall of my garage in the back yard.

I also picked up some random stuff from local sporting goods stores, like jump rope and tennis balls to do hand workouts with and those portable handle things that help me do push-ups and back bridges without stressing my wrists.

Anyway, hope that planted some useful ideas in somebody out there.

As many of you probably know, last spring I coached the Purdue Women's team. It was a dream season - we swept the region, qualified for nationals. Nationals was disappointing, due to the combination of hot weather decimating our thin roster and the team just not being ready for the tougher marking from the nationals teams. (Me not being there the second day didn't help, either.) But still, a dream season. My only real regret was that I only coached them for 5 months, in stead of 2 years like I should have.

OK, so fast forward to the present, I'm in Denver, a good 17 hour drive from Purdue. Another local club guy has taken up the coaching duties. You'd expect that I would wish them the best and move on, right? Well, I'm having a hard time with that. In stead, I'm composing e-mails to individual players breaking down their play on video from Michigan indoor, and sending the current coach and captain drill sequences for practice, and pdf diagrams of new plays to run.

Why am I doing this? Possible reasons that are probably all true to some degree:

- I like the players on the team and want to see them succeed for their sake.
- I want to believe that I've "created something" at Purdue, and last year wasn't just a flash in the pan, so continued success will somehow validate last year.
- (Less charitable variant of above) Further success will just underscore what a great job I did and feeds my ego.
- I found coaching really fulfilling and just want to do what I can in an effort to satisfy my coaching joneses.
- (Less charitable variant of above) I enjoyed the authority associated with being the coach, and my current efforts are an attempt to still have some small degree of influence.

Uh... so, maybe I haven't painted the prettiest picture of my psyche there. I don't think coaching is mostly about ego and control for me, but I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't about that at all.

What I really need to do is land a coaching gig somewhere around here. There's actually a pretty healthy high school league around here, and I have my coaching certification, so I'm sure I could find something. Of course, that could mess with my 1:1 Season:Regional Title ratio, but I think I could deal with it.