Tarr's Blog

I had an interesting conversation at a recent tournament with a guy who played on a high profile college team around a decade back. This was one of the top teams in the nation, and it was also one of the teams that had a reputation for aggressive play and bending the rules. This was before the days of (widespread, well trained) observers, and the gray area for rules abuse was much bigger. He was in a very different place as a player now, so he offered some interesting inside perspectives to me looking back on those days.

I've always been curious about what it was like to be on those teams, because they had to know, on some level, that they were blatantly breaking some rules and were winning through intimidation (in addition to talent). And yet, while these teams had always freely admitted to enjoying a physical style of play and occasionally fouling as a result, I've never heard admissions of intentionally breaking the rules. Despite this, these players have often seemed exceptionally mellow and friendly off the field. This contrast - nice guys acting in a way that earns them hatred, and then being somewhat dishonest about it - seems jarring to me.

A few tidbits I got from this conversation:

- He basically confirmed hat there was a (largely unspoken) rule on this team that you back your teammate up, no matter what the call or situation. And you do it vocally. That was just the culture of the team. That's not too different from a lot of teams now, I suppose.

- Although he couldn't be sure, he was fairly convinced that many of the worst fouls /calls/infractions that the team leaders made were made intentionally. That's no shocker, but what I found interesting was that he thought the motivation was not to get that one possession, but rather to control the pace/style/mood of the game.

- Most interesting to me was an anecdote he told about a bad call he made. He had a layout catch that he got his hand under, but the disc was down. He called it up, and stood by his call after a huge argument broke out. Nobody on his team said a word in dissent at the time. Over a week later, however, after a team meeting, one older player on the team pulled him aside and said "if the disc is down, call it down".

So, you get total support at the time of the call, but on some level, at least some players on the team wanted to win without making any obviously bad calls along the way. So, the culture of SOTG did seep in to these teams, if only to a tiny degree.