I looked at my watch. The game was 53 minutes deep and the score was 12-6 to the opposition. I look around at the team I was coaching. Three players were done for the week with lower half injuries. Two were asleep in the shade trying to shake the effects of mild heatstroke, being watched over by our assistant coach whose partly-rehabbed knee had had enough of being upright. The remaining players were almost at a crawl back to the line after conceding another goal. I went to the opposition coach and for the second time ever in my playing/coaching career*, suggested we pull the pin mid-game for everyone’s sake. He agreed, and we called “time cap” there and then.
This was nearly three years ago now, and since then I’ve become more and more solidified in my belief that we ask too much of less experienced players. This thought was first implanted in my head over a decade ago by Owen Shepherd who, at the conclusion of an Australian Uni Games that saw some teams play 12 games in five days, lamented that we weren’t seeing good teams play good ultimate in the finals. “The winner is usually whoever survives.”
The average player at 2019 Uni Nationals spent more time on the field across four days than the average player at the 2019 Australian Ultimate Championships, by about half an hour. Which doesn’t seem like much at first, but the average Uni Nationals player doesn’t spend six months preparing their body to go through that much ultimate. Isn’t Uni Nationals supposed to be a development event? Isn’t it supposed to be fun?
It’s not just at that level that we’re asking too much. Think about another sport you play or have played. If you don’t play anything else, ask someone who does. Ask how long it was between turning up to the first training session, and playing a full-scale, official-rules match. Answers from other sports are typically measured in months. In ultimate the answer is generally in minutes.
Players get absolutely flogged straight from the outset. New recruits get matched on experienced players on a full field on their very first point and sprint for 200 metres for the first time since Little Athletics. Beginner teams turn up to tournaments with barely enough to take the field for one game, let alone four. And while they go home having had fun, they are physically beaten and broken.
That somehow has become the expectation, or the measure of value out of a tournament – that you are completely exhausted at the end of it, often to the point of physical injury.
Players can get away with this in their teens and early twenties, as the body recovers relatively quickly. But then the years tick by, and the recovery gets slower. To the point where players who haven’t progressed to highly competitive levels hit a wall at 25 years old. After slowly limping into work on Monday morning again they say to themselves, “I can’t do this to myself any more,” and move on from ultimate to something less taxing on soft tissues like trail running or mixed martial arts.
Survivorship bias reigns supreme when it comes to decisions around what we impose on new players. “I was fine,” many may say. “The more game time, the better!” But the AFDA database tells a different story - thousands upon thousands of names who played one tournament, then never played another. Or more accurately, chose not to.
Ease new players in. At their first session just teach them the throws, do a couple of drills, and maybe some 4 vs 4 on a mini field. Give them a couple of weeks to get comfortable before bumping up to full sized 7 v 7. If you’re captaining a team of beginners at a beginner’s tournament, be okay with only playing 2 or 3 games for the day. The biggest event you’ve never heard of in Australia has 300 people play four, maybe five, half-hour games, that are all done by lunchtime. And they all come back the following year to do it again. Don’t leave them with a memory of being tired and sore. Take the wisdom of that dead circus guy – “leave them wanting more.”
Recruitment in ultimate isn’t a challenge – it’s an enjoyable enough game for folks to get acquainted with and hooked on pretty quickly. The challenge we have is retention. And until we fix this norm of wearing new players out at a young age, it’s not going to get better.
Quantity does not equal quality.
* – First time was Wollongong in 2018. Those who were there know why.
This article was written by Simon Talbot, the General Manager of Ultimate Victoria. Simon is one of Australian ultimate’s most experienced coaches, commentators, and facilitators.