Matt Dufort
Marking consists of two simple steps: knowing the threats, and denying the
threats. While the specifics will depend on how your team decides to play
defense, the ideas below will apply in nearly all situations.
Step 1: Know the threats.
The best way to adjust your mark is to anticipate what the offense wants to
do. If you can read the offense, you can take away the throws that would help
them the most. Here are the key things to know:
1 Position on the field. Where you are on the field changes the threats,
and should change how you mark. Every time you set up a mark, you should take
a moment to get your bearings on the field.
2. Thrower’s abilities. If you’re covering a team’s top thrower, you’re
likely to be focused on stopping hucks and dangerous break throws. But if
you’re marking a good athlete with weak disc skills, the biggest threat may
just be that they get the dump off. Pay attention to their comfort with the
disc, the throws they’ve made before, and what their teammates look for when
they have the disc. If it’s someone you match up against frequently, watch
video to learn their moves, and visualize how you’ll stop those moves.
3. Position of other players on the field. Knowing where the cutters are
can make marking much simpler. You don’t have eyes in the back of your head.
But take a quick glance around as you set up the mark, keep an eye out for
cutters in your peripheral vision, and get your teammates on the sideline to
tell you where the potential receivers are.
4.Reading the thrower. For all but the best throwers, it’s possible to
tell when and where they’re going to put a throw up. Focus on their eyes and
hips—few people have effective no-look throws, and if their hips move, the
rest of their body will too. DO NOT focus on the movement of their head,
shoulders or hands—these are the easiest parts of the body to fake with.
Step 2: Deny the threats.
If you followed the advice above, you should have a pretty good idea of how
the thrower can hurt you. The next step is to use that knowledge to deny the
threats.
1. Establish and maintain proper positioning. Stay low and active as you
approach, and set up so you can prevent the thrower’s most dangerous options.
With a great thrower, this may be tight and flat to prevent the huck, or low
and a yard away to deny quick breaks. With a weaker thrower, you can more
safely attack the open side and dump throws.
2. Hedge your bets. You want to prevent the thrower’s best options,
without exposing your defense to even bigger problems. Don’t jump so hard on
one fake that you let off an easy break throw. You can’t stop everything, so
focus on preventing the throws that would hurt your defense the most, while
making other options a bit more difficult.
3. Be unpredictable. A good thrower will see a mark’s weaknesses and
exploit them. By constantly changing things up, you can keep the thrower
guessing and force them to look off throws they’d otherwise take. Vary your
distance from the thrower, your side-to-side positioning, and how you move
your hands. Don’t just follow the thrower’s moves—it may take them a couple
fakes, but they’ll burn you. I tend to split a 10-second stall count into 3 or
4 chunks, and change up my mark every 2-3 seconds. I’ll often start tight and
active for 1-3, back off to deny the breaks at 4-5, approach again at 6-7 to
make them uncomfortable, then step back a bit to avoid the dreaded stall-9
foul call.
4. Go for the kill. In elite ultimate, turnovers can be hard to come by.
When you’re marking a weaker thrower, when the stall count gets high, or if
the disc is in a bad position (deep in the end zone or trapped downwind), you
need to take advantage of it. Get active, attack every throw, and don’t make
anything easy. Even if you don’t get a point block, chances are good you’ll
force a turnover.
Matt Dufort
First things first—calling subs for a competitive team is a big job. It will
take a lot away from anyone’s playing ability. There may be someone out there
who can play at their best and call subs at the same time, but I haven’t met
them. Because of this, I think it’s better to split sub-calling duties between
two or three players, or expect that the person calling subs is not going to
play very much.
To me, the most important element of sub-calling is being prepared. You should
know pretty well before the tournament starts who’s going to play, how much,
and in what situations. You need to leave room for adjustment based on how
each person is playing at the moment, but having an idea beforehand is a huge
help.
Sub-calling sheets are great. A simple grid works well, with the players
listed on the side, and points across the top. You can easily see how many
points each person’s played, how long they’ve been in or out. Grouping
handlers, cutters, defenders together also helps. It’s pretty easy to add
basic stats to such a grid, and to get your next line ready during the point.
In a game with strict time limits, you should ideally have an O line and a D
line ready before the point ends. If you need to change one or two people,
that’s much easier than picking a full seven.
When it comes to picking players for each line, subbing should be strategic,
over the course of the game and the tournament. If your defense is forcing
lots of turnovers but having trouble scoring, you can bring over a more
offensive-minded player. In general, you want your best players to be in when
you need them, but rested enough that they’re still going strong in finals or
that last backdoor game of Regionals. This strategy will vary depending on
your team’s composition, but here’s one example of what I mean.
For many of its years at the top of the Open ultimate scene, Furious George
has been a top-heavy team. Their best five or six players were better than
anyone else’s, and they knew it. But they couldn’t play those guys every
point, so most of the time they’d mix them in with role players (who were,
granted, also very good). A couple times a game, they’d put most or all of
their strongest players in for one defensive point, with the intention of
getting a break on that one point. It usually worked. Against the consistent
offenses in the elite game, defensive breaks are enormously important. One
break can be the difference between a win and a loss, and a huge momentum
swing. By targeting particular points for breaks, Furious George was able to
maintain a high level of play throughout games and tournaments, but bring it
up one big step when it counted the most.
Matt Dufort
Catching the disc is all about practice. If a situation comes up in a game,
it’ll be much easier if you’ve done it a hundred times in practice than if
it’s totally foreign to you. What that means is that you need to practice
catching in game situations, not just easy, uncovered, and standing still.
Practice catching the disc out in front of you, practice catching with a
defender on your back, off-hand catches, in the wind, hammers, and so on.
Something as silly as flutterguts can be a big help when you need to catch a
bobbled or macked disc. Also, try to catch everything—on defense, tipped
discs, random discs flying by during drills—and don’t give up until it hits
the ground or someone else catches it. This will hone your reactions and get
you in the habit of doing it automatically.
I find it particularly beneficial to practice the things you’re weakest at.
For example, I’m terrible at catching discs straight-on, where I’m running
directly at a disc that’s coming straight to me. So I practice those catches
constantly, during warm-ups, down-time at practice, or when I’m throwing
around. They still give me trouble, but I’m a lot better than I would be if I
didn’t work on them.
Different types of catches allow for different margins of error. Clap catches
are easier than two-hand claw catches, which are easier than one-handed
catches, and so on. If you know you have tons of space from any defenders, it
makes more sense to use a clap catch This is particularly true when conditions
such as wind, rain, or bright sun make catching more difficult. Lots of drops
happen because receivers make the catch harder than it needs to be.
Sarasota, Florida, where the UPA Club Championships have been held for years,
is notoriously windy. At its worst, the disc can bounce six inches up or down
in a moment. In these situations, I use what I call the “alligator catch.” I
put my elbows together in front of me, with the hands spread so that my
forearms make about a 90-degree angle. This way, if the disc pops up or down
just before it gets to me, it’ll hit me in the forearms, and I’ll still have a
good chance of catching it. If a defender’s right on my back, I won’t have
that luxury. But in general, I like to use the easiest catch I can without
risking getting blocked.
One last thing that’s intuitive to many players, but may not be obvious to
others, is the influence of spin on catching. Especially if you’re catching
with one hand, you want the disc to be spinning into your hand, not out of it.
This means if a right-handed backhand is coming straight at you, you want to
grab the disc just right of its center. The disc should “stick” to your hand;
if you try to catch the same pass left of center, the disc will feel like it’s
pulling out of your hand. I find it especially helpful to focus on this with
throws where the direction of spin isn’t as clear, like blades and upside-down
throws. You may already be doing this unconsciously, but being aware of it can
make difficult or awkward catches that much easier.
Matt Dufort
With zone defenses, I tend to lean away from the old standards, reasoning that
if most defenders know them, most offenses know how to play against them.
Almost everyone has run a standard three-person cup, and every offense has
seen one. In order to get a good offense out of its rhythm enough to generate
turnovers, you need to either run a well-known zone better than other teams
do, or you need to do something different.
Here’s something different: the formation is a 1-3-3, but with a few major
changes. One marker, three defenders 5-10 yards downfield from the disc (aka
“first wall”), and three more defenders 15-50 yards downfield from the disc
(aka “second wall”). The spacing of the defenders in the second wall is
largely dependent on where the threats are, and is similar to the backfield in
most other zones.
From the first wall, two players step up to form a 3-man cup with the marker.
The break-side player from the first wall drops into the hole immediately
behind the cup. If the disc then swings to the other side of the field, he/she
steps up to become part of the cup, while his/her counterpart on the other
side of the field drops into that same hole behind the cup. This requires more
communication and awareness, but the cup players no longer have to chase the
disc back and forth across the field—instead the composition of the cup
changes as the disc moves. A good marker is essential—someone who can contain
break throws, but will take a risk here and there when they smell blood.
The defense traps the disc on both sidelines. Essentially, the marker is
always forcing the disc to continue moving the same direction as the previous
pass. So if the marker is forcing backhand, and gets broken by a crossfield
swing, he/she just switches to forcing forehand, to keep the disc moving
toward the opposite sideline. This is primarily to save energy—the marker
never has to catch up to the disc to contain the flow. It also perpetuates the
trap, as the easy continuation throw will usually be toward a sideline.
Most of the turnovers generated by this zone will be from riskier throws off
the sidelines. The trap uses the sideline to reduce the area that can be
thrown to, and forces the offense to break through the zone just to maintain
possession. My opinion is that at many levels, offenses have become patient
enough that force-middle zones don’t create turnovers. Unless the team has a
really bad zone offense, or the conditions make it difficult just to complete
passes (extreme wind, rain, snow), a force-middle zone is just going to slow
the offense down. Trapping makes things hard, takes away the easy options, and
can force turnovers even from skilled, patient teams.
This zone has two main weaknesses. It’s not designed to contain the disc in
the middle of the field, so it’s susceptible to handlers chipping the disc up
the field with short two-yard gains. To prevent this, the middle player of the
first wall needs to step up to make those short gains more difficult. It’s
also possible for the offense to gain yards by swinging to the weak side, then
taking quick upfield shots before the defense adjusts. To combat this, the
side players in the first wall need to move quickly when the disc swings. If
run efficiently and aggressively, this defense can fluster offenses and create
lots of turnovers, without exhausting your team’s best zone D players. Lastly,
it helps to have more than one alternative to man defense (either a transition
or another zone set). That way, if the offense starts to figure out your zone,
you can mix things up a bit to throw them off again.
Matt Dufort
A player like this, who clearly has multiple offensive weapons, presents a
serious match up challenge. Individual defensive match ups are an odd thing,
and it can be difficult to predict which defender would be most effective.
Given the past experience of this player being most effective as a deep
thrower, I would continue to push them away from the disc. I would try
different defenders on them until finding a player who could be successful in
keeping the player away from the disc, and in containing their deep game.
As a second possibility, if my team had a strong zone defense, and this player
was the opposing offense’s primary weapon, I would consider playing a “box-
and-one” zone. Match up someone individually on the skilled deep thrower, and
play zone with the other six defenders. This makes it difficult for that one
player to get the disc, and limits his/her throwing options after receiving
the disc.
Above all, a defense’s best weapon is to be unpredictable. Throwing different
looks at this player, and at the opposing team’s offense in general, forces
them to constantly adjust, and to do things differently than they’re
accustomed to. This often leads to small mistakes or miscues that the defense
can capitalize on.