High Release Flicks and Lefty Backhands
It’s high time that I wrote something about Ultimate; I’ve been playing for this entire school year and I’d say I’ve become kind of obsessed. So obsessed, that I just spent the last minutes (between writing the previous sentence and this one) watching videos of ultimate on youtube. Ultimate has essentially replaced soccer for me. In high school, I was obsessed with soccer, I would watch games whenever they were on (and often record them), I would run and lift weights to improve my fitness for soccer, and of course I played competitively for a club team and for my high school. This year, I’ve been watching ultimate videos whenever I get free time, I train for ultimate and I played for Thugmo (our Men’s B team).
I have a decent amount to write about with regards to ultimate (of course keep in mind that I’ve been playing for less than a year) and I’m sure there will be many more posts to come about the sport. For this post, I wanted to write about throwing. During the year, I usually spent a couple of hours a week outside of practice just throwing a disc around with a couple of my teammates. I attribute a lot of my improvement over the past year to those sessions outside of practice, as I’ve noticed that my throws are significantly better than they were at the beginning of the year. My coach also repeatedly told us this: throwing is the best way for a new ultimate player to get better.
One thing that I really like about throwing sessions is that you get to goof around. At practices, I spend most of my time working on my real throws, the ones I’d use in games. When I go out and throw with my teammates, yeah we work on real throws, but we also work on stupid throws. Like today, we started out normally, throwing standard flicks and backhands, then started mixing things up with high release throws and upside down throws. Finally, we played a 4v4 scrimmage with only left handed throws. It was really fun, but I’d argue that the scrimmage wasn’t all that beneficial.
There is some benefit to the goofing around though. Some of those throws are really useful (especially hammers and high release backhands), but practice and tournaments aren’t the place to perfect them. That’s where throwing sessions come in. You get to work on the throws that you don’t have, and get them to the point where you feel comfortable throwing them in games. I’ve been working on my high release flick and my left-handed backhanded, both of which I feel can be useful short-distance throws, and I’m almost at the point that I’m willing to throw them in games. The same can be said with my hammer. Throwing sessions have really increased the types of throws that I am comfortable with.
From another perspective, as a overworked student, throwing is a great break. When I was a freshman we used to play soccer as a break, but for soccer you need at least 6 people. With ultimate, you can have a pretty good time with just one other person, and I can almost always find someone on my team who is willing to throw with me for an hour. It’s really easy to organize a throwing session, and I derive a lot of enjoyment from it.
I guess I’m just really excited to be playing a competitive sport again. After a couple of years without it, I realized how much I missed it. Last year, I tried filling the gap with running, but the lack of a close team didn’t cut it for me (although I do still enjoy running). It’s been really amazing to be back on a competitive team.
I’ll leave you with a video I watched while writing this. Enjoy.
Tags: ultimate