Mildly against sideline communication
Is it really helping?
As it says on the Guide page, I'm happy to take requests for articles. Here's something a friend mentioned to me over text message:
...it would be interesting to look at communication in frisbee vs other sports.
One of my biggest pet peeves about frisbee is the reliance on sideline talk, whereas basically every other sport there's only a coach talking. If you listen to a soccer game vs a frisbee game without the sidelines, the soccer game would be way louder, everyone is always talking to each other...
I'm with my friend on this one—sideline talk is nowhere near as useful as some people think. It seems so straightforward: I say something useful and it helps my teammates on the field. But it's not that simple.
Everyone knows the arguments in favor of sideline talk, so I'm not going to review them here. And in my opinion, they're not totally without merit, hence the title of this article. But here are the often-overlooked arguments against sideline chatter:
What you know, they know
My friend's next text pointed out one downside of sideline talk:
At our alumni game, some guy on our team on the sideline asked what the force was as we were about to pull. And [another player on the team who's won a club national championship] responded, "we don't need to know, never tell the sideline what the force is".
If everyone on your team's sideline knows what your team's on-field strategy is, then everyone on the sideline for the other team is likely to know, as well. And if the other team's sideline knows, then their on-field players will quickly find out, too.
Part of the benefit of having plays and strategies is having shared knowledge that the other team doesn't have. For the sideline to be helpful, they have to know what the players on the field are trying to do. But if your sideline is walking around discussing strategy, the other team will know as well, taking away any benefit of surprise. (Of course, secret knowledge isn't the only benefit of strategies—like running a zone on a windy day, some strategies are effective even if the other team knows what's coming.)
When the world needed him most, he vanished
There's a pretty simple reason why professional basketball or soccer teams don't use sideline talk—it's much harder to hear the sidelines in an arena of 20,000 people or a stadium of 60,000+. Lots of frisbee games, on the other hand, take place with almost literally no one there besides the players on the two teams.
But there's a catch: the more you care about a particular game, the less likely it is you'll be able to hear sideline talk. Sure, it's easy for the players to hear the sideline at your regular season summer league game. Even at club regionals there's still hardly anyone watching besides a few parents (pool play games at least). But what are you going to do if you make it to summer league finals, and there's 250 people crowding the sideline who are heckling the teams they just lost to? Or at college, club, or semi-pro championships where there might be 1,000 people watching and making noise? And they won't just be making random noise—some fans can't help but shout advice at the players as the game is happening.
We can see an example of this in pro football, where it's not unknown for the quarterback to ask the crowd (at home games) to quiet down:
But if you want to win the games you care about most, you can't rely on the crowd to obey your every whim—you need a strategy that's robust even when the crowd is trying their best to distract you. Peyton Manning asks the crowd to quiet down at home because it's helpful, yes. But he wouldn't be an all-time great quarterback if he didn't also know how to handle himself when the crowd was against him. Football teams understand they can't rely on having perfect communication conditions, and will play crowd noise at their practices so they don't rely on techniques that aren't robust.
Miscommunication
I believe it's harder than some people assume to get actually useful information from the sidelines.
First, there's the issue of your own team giving you mixed signals from the sidelines. For example, one sideline player might see an upline cut developing and yell "no strike!" while someone else on the sideline is still yelling "no around!".
Second, as I mentioned above, there's likely to be other people yelling on the sidelines too. Fans may be yelling out advice out of instinct. They mean well, but their advice might not match up with your team's game plan. Players on the other team are likely to be yelling as well. It's not trivial to separate the voice of your teammate yelling "strike!" to warn you of an upline cut from the voice of an opposing sideline player yelling "strike!" to encourage their handler to make an upline cut.
Third, there's the issue of mismatch between what you hear and what your instincts tell you. If you hear "no strike!" from the sideline but your own instincts on the field tell you to continue taking away the around throw, what should you do? The sideline advice might just be making you more confused.
For all these reasons and more, I tend to doubt sideline communication is consistently effective at delivering useful information. And many captains encourage their sideline to be loud—but the louder the sideline, the greater the cacophony and the more likely it is that players will hear multiple voices telling them different things.
Use your own brain
For sideline talk to be useful, the players on the field need to be good at hearing a suggestion from the sideline and responding immediately. You might be able to predict from other things I've written on this blog that I think that's pretty whack.
Great players aren't great at being told what to do—they're great at figuring out what to do. Too many players use sideline talk as a crutch. A much more powerful technique is scanning the field and thinking for themselves.
Example: If you are the wing in the zone, you shouldn't be staring at the disc and listening to your sideline. You should be using your eyes to evaluate the threats: in front, to the left, right, and even behind you.
Example: If you are marking the thrower, believe it or not, you can still use your eyes to notice other things. You don't need to rely on the sideline to give a "no strike!" call. You can pay attention to the dump cutter out of the corner of your eye to know if a strike cut is coming.
The sideline chatter is essentially operating as an external brain for the players on the field. And it's tempting to have the benefit of an external brain helping you play frisbee, but you'll become a much stronger player in the long term by learning to use your own brain.
Using the "external brain" will never be as efficient as using our own brains. We'll always find it hard to commit fully to a play based just on what we heard someone say — we need to look for ourselves before we can truly feel comfortable committing. But if we're going to need to look before we commit, then we might as well just get good at looking around in the first place instead of relying on the sideline to tell us when to look around.
As a coach, this is the biggest reason I try to avoid talking when I'm on the sideline. Every time I shout advice to a player on the field, they're learning that they can rely on the sideline to tell them what to do, instead of learning to notice things for themselves. Instead of teaching your team to value sideline talk, teach your team to value scanning the field. If you do need to shout advice from the sideline, try just shouting "[player name], look around!"
This takes us back to what I've written before about the tradeoffs between winning and developing. Yelling sideline advice might help on one particular point in the short term, but it'll hold players back from effectively developing their field-scanning abilities in the long term.
Quick hits
A few more short arguments before I wrap up:
Fatigue: Yelling on the sideline (especially at all-day, multi-day tournaments) can get kind of fatiguing. I'd rather players save their energy for when they're actually in the game.
Responsibility: Believing we can rely on sideline chatter opens up a whole can of worms with respect to who is responsible for what. Imagine you're marking a thrower. You shift to take away the upline throw because the sideline yells "no strike!" Because of your shift, the thrower is able to throw an around throw to the break side and the offense scores. Is it the sideline's "fault"?
It seems clear to me that the healthiest solution is for us to be responsible for our own actions on the field. I've been in situations where players on defense came off the field frustrated that their sideline didn't help them more. I've never felt great about people doing that — something feels wrong to me about the players in the game blaming poor performance on people who aren't even playing.
Final thoughts
As my friend pointed out, teams in other sports train their players on the field to talk to each other much more. I totally agree—too many frisbee players are too quiet on the field. Of course, this is not universally true: see, for example, this Hive Ultimate video on Japan's defensive communication.
This brings me back to what I wrote about in my article about passion in ultimate. So many people say they like ultimate because they get to connect with people. But those connections shouldn't just happen off the field. Playing should itself be a nonstop conversation; it should be an opportunity to help others and ask for help when you need it; it should be people constantly working together to become more than they could be by themselves.
I've met no shortage of people who will tell you the benefits of sideline talk, and not enough who've taken the time to weigh those potential benefits against the downsides. I'd like to meet more people who are passionate about developing their team's ability to scan the field, and less who are quite so passionate about their sideline being loud.
Update (2024-12-02):
Alex Atkins, co-host of the Pod Practice podcast, mentioned on a podcast that he’s also not into sideline talk in this episode (link will take you to right before he starts discussing it). He focuses on the “Fatigue” point that I make above.
Interesting article thanks!