General trends about communication that upset me about Squid ultimate:
-Players (in game and on sideline) yelling "No Break!".
Does this mean that its ok to get broken other times? No, I think that what people mean is "No Arround ! Cause now there is a guy there". "No break is meaningless and it doesn't help the mark at all (unless we are so well (poorly) trained to know that "No Break!" means shift around. Lets change the way we talk so that ambiguity is eliminated and so that we can communicate more efficently
- Instructing the mark with calls of "No IO!" or "No Arround!" when "IO!" and "Arround!" will suffice. Why waste the extra time to say "no"? Again, we could communicate to our players more effienctly.
-Saying things to the players on the field, before the point is over, like :
Nice cut!
Sweet break!
Yeah!
Stop getting broken!
Come on! You gotta catch that !
All of these things take the player's focus off the game they are playing. When someone gets broken, THEY KNOW. There isnt the need to tell them, it only serves to get them thinking about how poorly they are doing which does NOT help future perfomance.
-On the line, saying "Look at this great line we have". This unfocuses the players from the point about to start: we should not be thinking about how great we are before the point. Expectations kill.
- In a huddle, there are often to many people with something to say. Perhaps when everyone is silent its the right time to butt in with some meaningly saying: "Work harder!" (Even that is useful compared to "We have to suck less") but when the coach or captains or vets has something really insightful to say, following it up with "run more, we have subs" just takes the focus off the insightful thing.
-At halftime, we should all emediatly get water and cool off and THEN bring it in for a huddle so that we arent stuck talking, then doing the cheer and then waiting 4 minutes for the other team.
-Arguing a call from the sidelines. Keep it on the field - its says so in the rules.
More to come, this is quite cathartic
1 comment:
re: Huddle talk,
This past year on Dartmouth we established a rule of only the captains and coaches speaking in huddles. They convey the important stuff and we go and do it. If others have things to contribute, they bring it to the captains before the huddle and they can choose whether to address it then or save it for later (you can really only focus on one or two things at a time as a team).
This worked pretty well for us, especially in contrast to people saying things just to fill space as you allude to (oftentimes, this talking for talk's sake resulted in non-optimal talk...meandering through prior game situations or shifting focus off of the moment).
It's hard to institute this sort of thing from the ground up, but over the course of a few years we managed to change our focus enough that now things like "process goal" are standard nomenclature on the team (or at least, were last year). HUGE shift in our mentality.
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