Something we always hear from contributors is “But I’m not an expert, there must be someone more qualified to talk about this than me.”
Ultimate Frisbee is a new and weird sport that continues to evolve every year. While some members of our community have been playing for longer, or coaching at higher levels, “expertise” is relative and is not a barrier to entry to creating content with IOU.
You don’t have to be the #1 authority on a skill or concept to add value to the conversation. Let’s think about dump guarding, for example. Your personal experience (your successes and failures) in the dump space have given you a unique insight into the skill that might help someone else improve or think differently. And you don’t need to actually be the best dump defender in the world to be able to effectively explain key principles or theories.
We often focus too much on hard skills. There are a million nuances that go into being a strong player and teammate, and off-field soft skills (like communication, work-life balance, decision making) are just as interesting to our readers as on-field technical advice. Find the thing that you’re really good at (each and every one of us is really good at something, even if it’s some really small and often overlooked part of Ultimate), and write about that.
We welcome strange new topics. We welcome considered approaches to tournament footwear, cleaning mud stains out of white jerseys, sunscreen application systems, and sideline voice. We welcome players from any background and division talking about how they developed a particular skill, and how they’re going to become better at it. We welcome your tips for psyching yourself up for training after a long day at work.
You don’t need to develop this content alone. We can help you - or, you can develop the content with your teammates by discussing it at training, setting up a Google Doc, and running it like an annoying university assignment. You could even do a Q&A with someone you consider to be an expert. We know from our engagement data that if you write a considered, passionate article, it will start a broader conversation.
The IOU Reader Community is passionate about everything to do with Ultimate Frisbee. You don’t need to be an expert to help us feed their insatiable content hunger.
Neither do we! The IOU Team has to try to make the most of an hour after work, or lunchtimes, or a boring meeting, to solicit and shape the content that you see every week. Everyone has commitments, especially during the season when training can take up all of your surplus time and energy.
The reason why we do it, though, is because we love the sport. We love sharing your stories. And we genuinely believe that this community is full of bright, complex, insightful human beings with interesting things to say about the sport we all love.
If you’re passionate about sharing stories too, there are many ways to contribute to IOU, even if you don’t have much time to give.
The first and easiest way is to tell us your idea for a piece of content. We can then work together with you to develop it into a final product by taking on grunt work, research, story structure and writing assistance, trying to limit your time investment while keeping you involved in the development of the piece..
The second thing to keep in mind is that articles don’t have to be long - they don’t even have to be written articles! We are more than happy to publish 500 word pieces, or cartoons, or short interviews. Whatever you can produce, we can help build into a winning final piece.
Third, if you don’t have much time, consider a collaboration. If you can find someone else who is passionate or knowledgeable about the same subject as you, share the load of content creation with them! You can share the load with your whole team, if you want, by getting each player to contribute a paragraph. We would love to work with you to manage a collaboration like this.
Finally, we’ve been looking to develop an ‘Around the Grounds’ series, where we pick a topic and get a small amount of input from a large number of experts and players from all over Australia. If this is something you’re interested in, please talk to us. The hardest part of our job is all the outbound messages we send asking for content (and, also, we don’t know everyone in the community who’s interested in writing!), so we would really, really love to hear from you.
Don’t let time be a limiting factor for you contributing to IOU. Half an hour here and half an hour there can go a long way, and we have so much energy and so many strategies to help you turn an idea into a finished piece. We can’t help you do that if we don’t know you’re working on something, so please reach out.
Message us on Facebook/Instagram, or talk to your team leadership, about ways to get involved in IOU content creation today. We want to help you share your story.
We’re spending all of this week busting IOU Contributor myths. Let us know what else is standing in your way in the comments, and we’ll address it!
We hear this a lot and it breaks our heart.
There *is* no such thing as a bad writer, only bad stories, bad teachers, and the occasional bit of bad luck. If you take nothing else away from these posts, let it be this: you don't need mastery of the English language, a potent loyalty to oxford commas, or anything remotely resembling a "conventional" paragraph structure to be able to write a good piece for IOU. In fact, the only ingredient you need is passion.
We have enough wordsmiths and grammar geeks in our team (and in our community) to polish the actual written copy, what we need from you is ideas, opinions, arguments, and stories that start conversations.
For your reference, every piece we ever publish, no matter how "well written" it might be, undergoes a pretty serious collaborative editing process. We provide structure advice, we provide writing support, and we provide suggestions on narrative and themes. We're really good at helping writers develop and shape their ideas into a high quality final product, and we're happy to take on and share the burden of writing if you think you need it. Ask anyone who's contributed to IOU before - we love to building stories with you.
Also, your contribution to IOU does not necessarily have to take the form of a written article. We'd love to create more audio content, do video interviews, and experiment with form and structure. We love working with our contributors to build a piece of content from their idea, even if it isn't something we've done before. If you want, you can have a 20 minute or less phone conversation with us about your concept, and we can help you turn it into a full-blown written piece.
Writing is like throwing - the more you do it, the better and more skillful you will become. It’s hard for us to edit a blank page, so please, believe in yourself (you’re great), put some pen to paper, and then we can help you make it a winning piece.
Wrong. So wrong. Really, really wrong. We have learnt in five or so years of IOU’s existence that people in this community care. A lot. About a lot of things. They seem to *especially* care about people caring about something, whatever that something may be.
The absolute best articles to work on, and the ones that resonate and stay with audiences, are the ones that are driven by a personal story. Whether that’s “I’m sick of people not centering the disc on stall zero, here’s an article about it!” or something off-field, complex, and nuanced, passion begets passion. Chances are, if you are passionate about something, there is a not-insignificant portion of the community that is passionate about it too. Or, if you’re the only person in the world who thinks that Crocs are hands-down the best non-playing tournament footwear on the market, your passion will open eyes, change minds, and, ultimately, drive greater support for foot arches across the Asia-Pacific region.
Our community is special. Ultimate Frisbee is unique. It might have something to do with the fact that it’s a pay-to-play sport with a weird name and very little social credit, meaning that to even play a game of Ultimate at the park you have to be willing to be a little vulnerable. It might have something to do with the Spirit of the Game, and its various mutually assured destructions. Whatever it is, it makes our community especially responsive to honesty, vulnerability, and people’s personal stories.
You don’t have to be an expert, or to have played at the highest level, to have something interesting to say about a game you played. A tight point in a placing game of mixed regionals, for example, might feature all kinds of incredible, relatable moments that our readers can see themselves in.
You might think that people won’t care about your story or opinion or idea because it’s too small. Or weird. Or specific. Don’t think that. There are so many dimensions that go into being excellent at Ultimate Frisbee, and our reader community wants to learn and think about all of them.
Many of these dimensions are physical, but a lot of them are about our lives. Injuries. Mental health issues. Work-life balance. Burnout. Failure. Success. Repeated and colossal failure. Financial stress. And so on. We at IOU believe that so many people in this sport have something interesting to say, and something valuable to contribute, to our community’s collective knowledge. We want to work with you to share your story, whatever it may be.
We don’t need a finished product, we don’t even really need a first draft. The most helpful thing that you can do for IOU’s content pipeline is to let us know what you’re passionate about.
If you’ve been looking at this week’s series of IOU contributor myths thinking “Hmm” and “Yes, sir” and “They made some really good points about Crocs (the shoe), I think I would like to write an article,” please tell us. We are really good at helping writers/creators develop their pieces, even if it just starts as a little seedling of an idea.
There are some real holes in our upcoming schedule, and we would love for you to help us fill them. As mentioned previously, we can help you plan, write, and polish off your piece of content - and we have A LOT of energy to make this happen - but we need you to tell us what you’re working on.
So, don’t say “Great, I’ll do it later.”
Reach out to us right now, by replying to this email, or by reaching out to us on Facebook or Instagram.