Brute Squad's fast break ferocity
The "fourth down" of frisbee
[Semi-related to the content of this post, I recently left a longer comment on a Reddit post about the best ultimate players in Europe. Click here if you'd enjoy a little bonus content.]
Update [2025-01-24]: All the links in this article started pointing to the wrong time after Ultiworld removed a few minutes of “waiting for stream to start” from the start of the video. They are now fixed.
I love the way Boston Brute Squad picked up the disc quickly after turnovers in the 2023 US Nationals.
I've alluded to it in a recent article, but I'd like to fully appreciate it now in a separate post. I teach my team to pick the disc up quickly, and I want them to know this is something winning teams do. It's a national-championship-winning strategy, it's not just my own crazy idea.
Let's get into it.
I already pointed out this first example in my previous article—Laura Ospina starts running to pick up the disc while it's still in the air. Don't wait for the disc to hit the ground—if you see it's going to be a turnover, start playing offense as soon as you recognize it:
In the next example below, Yuge Xiao is literally sprinting after the disc. In this case it's not just about fast breaking—the disc is rolling in the wrong direction so she doesn't want to lose field position, either. But she doesn't just stop the disc from rolling by knocking it down, she picks it up and plays it right away.
After the first pass is closely guarded, Brute Squad gets 20 yards on the next two passes completely unguarded. This is exactly why we pick the disc up quickly—the defense isn't ready so there are free yards to be gained.
Fury is one of the best defensive teams in the world, but if you start playing offense when they're not set up to play defense, you get wide open spaces like this:
Watch this clip below and you'll see Levke Walczak pick the disc up quickly twice in less than a minute. The first pickup generates another wide open opportunity, although the throw isn't quite accurate enough to cash in.
Here's the screenshot, showing another example of the types of spaces that fast break offense can generate:
On this point, Fury turns it over near their own goal line, and Brute Squad picks the disc up quickly, not waiting for everyone on both teams to clog up the end zone—as I've written about before in Putting your whole offense in the endzone is bad, actually:
On their first possession of this following point, Brute Squad threw countless passes and barely made any progress against a Fury zone. That long possession ended in a turnover, but Fury turned it over themselves after just a few passes. Brute Squad's quick pick up helped them break through the Fury zone and score in four passes. This is another reason I love the fast break—picking the disc up quickly makes it very hard for a zone to get set up:
Brute Squad isn't as aggressive as they could be in this following clip from early in the second half, but Yuge Xiao still walks straight to the endzone line and throws a pass on stall zero, gaining 20 yards before the defense was fully set:
Here Levke sprints in to pick up a disc when she sees the two teammates closer to it aren't in a good position to pick it up quickly:
And here's the example I used in my last article—Levke picks the disc up quickly after a long huck. There's lots of space for the cutters to work with, generated purely because half the players are still far downfield in the area where the huck was released from:
As I pointed out previously, the issue here is that her teammate isn't looking to get open, and instead is jogging away from Levke. Fast breaking works best when the whole team is on board. It's not just about picking up the disc quickly, but the other players need to be quickly working on getting open.
After that turnover, the next 5 or so Fury turnovers either involved injury calls or the disc rolling far out of bounds where there would be no benefit to Brute Squad picking it up quickly. That series is followed by the turnover below, where the disc lands far from any player. The camera shifts to a field-level shot, and we can see Levke again sprinting over to it (this turnover actually also included an injury call, so Brute Squad didn't really fast break):
A bit later there's a Fury drop on the goal line, and when no one picks it up, Levke runs over once again, starting a possession where they take the disc down the field to win the game:
Final thoughts
I tell my team to "start fast, and start small". The clips here highlight "starting small", as well. Most of the time, the first pass was 5-10 yards, with only one example that was a bit longer than that.
A number of Brute Squad's fast breaks led to hucks on the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th throw. In this game, those hucks tended to not work out. I don't know the players super well, so I can't comment on whether hucking was the right decision given the situation and each player's unique skillsets. Generally, fast breaking doesn't need to mean making crazy decisions—a friend of mine says we should play fast, but not hurried.
Brute Squad is more committed to the fast break than any other team I've noticed, but I think there's still room to grow. They're not always picking the disc up as quickly as they could, and players who aren't picking up the disc aren't always looking to get open as aggressively as they could.
As I wrote previously, I'm not worried that some quick pickups don't lead to huge opportunities. At the elite level, you have to do things the right way 10 times to earn 2 or 3 good opportunities. And that's exactly what we see here—a number of fast breaks that are nothing special, and a few where the benefits of a fast break philosophy are totally obvious, generating huge open spaces against one of the best defenses in the world.
It seems like it was only a few years ago that NFL (American football) teams almost never went for it on fourth down. But then it became obvious that, while "risky", the expected value of going for it was often much better than punting or kicking a field goal. A few short years later, teams are shamed for it if they don't go for it on fourth down. Fast breaks in ultimate are similar—they're "riskier", on the surface, but it seems obvious it'll raise the expected value of scoring. If you care about winning, you should care about fast-breaking.
