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Stay Resilient
by Lou Burruss
"You take away a team's strength and make them beat you with their weakness. If they do, you make them do it again, because it’s their f***ing weakness!" — Jon Gewirtz
This situation is so similar to what Jam did with Damien Scott in the 04 finals that I almost think that "The Huddle" ripped it right off of the video. All season long, Damien had handled. He wasn’t a great hucker, but he could always get open for a reset and hand a very nice forehand inside out. (Want to see it? Watch the '04 videos).
Until the finals, Alex Nord had been covering Damien and really destroying him. Nord is big, quick and tenacious, but doesn’t have Damien’s out-and-out foot speed in the open field. In the final, Damien ran deep, Idris Nolan ripped it to him, and Jam got easy scores. We made an adjustment by putting Blaine Robbins on Damien. Blaine was much less experienced, but fast enough to keep pace with Damien and we got two blocks out of it. But mostly we followed Jonny’s advice and worked to limit Damien’s reset and throwing opportunities and shrugged our shoulders when he went deep.
Kirk Savage of Furious used deep cuts successfully throughout his entire career. The best defense we used against him were flexible, experienced defenders. Typically, if a handler runs downfield from the area right around the disc, defenders will let them go. Why bother chasing them when you know they’re coming back to the disc? But if you let Kirk go, he’d be gone and you’d be postered. So the experienced defender would pursue immediately when he made a move to go downfield.
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Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 |
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