Be good at frisbee, not just frisbee-like things

Winning isn't just about throwing more accurately

Here's my hypothesis: there are lots of people out there who are good at throwing frisbees, and catching frisbees, and running fast...but aren't good at frisbee. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say they aren't anywhere near as good at frisbee as they could be, given their easily measurable skills.

A goal of my blog is to try to put into words the subtle things that make you good at frisbee, and not just good at frisbee-like things. I've written a number of articles that fall into this category, but I haven't yet written an article pointing out the overall concept itself.

What does it take to be good at frisbee? Here are a few things I've been able to put into words so far:

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Some subtler frisbee skills

Perhaps the simplest, most important is to understand the goal of the game. As basic as that sounds, it takes a certain singleminded dedication to learn to filter every decision through the lens of does this help me win games?

A specific example here is my essay Defense is for stopping the other *team*. Good frisbee players play help defense, because if the other team scores, it doesn't matter whether you stopped your assignment from catching the disc. The goal of the offense is to score. The goal of the defense is to force a turnover before the offense scores. Whether playing "person" defense or "zone" defense, a good frisbee player never forgets the ultimate goal—stopping goals, not stopping people. A good frisbee player doesn't get beat deep any more than absolutely necessary—one open pass to the endzone is worth more points to the offense than 10,000 dump throws.

I think people are, on average, better at understanding the goal of the game on the offensive side—scoring (and the closely correlated goal of 'gaining positive yards to make scoring easier'). But we do sometimes see players who are overly focused on playing their role ("My job is to get back to the stack now"... "It's not my turn to cut now") and miss opportunities to score. A good frisbee player understands that the ultimate goal is scoring. They never simply think "I get back in the stack now", without filtering it through the lens of will that help my team score, in this specific instance? My article The "fake clear" cut is a rough example of this.

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Decision making is one of the more well-known aspects of 'good frisbee'. A good frisbee player needs a highly refined sense of is this the right choice? A less accurate thrower who's extremely good at not attempting the throws they shouldn't can be more valuable than an accurate thrower who overconfidently throws to receivers who are too tightly covered. Improving your understanding of what your own skills are is often as important as improving your skills themselves.

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A good frisbee player pays close attention to the skills of their teammates and opponents. They're ready for the opponents who want to give-and-go. They know which throws their opponents don't have—allowing them to play more help defense in the right moments. They know which of their opponents are liable to stare downfield until stall five, and which are willing to throw dump/swing throws early in the stall count. They know which of their teammates are overconfident in their deep throws, and avoid tempting them with cuts that wouldn't be high-percentage passes. (In general, you'd be surprised how much decision-making a cutter can do for their thrower. Perhaps that will be its own essay some day.) A good frisbee player is great at communicating with their teammates.

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A good frisbee player is a master of awareness. This is something I've touched on in a few posts already. Oodles of OODAs is a more philosophical look at the general concept of awareness. Be ready for the pass at all times discusses a type of awareness that all great players need.

Defense is for stopping the other *team* is closely related to the theme of awareness—defenders need to be aware of more than just the person they're assigned to guard. Good cutters are also sensitively aware of what their defender is doing, as I discuss in Notice when your defender isn't noticing you and Notice when you're open.

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Awareness is great, but it's useless if you don't do anything with the things you notice. Good frisbee players are obsessively dedicated to taking every opportunity that's given to them. Good frisbee teams aggressively field the pull and gain as many easy yards as possible, as I wrote in PUL's pulls. It's easier to gain yards when you're undefended, so gain as many as you can before the defense arrives. Having the opportunity to gain more yards instead of less yards is not limited to pulling situations, as I write in Take the free yards. Good players are relentlessly hunting these opportunities.

Some opportunities are not as obvious as "gain yards when undefended". These skills combine 'frisbee knowledge' with a 'dedication to taking every opportunity'. For example, take Jack Williams's great video about the power of being in a position where your defender can't see you: Add This Trick to Your Bag. A good frisbee player will learn to take advantage of their defender's bad positioning, every single chance they get.

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Another hard-to-train skill is a player's ability to predict the future (also touched on in Oodles of OODAs). Can you see who's going to catch the next pass before it's released? Can you figure out who will be open for them when they make a catch and turn around? Humans are somewhat predictable, and a good frisbee player will predict them—and begin to act on those predictions without waiting for the action to actually happen.

A good frisbee player knows their opponent is trying to predict them, too (Think about what your opponent is thinking). They take care not to telegraph their intentions (e.g. You, too, can look off defenders). Perhaps they even behave unpredictably, simply for the sake of keeping their opponents from keying in on their tendencies (stall zero dump, anyone?).

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Then there are skills that everyone knows are skills, but are hard to practice and hard to record in a stat sheet. Being unnaturally good at figuring out where a disc in flight is going (and forcing yourself to change direction immediately instead of waiting until it's too late) is probably the most valuable skill many intermediate-level cutters could develop. Every time a disc hits the ground near you, ask yourself: could I have caught that if I started running to the correct spot earlier? (A turnover is a turnover, so you should care just as much about misreading a disc—and developing the skills not to—as you do about throwing a bad throw.)

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And frankly, although it feels a little Machiavellian, if you care about being good at frisbee you should care about being emotionally intelligent. My article Being competitive includes your emotions touches on this subject. If you want to win frisbee games you should want to be the kind of person that other good players want to play with. If you want your team to succeed, you need to be the kind of person who makes their teammates feel supported in their growth, because learning takes vulnerability.

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Good frisbee players aren't afraid to ignore a little social pressure if that's what it takes to be good at frisbee. To outsiders, all ultimate players are a bit weird—out there in the park, throwing a disc back and forth for hours at a time, multiple times a week. But to be good at frisbee, you need a certain willingness to be even weirder. Peer pressure will subtly push you to play frisbee and practice frisbee the way everyone else does. On your path to getting better, you'll need to be willing to ignore that pressure (at some point, though, you'll hopefully end up on a team of people smart enough to be weird in similar ways).

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The trap of quantifiable goals

In my journey to get better at things, I've noticed that it's easy to shy away from doing the hard work that leads most directly to improvement. It's easy to favor work that's more straightforward. I'm guilty of this myself—it's easy to practice my Chinese flashcards in a way that finding a conversation partner to practice with is not. It's straightforward. It's quantifiable. But it'll never be enough to actually master Chinese.

The word legibility is used in discussions of issues like this. Progress that's easily measured and tracked is legible. Training plans that can be explicitly written down are legible. A lot of important frisbee skills are illegible, however. You can't wake up early to go out to the field by yourself and practice your decision making for an hour. You can't hit the track three times a week and do ten sets of awareness.

Scott Young makes a similar point in his book Ultralearning:

We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to work on collaborative, professional programs but mostly code scripts in isolation. We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting. In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing.

In the same way, I encourage you all to do the hard work of actually getting better at frisbee. Don't fall into the trap of focusing only on the "easy work"—making your forehand slightly more accurate, sprinting slightly faster, etc. Lean into the hard work of learning to play winning frisbee. Yes, sprinting fast and throwing well are part of that. But they're only one part of the equation—and are often overdeveloped since they're easily practiced.

There's one important sense in which what I'm saying here is different than Scott Young's suggestion. The point of this essay isn't (just) "play lots of frisbee". I know lots of people who play lots of frisbee but aren't getting better. The point is work on important skills, even if they're hard to track. And I'm not sure I even know the best way to do that. Play pickup with the intention of practicing your awareness. Watch film of your own games. Bring a journal to practice and jot down notes between points. But at least try. Hopefully having this essay will help you continue on the right path.

For many players, improving their throws will add less value to their team than improving their awareness and their dedication to taking advantage of every opportunity the defense gives them.

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Final thoughts

In my own life, I've noticed it can be very helpful to have a clearer mental picture of a concept, even if it's one I already had some subconscious awareness of. That's what I've tried to provide with this essay. Most people have probably heard terms like "Frisbee IQ" before. But I think it can be very helpful to have this clear mental model—that there's a significant difference between being good at frisbee-like things and being good at frisbee. If you care about winning frisbee games, then it's not enough to only work on getting better at frisbee-like things.