USA Ultimate

Minutes Are Precious

by Ben Wiggins

Minutes at practice are precious. Here are my 5 relatively simple ways to maximize the amount of growth you can foster from each of your practices. At the end, I've included an example set of 3 practices to try and illustrate these points. 

1) Use your warm-up time effectively
Warm-ups take a large percentage of total practice time. To focus that effort, I like to include warm-up drills or games that give a good mental introduction to the purpose of later practice drills. I'll try to use plyometrics or other movements that foreshadow the movements we'll be trying to teach later. I like to start with a warm-up game for many practices as well, and these games can usually be tailored to work with the later specifics. 

We all learn from our mistakes, and we are very good at learning from experience. Warm-up time doesn't have to be focused or consciously driven for the players. As a coach, this is where I am putting drills that can give benefit without being discussed overtly or even introduced at all. You can't expect players to come straight from class or work or their families and act professionally in the first minute. Even pros need time to get in the right frame. But we can tailor those introductions to help the warm-up put them in a receptive and ready state. 

2) Cover topics in multiple practices
When you think about the school classes you have taken: did you spend 5 hours in a row learning math every week, or did you go to class for 1 hour each day? Spreading learning out gives players a much better chance to internalize new strategies or fundamentals. We can do this by running similar drills or situations in multiple practice plans. 

For example, let's say we have 3 drills that we want to run for ~30 minutes of total time each. Those drills are similar, with "A" being a simplified fundamental drill and "C" being the very advanced application drill. We could run those drills all on Monday and spend a complete 90 minutes on that topic. This would be easy to plan. Players would spend a long time on similar drills, so we might lose some effective time due to boredom. Also, players would only have one night after the practice to be mulling those topics over when drills or done. Which means just one post-practice meal to discuss and no practices that players can come in already thinking about the topic. 

Alternatively, we can maximize those benefits by running these drills in series throughout the week. This gives players lots of time to think and prepare. You'll catch your team by surprise less, which is a good thing with complicated topics. I've tried to show an example of this in the practice plans below. 

3) Focus on fewer topics
In other words, don't try to cover everything. Given limited practice time, work on those topics that are most important. If something is not going to give a real return to your team, then don't practice it. Ideally, the perfect team has probably practiced everything at least once, but that just isn't realistic for a college or high-school team. If you can only practice twice per week, then trying to run two different offenses is not going to help. Do one well. If you are not going to use a 1-3-3 zone, don't learn it. Do you really need to spend time teaching all of your players how to call plays on turnover situations? No! Use those reps to teach your handlers how to make these calls, and use the extra rep time to learn it well. 

Maybe most prevalent, in my opinion, is trying to teach solid continuation (aka 'flow') cutting. This is very difficult and time-consuming to teach. It requires teaching vision and anticipation, which are long-term learning goals. I feel like many youth teams spend massive amounts of time learning how to play flow offense against solid man-to-man schemes...and then spend their entire season playing against poaching person-D or zone. Those teams would have been better served spending more practice time on zone and learning it well. 

As coaches, we don't know what our teams will see...but we do need to give them enough tools to have success. But when you know what to expect then you should tailor your game to beat it. If you are worried about depriving your players of the balanced Ultimate education for future teams, know this: players that learn a few skills extremely well have a much easier time learning other skills at a high level. Players that learn many skills poorly will struggle when they have to learn any particular skill at a higher level. You may be serving your young players better by helping them master a single skill rather than having a mediocre grasp on ten skills. 

(In the example below, I am writing for a team that has decided that downfield defense is their top priority, and they believe that this is going to help them even if they spend less time on other defensive priorities like zone, poaching, etc.) 

4) Eliminate pulls
The time between pulls can be a huge waste of practice time. When you add up everything that goes into walking to the line, discussing the play, signaling, pulling, walking to the brick...it adds up fast. You can be much more efficient by running more game situation from a stopped-disc. Or by breaking your team into 3 squads, and having two teams pulling to a single O-team so that the D can discuss and be ready to pull very quickly. 

Playing uptempo at practice will ready your team for observed games with time limits, and it saves a ton of time. With that extra time, you can talk as a team about details or run extra reps. You have to play real Ultimate sometime...save that for scrimmages that aren't focused on a single topic or that are long enough to simulate a game. 

5) Be prepared
If you've read this far, then you really care about creating efficient practices. So I'm probably preaching to the choir here. Every minute that you aren't prepared at practice is 20-25 minutes from your teams' individual minutes that could have gone into becoming a better player or a better team. Write your notes ahead of time. Have a plan. If nothing else, your players will feel more respected and more valued, and they will work harder because of it. 

Most importantly; once you have a good plan, you can deviate from that plan intelligently. If you've planned for 20 minutes of a particular drill, then you can change at minute 19 for extra time if you think you are on the verge of a team breakthrough. Alternatively, you can back off the pace and re-simplify drills if the concepts aren't knitting together like you'd hoped. Or switch topics more rapidly if they are coming easily to your team. Those kinds of deviations are where coaches and team leaders help make huge advances...and you can't do them when you are trying to figure out the plan during the practice. 

With those things said, here is my example for a set of three 2.5-hour practices, with the focus being improving individual downfield defense: