The 'post-huck' fast break

Taking advantage of mis-positioned defenders

I'm generally a big fan of picking the disc up quickly after a turnover. Here's a specific situation where quickly picking up the disc represents an especially juicy opportunity.

A deep throw goes up. In a last-moment attempt to get to the disc, the cutter(s) sprint as hard as they can. As the disc hits the ground, the cutters are running past it since it takes a few steps to slow down from a full sprint.

All turnovers generally provide a great opportunity for a fast break. Defenders are often out of position—since the optimal position for an offensive player isn't the same as the optimal position you'd be in if everything was the same but your team was on defense. Defenders are also not always fully engaged mentally to play their best defense—since they were just on offense a moment ago.

But this specific scenario offers two extra advantages. The defenders (who a moment ago were sprinting cutters) are now on the completely wrong side of the disc. And there's almost always lots of open space in front of the disc—the group of players who were involved in catching or defending the huck are near the disc, with a big gap between them and the players who didn't chase after the huck.

I noted an example of this play in the recent Lawless vs. Crocs game at 2023 Nationals. Here it is in both YouTube and GIF form:

This play checks off all the boxes for the situation I described above—cutters-become-defenders on the wrong side, a big open space to gain yards—but Lawless doesn't take advantage.

As I noted in a previous article, frisbee offenses are designed to create open spaces and out-of-position defenders. But we don't always need to work so hard for those opportunities. Sometimes they are generated for us by the flow of the game, and all we need to do is be aggressive about picking up the disc quickly.

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Later in the weekend, I saw an example of exactly what you should do in this situation. This example was provided by Levke Walczak, who was already one of my favorite players (see here or here). In Brute Squad's semifinal game against Fury, she grabs the disc immediately after a huck hits the ground, while one defender is still on the ground after their layout catch and another defender is inattentive to the threat posed by Levke picking up the disc:

[Updated 2025-02-26: Fixed this link to point to the right timestamp. Ultiworld cut some dead time from the video causing my timestamp to point to the wrong moment.]

In this case, the play doesn't work out perfectly for Brute Squad. The receivers Levke wanted to throw to weren't quite as ready to play as she was. And the Fury defenders got back into position quickly—especially Carolyn Finney who immediately pops back up after her layout attempt. If Levke's teammate had been ready to receive the pass, she may have been able to turn it into a give-and-go situation that kept Finney on her back while she gained a number of yards. This really highlights how fast break readiness is a whole team effort. It's easy to talk about "picking up the disc quickly", but what I really mean is that the whole team needs to start playing offense quickly—especially those who have an opportunity to get open near the disc.

The fact that it didn't work out in this specific instance doesn't discourage me. At the highest levels of performance, competition is fierce. You need to do the right things ten times to get an advantage over your opponents once or twice. But those small edges add up over the course of a full game, tournament, or season.

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Brute Squad in general—but Levke especially—did a great job of picking up the disc quickly after turnovers. (Fury does this well too, to be fair.) I won't discuss that in too much detail in this article, but I want to highlight one other play that impressed me. Watch this play below, where Laura Ospina starts sprinting towards the disc while it's still in the air (yet to have officially hit the ground and become a turnover):

This highlights something I've been integrating into my game recently that I rarely see people doing. You shouldn't start playing offense as soon as the disc hits the ground—you should start playing offense as soon as you know there's going to be a turnover. Once you can see where the disc is going, figure out where you want to be once it hits the ground and gets picked up (or once it's caught by your teammate on defense). Getting there earlier than anyone else is an amazing way to get your team's flow started.

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Let's wrap up and bring it back to the original discussion. I'd like to see more people start to recognize the pattern of cues that alert us to the opportunity of a post-huck fast break. A deep throw. The defenders-formerly-known-as-cutters overrunning the disc and getting themselves out of position. A big open space in front of the disc. Learn to recognize this situation—put the disc into play quickly and gain big yardage.