In general, I think that in a short season you can really teach at most 2-3 things. Based on the level we’re at, I think those things should be dump sets, marks, and basic defensive principles (i.e. staying with your man).  I’d like to work on those, along with catching, in some fashion every single practice.  If we can execute our dumps 80% of the time and limit around breaks ourselves, I’ll consider the season a great success and think we’ll be a real contender at Regionals.

Behind this are some general principles that are going to influence how we operate in general (so not something that’s explicitly being taught, but the way we teach and run scrimmages).  The basic philosophy of our offense is to quickly move the disc in order to rapidly and decisively exploit holes in the defense.  More practically, dump swing so we can fast break it down the break side.  I want to play fast and aggressive this year, I think we’ve got some athletes with low levels of experience and an aggressive downfield attack with tough D seems like a winning strategy that will also give people useful skills to play A-side (i.e. defense, hucks, and running quick strike O).

On D, I have a dream of running force middle, hence us working on changing the mark last night, but really my main goal is to lead with our defense.  I want us to defend actively, to force them to take throws they don’t want to.  In practice, that means doing things like really pushing people under/deep, hassling dumps, and (if we can manage it, I doubt it) trying some “contain” type defenses, which are really effective against B-teams that can’t complete a lot of underneath throws consistently.

This year, I’d also really like to stress team values.  Surveying the team, virtually everyone gave some variation of “fun” and “team” as the values they’d like to see us aspire to this year.  In my eyes, the true success of our season depends on the degree to which we actualize these values.  What precisely that requires, I do not know, but that won’t stop me from trying and I’d like to document this attempt over the course of the season.