Looking Forward to 2007

After a ridiculously long 2006 season I think I needed some time away from Frisbee. When I say away from frisbee I mean not even thinking about the damn sport; some people spend way too much time obsessing about our sport but that is another topic for another time.

Now it’s time to start moving forward and planning, or at least thinking, about the 2007 season. We need to decide which tournaments to go to, plan our practice schedule for the season, plan the tryout schedule and most importantly evaluate how we can improve on our 2006 results. The first step for accomplishing that is the good old break down of the previous season. Mephisto will be getting together in a few days to go over what worked, what didn’t work and what we can do better moving forward. It’s my dad’s birthday on the day of that meeting so I won’t be there to hear everything firsthand and to share my thoughts so I’ll start by putting my ideas onto “paper” here.

Things that worked in 2006: Well it’s no fun blowing smoke up your own a**. No one wants to hear all the positive, feel good stuff from last season but I’ll throw a few things out there anyway. As usual, Mephisto came together very well at Canadian Nationals. We finished a clear second behind Goat. We weren’t quite good enough to give them the game that we wanted to in the final but we were clearly ahead of all the other teams in the tournament. At no point did any team aside from Goat have a chance of beating us. We also came together in a similar way in Australia at World’s. I think that we performed very well this season considering how many new players we had on our roster which was a huge positive. Our move to a more Montreal based roster (for the summer season at least) was huge. It was really helpful to go to practice and be able to split into as many as three teams. It’s so much better than trying to replicate game conditions in a game of 5 on 5.

So now on to the fun stuff; things that I think need to be different in 2007.

First off it will be nice to have one focus only, that being Canadian Nationals. It will allow us to deal with one roster for the season. In 2006 it was tricky managing the Nationals and the Worlds roster. It meant that we rarely had the chance to go to a tournament with our complete team because we essentially had two different rosters.

Not having to deal with Worlds will also allow us to have a pared down schedule. Down time is healthy and we didn’t have enough of it last year. By the end of the season pretty much everyone was physically and mentally exhausted. We were playing 3-4 times a week from April until November.

I think the biggest change we need to make is with respect to individual play. We need to crack down on errors. I don’t know if we were too accepting of drops and throwaways, if some players just lack some basic skills, or if we didn’t have the depth to really penalize players for their “liberties” with the disc. The reality is that if you want to compete at the top level there is no room for the simple mistakes. Turnovers happen often enough that we can’t afford to gift the disc over as well. The best example of this is from our game against Thong at World’s. We were up a bunch and Shaggy passed the disc to Frank for an “easy” score. Frank dropped the disc and instead of us going up by 4, Thong scored and it was a 2 point game. In the end it’s not Frank’s fault that we lost the game; had Seb not dropped the pass on double game point who knows what the result would have been… but had Frank not dropped that pass we wouldn’t have had to worry about being in a double game point situation in the first place because at worst we would have been saved by the cap. In 2007 we need to make sure that those errors don’t happen anymore.

From an individual point of view the team has to make sure that everyone is in top form for the season. With so many things to work on at practice it is difficult to spend time trying to get guys in shape when they should be doing that on their own. The reality is that most people are lazy and only work out at practice so don’t do any extra work to get in peak shape. Again, to compete at the top level we need to be in the best shape possible or else we’ll get run into the ground by the teams we play.

Lastly, our mental focus needs to be improved. How you do that I’m not quite sure since I’m no shrink but we need to get better. All too often we play down to the level of the opposition or we play inconsistently following a big win or loss. That needs to change. We need to have the focus to finish teams off when we have the chance in order to conserve energy. We managed that well at Nationals but had trouble with that at pretty much every other tournament. I’m sure that comes from how the team is managed and I want to make sure that the team’s management makes a big effort to improve this aspect.

Aside from that I think things ran quite well last year but I guess we’ll hear more from everyone at our meeting. I’m sure there are some “obvious” improvements that some guys see that to me don’t seem like a big deal.

Oh yeah, I miss Australia. I need to go back there for a bit longer in the near future.

DF