Balancing Individual Growth and Winning
Push and perfect, explore and exploit, expand and calibrate?
Goals and trade-offs
In learning and growing as frisbee players (and members of teams), we sometimes have different goals which we can't achieve all at once. I'm going to put aside many of our important goals (having fun, being part of a community, being active) in order to talk about the trade-offs between two important ones:
First, to win a particular frisbee game by using the strategies that work best for us.
Second, to win as many frisbee games as we can in the long term by learning and growing and improving our skills as players and as a team.
As the GIF above says, if we want to be good at a skill, we're generally stuck kind of sucking at it for a while. And even though we can practice throws in a throwing session before using it in a game, even a throw that we've practiced a lot is likely to kinda suck when we haven't practiced using it in-game. So, we want to try new things and make mistakes (and encourage our teammates to do the same) so we can get better in the long term. And because skills don't transfer perfectly from the throwing session to the field, we have to suck and make mistakes not just during throwing practice, but also during "real games".
But there are other situations where we want to do the best we can to win a particular frisbee game. In those situations, we don't want to experiment with something new, we want to get the most out of the skills that we have already mastered.
And while the "particular frisbee games" where we care the most might only be tournament elimination games, being able to go into "get the most out of the skills that we have already mastered" mode is a skill in itself. We need to practice that skill to be able to turn it on in the right moments. We have to practice both our throwing skills and our internal calibration of how good we are at those skills. We grow by improving ourselves, but also grow by having an ever-more-accurate understanding of who we are.
Push and Perfect, Explore and Exploit
This article from Ultiworld uses the terms "push" and "perfect" to describe practicing with these two mindsets. Here's how they describe a "push" drill:
Push drills try to expand our skill set. They ask players to extend themselves into new territory and to embrace failure. In fact, if you’re not failing while doing a Push drill, you’re missing the point.
It’s important that athletes know they are engaging in a Push drill, and that they get that green light to fail.
And this is a "perfect" drill:
Perfect drills, as the name implies, seek perfection. The idea, which maybe applies more to ultimate than to other sports, is to play completely within your game, and to execute your skill set perfectly (though it’s important to recognize we’re just aiming for perfection – there will still be some miscues).
In reading about computer science, I've also learned the terms "explore" and "exploit" are used to describe a similar situation of trade-offs. When you "explore", you're learning new things and trying to find a better way of doing something (or find a new favorite restaurant; or a new, better career; etc.). When you "exploit", you do the best you can to achieve your current goal with the knowledge and skills you already have. Here's an article that uses the explore-exploit terminology.
To be honest, I feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with both of these sets of terms. I don't love "exploit" because exploiting has a negative connotation. I also don't love "perfect", because it's not possible to actually be perfect. For this article I'll continue using "push-perfect", although in the long term I'd like to figure out a better name for this. Taking a cue from the what I wrote above, we could use "expand" and "calibrate" — i.e. expanding your skill set and calibrating your skill set. (Unsurprisingly, that sounds like something an engineer would come up with...)
Not just "drills"
The Ultiworld article I linked above talks about push and perfect "drills", but that's too narrow—the push-perfect spectrum can apply to all of our interactions with frisbee. We can have "push" and "perfect" throwing sessions, push and perfect scrimmages, and even push and perfect tournaments.
For example, consider learning a new throw—probably the biggest use for the push-perfect concept in frisbee skills development. Here's my usual path of skill development:
I'll start with throwing sessions, perhaps with a partner or just by myself with a stack of discs.
When I've gotten comfortable with the new throw, I'll use it in a very low-stakes game: at pickup, or in a game at practice that we've already decided is a push scrimmage and not a perfect scrimmage.
Once I've thrown a throw in the lowest-stakes games, I'll move up to slightly higher stakes: throwing it in summer league, or in a perfect scrimmage at practice. Once I've got all of that behind me, I'll be ready to throw this throw in games that "really matter" the most. (And throughout all of the later stages, I'll continue using practice sessions to build up my comfort and accuracy with the throw.)
And a particular throwing session can itself be push or perfect as well: sometimes I'm throwing a core throw and refining my already-good accuracy, and on other days I'll practice throws that I completely suck at, just to start building up a brand-new skill.
Skill development and team building
The skill development progression I laid out above is also written with the idea of respecting your teammates in mind. I practice new throws in throwing sessions before I "practice" them in games, because I feel like that's something I owe my teammates, out of my desire to respect their time, respect their desire to have fun, and respect their desire to accomplish other goals (like winning).
More generally, I think having a vocabulary for the push-perfect spectrum is important not just for individual growth but for a team's culture. We feel connected to our teammates when we are working towards the same goals, so communicating within a team about our push-perfect level can help teammates be understanding instead of being frustrated.
Here's what I mean by that: I know from experience that it's frustrating when a teammate makes a questionable decision. Immediately, there's the frustration of losing a game or getting scored on in a particular point. But on a deeper level, I might wonder things like, does this person's idea of fun frisbee match up with mine?, or, are this teammate's goals for the season compatible with mine?, or, does this teammate share my opinion on how our team is most likely to succeed?, or, is this person selfish?
Feeling like I have teammates that aren't on the same page as me can lead to frustration and disappointment over the long term.
However, at the same time, we do want both ourselves and our teammates to develop new skills in order to thrive as frisbee players. Explicitly talking about push-perfect can help resolve that: instead of being frustrated that a teammate has made a bad decision, we can know when we're pushing our skills. We can be happy and accepting that our teammate is practicing new skills.
Conclusion
I think this isn't my best article. As I've said before, I want to write things that are better than what's already out there, in some way (if not in the idea's originality, then in writing a clearer explanation, or finding better examples, etc.). But I'm not sure this article is much better than the Ultiworld article I linked to in the beginning. I've added a little bit here and there (comparing "push and perfect" to "explore and exploit"; spelling out the skill development path), but it's not really that new.
But I still wrote this article, because I think this idea is that important. I wanted to say it in my own words, for a couple reasons. One, because I wanted to refine my views and practice saying what I want to say about this subject. And two, so that anyone who happens to care about my opinion can know the importance I attach to this concept. We have to accept that developing a skill means being bad at it, for a while, and we have to understand that we need to create opportunities for both ourselves and our teammates to feel safe building new skills. That's a core part of my coaching philosophy and so it's worth writing about whether I have something very new to say or not.