Iain and his forays into the realm of leadership

Being a blog christened after its author's attempts at captaincy, its author feels obligated to update. Also, the fact that a tournament, a location change and the return to the college lifestyle have all occurred way heavy on its author's shoulders. Unfortunately this post is about none of these.

UNIPUC's first practice occurred back on Sunday. We had some decent turnout, a lot of people that have played back in high school, a few people that "played some disc back in gym class and thought it was fun," and one or two tournament goers. Also present - an inconceivable amount of wind and rain. The latter was not well received by the team.

Due to those conditions we weren't able to get as much done on Sunday as I had hoped, the usual introductions were performed, a few basic explanations about the stack and force, nothing too fancy. I did discover though, that I'm really bad at explaining things. Really really bad. Abominable even. This isn't all that desirable of a trait for a captain to have.

Sunday practice also had very few of our old team present. We were missing our three main players at Cooler playing with the PaB team, while the rain probably drove off any of the other slightly less dedicated members. Two of the three members at Cooler were also former presidents, which somewhat left me at a loss for what to do. I worked with what I could.

Afterwards (with the addition of the three Cooler-ites) our first team meeting was held. It proceeded exquisitely. Chili red and marina blue are now our two jersey colors, although no input was given for a name change or a new insignia for that matter, mostly because I didn't have any of the drawings on my person.

Another no-ultimate Monday came and passed and then Tuesday practice arrived, hooray! This time around my explanations were much less of the abominable sort, quite the opposite in fact. With an official practice under my belt I was feeling confident, so my stack and force demonstrations flowed much more smoothly. Even with my peerless demonstrations though, the team still has a lot to work on. Unlike ISUC we don't have as solid of a core of veterans, so not only do we have to teach the newbies, but we have to reteach some of the team members as well. The newbies don't have that competitive ultimate atmosphere to learn in yet, I'd like to try to cultivate that, but I don't know how.

It's hard for the new players to learn how to play correctly when a lot of the older members don't quite know when to make a continue or how to make a proper cut. It also worries me that none of the older players really understood the necessity of the stack moving upfield when the disc moves upfield. Whenever the disc is caught a lot of people just panic and sprint wildly away from the stack in these dazzling circular continue cuts, which although I'm sure look absolutely scintillating on paper, lose something in translation to the field.

I should probably stress a bit more the necessity of the stack moving as a group, but I'm still trying to feel out when exactly it's proper to give advice, and when it's not. People tend to misinterpret what I say into something a lot more harsh than I intended, so I'm somewhat hesitant to tell people what to do. With this being only our second practice as well, I don't want to put people off by having them think they're doing absolutely everything wrong, but I also don't want them to build bad tendencies that we'll have to overcome later in the year. I'm sure the happy medium is what I should aim for, but those happy mediums tend to have a lot in common with sublime circular continue cuts.

The basics are what the team needs though and the basics are what I'm going to have to focus upon for the next few days. Whether or not the team understands the main nuances of the stack will make or break our play this year, it's what kept us from really playing all that well last year.

This brings in another issue though, our practices starting at 3:30, when about five or so people have classes until 4:45. If those five people miss out on Tuesday/Thursday explanations and drills, then they're going to be leagues behind the rest of the team in terms of understanding. I'd like to move practice times up to 5 or so, but then we'd start to encounter the problem of not eating dinner until 7:30. With the dining centers closing at 7:45, that probably wouldn't go over very well with the team.

This all sounds like these last few practices have been fruitless, but for the first two practices they've gone quite well. We converted a track athlete permanently to our heathen ways, as well as picking up a few other pretty athletic people. The older players seem almost excited, if not more excited about this year than I am. Additionally the intensity of our last practice was a pleasant surprise from what UNIPUC is usually like. I'm hoping to try to help foster this intensity by raising my intensity as well. Hopefully it will trickle down to the other players so they can try to learn from my example, as well as to help minimize any loss of skills that I might have (this I'm very worried about).

Getting used to teaching players that are completely unfamiliar with the game is new to me, although nothing I can't adapt to. It'll take time and I'm sure a lot of frustration, but when all these drills and explanations finally pay off and the team starts to click; it'll be worth the effort a thousand times over.