Zone offense is very difficult to simulate in practice. The skills necessary for zone are often quite different than for man (offense and defense). For zone O, you need to practice vision, patience and confidence which are quite difficult to simulate. For the most part, we usually teach zone O by drawing it up on a white board, going over it on the field and then doing LOTS of 5/10-pulls sometimes stopping the point to reposition people, especially in the early parts of the year. Handlers can simulate zone offense by playing against different types of partial defenses (3-person or 4-person cups, box and 1, etc.) in small sided games where they just try to advance the disc. Poppers can be added to increase the reality factor in these small-sided games (we often play 5 on 3 or 4).
I prefer having 2 handlers attack 4-person cups and 3 attack 3-person cups. This is not to say that they can’t both work for both defenses, but 2 handlers can easily attack the middle (where the weakness is in 4-person cups) and 3 can more easily and quickly swing to attack the sides which tend to be weaker in 3-person cups. Handlers and poppers should be the first to realize what type of zone is being played and can thus most easily adjust to the formation.
Deeps in zone offense tend to hang out and wait for things to happen around them. To a certain extent this is true—they should never just move around blindly. However, deep movement can not only open throws to these deep cutters, but can make poppers’ lives much easier by drawing short-deep and deep-deep defenders away from their space. Deep cutters should try to make the deep deep choose between them by staying in or out and staying left or right. They should definitely switch based on where the disc is and make real cuts but they should never be on the same side of the field or both be under/deep.
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