Why you shouldn't always play tight defense

More on basketball-style defensive positioning

If you've read some of my analysis of defense (like Defense is for stopping the other *team*), you may know I strongly favor a basketball-inspired approach to defensive positioning, where the goal is absolutely NOT to stay as close to your person as possible at all times.

In fact, as I suggested in the linked article, you could even say that good defense is trying to be as far away from the person you're guarding as possible¹.

There are a number of benefits to a play-loose-when-appropriate defense, only some of which I discussed in the linked article. Let's briefly look at all of those arguments (or at least, as many of those arguments as I can think of).

• Offenses like space, so defenses should clog space

  It's a truism in field sports that offenses like open spaces. What's the basic idea of a vert stack? To put players in the middle of the field so there's open throwing lanes on either side of them. Why do teams run a front of stack "iso" in end zone situations? Because a 1-on-1 in lots of open space strongly favors the offense. What do people like about ho stack? That the deep space is wide open for any of four cutters to attack.
  
  Offenses like space. Defenses are there to stop offenses—so they shouldn't just play along and let the offense achieve their goals! As a defender, you should make it so the pair of people consisting of you + your assignment are clogging as much space as possible. Any time you're not doing that, you're just giving the offense exactly what they want. When your assignment tries to create space, fight back.

  

  
  
  

• Deny the thrower certainty

  What else do offenses like? I'd say offenses like when decision making is easy. So, a good defender makes decision making as hard as possible for a thrower. The most obvious implication of that—the one that drives basic defensive strategy—is that you don't want to leave people wide open in places that it's easy to pass to them.
  
  But the other end of the spectrum is important, too. It's not good defense if a thrower looks at your assignment and KNOWS they shouldn't attempt a pass to them. If a thrower looks at your assignment and immediately sees someone they obviously shouldn't pass to, you've just made their decision making easier. Defense shouldn't make anything easier for the offense.
  
  Make the thrower wonder if your person is open enough to attempt that 40-yard hammer. Make the thrower wonder whether there's enough of an opening to throw the IO break forehand. The more confused they are assessing their options, the better it is for the defense. The more time you can sucker them into considering whether to throw to your assignment, the less time they'll have left to consider other passing options.
  

• Maintain hip supremacy

  One challenge with playing very tight defense is that it makes footwork harder.
  
  Say you have a cutter in front of you, just off your hip, and they take two hard steps past your shoulder. They're now behind you, and you'll need to turn nearly 180 degrees to keep up with them. And if they change directions in response to your adjustment, you may need to rotate 180 degrees twice in a second.
  
  Now imagine the cutter had taken the same two hard steps, but you were playing positionally, five steps away from them. They've just gone from being far away from you to being...slightly less far away from you. You don't need to turn around at all.
  
  Offense usually likes getting far away from the defense, but not when they're trying to juke you. That's why² you'll sometimes see cutters on offense run at their defender before exploding into their cut.
  
  Playing off your assignment simplifies defensive footwork, reducing the offense's opportunities to get you turned around. ("maintaining hip supremacy" is what I call this when I'm talking to myself—minimize the amount the offense can dictate whether you need to flip your hips.)
  

  

  Orange on offense, scoring at the top of the image. Brown is on defense. In the right image, I wouldn’t literally do nothing, I’d start backpedaling to begin to match my momentum to theirs. (Yes, the orange cutter on the right would probably just directly cut under if the situation was really like that. I simplified the scenario to focus on one particular concept, try not to get too caught up in the details!)

• Conserve energy
  Everyone knows playing frisbee is hard. Smart positional defenders save energy compared to playing always-tight defense. If you chase a deep cut against a thrower who can't throw that far, you're wasting energy. If you follow your assignment to the break sideline when the disc is all the way across the field, you're wasting energy. If you chase a cutter from the back of a vert stack, you're expending much more energy than if you and a teammate learn how to bracket.

  (This point is perhaps only half true. Good positioning will save you energy, but good defenders will then use that saved energy to do other things…We'll discuss more below)
  
  

• Know who you want to have the disc
  One strategic factor many frisbee teams still ignore (but Fury doesn't) is understanding that every offense will always have players that you want having the disc in their hand — i.e. the opposing offense's least threatening players. Sure, the dream is to completely shut down the other team, never letting them complete a single pass after the pull. But we can't plan for perfection—any competent frisbee team is going to complete hundreds of passes against us. So the real question is, given that our opponents are capable of completing passes against us, who do we want them completing passes to?
  
  Even if you don't believe in having every defender play basketball-style positional D, there should always be 1 or 2 players on your defense who understand that actually, it's ~good~ if the person I'm guarding catches the disc (in places that are relatively non-threatening, that is—of course I'm not suggesting you let them run to the endzone undefended).
  

• Play help defense

  The main theme of Defense is for stopping the other *team* is that the only valid defense is team defense. So I won't belabor the point too much in this essay. Sagging off your own assignment puts you in better positions to help your teammates. The best version of this is when the whole team plays as a unit—and you sag off in one direction while teammates sag off on the opposing side. Hive Ultimate has lots of videos on this worth checking out. But even when I'm not playing with a team that's committed to team defense, by playing my positional style I'm able to play help D much more than I'd otherwise be able to.
  
  To put it another way—and tie in with the previous bullet point—there will be times when the best (least bad) result for your defense is to let your assignment catch the disc. The obvious example being when you can help shut down a score (or otherwise big yardage gain) in exchange for leaving your assignment open underneath. If you're not yet recognizing those opportunities and responding to them, you're playing suboptimal defense, even if your person isn't getting the disc.
  
  

• Get a better view

  For similar reasons to the discussion above in "Maintain hip supremacy", a looser defense makes it easier to see more of the rest of the field. An opponent who's close to you can quickly escape from your field of vision by taking a few hard steps. An opponent who's far from you could run 20 yards and you still wouldn't need to turn your head the tiniest bit.

  Even if you're not super focused on playing help defense, knowing where the disc is and where the other cutters are helps you predict what'll happen next—giving you a better chance at guarding your own assignment. Sagging off a bit when appropriate makes it easier to absorb that information while not losing sight of your own assignment.
  
  

• Get a head start on the race to threatening areas
  Often, the opponent you're guarding won't be in a spot where they're going to catch the disc—they're going to run somewhere else before catching a pass. And the offense always has the advantage in a footrace because they get to decide when that race starts. One defensive counter is to figure out where the cutter wants to go, and get a head start by shading a few steps in that direction.
  
  If your cutter is on the far sideline away from the disc, shade towards the middle of the field. If your assignment is at the back of the stack, slide a few steps into the open side lane. If nothing else, I often stay a few steps deep of my assignment so they won't win the race to the most threatening area—the endzone. No matter where you are on the field, the question that's always at the back of your mind should be how hard can I play defense *here* without risking getting beat to the endzone?

  Perhaps another useful way to think about all this is that you're stopping the disc, not stopping people. The only question that's actually relevant to playing shutdown defense is "can I get to the disc before the disc gets to my person?". If you can answer "yes" to that question, you're playing shutdown defense. Worry about being in a position where you'll be able to stop the disc from getting to your person, not simply where you can stop your person.
  

A comment replying to Defense is for stopping the other *team* says "The long and short of this is: Always be poaching, unless you can't be poaching."

I agree with the sentiment, but I don't love the idea of calling this style 'poaching'. In my opinion, the connotations of 'poach' don't match what I'm trying to do on defense. For example, Ultiworld's Ultimate Frisbee Glossary says poaching is "A defensive maneuver whereby a defender guards a throwing lane or other space as opposed to guarding a single opponent." [emphasis added by me].

But smart positional defense is good one-on-one defense (along with being good team defense at the same time, which is what really matters). It saves you energy, it confuses the offense, it improves your awareness, it makes it harder to get turned around, it give you a head start on the race to threatening areas—these are all good things even if you're guarding a single opponent.

Poaching also has connotations of being 'lazy' defense, and I think my style of defense is anything but lazy. It's certainly not mentally lazy. And I don't think it's physically lazy, either. Playing smart positional defense requires you to be constantly adjusting:

• Every time the disc moves, you adjust

• Every time the person you're guarding moves, you adjust

• Every time other cutters move, you adjust

• Every time the thrower looks somewhere new, you adjust

You're still moving a lot—you're just not moving at the same time and to the same places that your opponent is moving. (For the math nerds: the smarter the defender, the less correlation there is between their movements and their assignment's movements.)

Play so far off your assignment that the only way to guard them is by sprinting to close the gap as soon as the thrower looks at them³. And then be ever-ready to start that sprint.

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[Updated 2025-06-25]:

I found a moment from the 2025 London Invite that I think exemplifies the idea of "Get a head start on the race to threatening areas". Watch below as the Canadian defender is playing very tight defense on a cutter in the stack—even to the point of having a hand on them. But with the disc near the open side sideline, that cutter really isn't a threat in the spot they're currently occupying.

But when the German cutter explodes to the open side, the defender can't react in time and gets beat easily. A larger buffer gives the defender an extra split-second to react before they’ve been beaten. And all you’re giving up is a stall-zero, crossfield hammer. Taking a step or two off their assignment here—sagging a little towards the open side—actually would've made it easier for Canada to play man-to-man defense.

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I also like this clip from Brooke Nishida’s 2025 Callahan video to highlight the idea I used to end the article:

Play so far off your assignment that the only way to guard them is by sprinting to close the gap as soon as the thrower looks at them. And then be ever-ready to start that sprint.

If you can play defense that far off your person, you should—you’ll clog up space making everything harder for the opposing offense. Again quoting from above:

Perhaps another useful way to think about all this is that you're stopping the disc, not stopping people. The only question that's actually relevant to playing shutdown defense is "can I get to the disc before the disc gets to my person?". If you can answer "yes" to that question, you're playing shutdown defense.

Here’s Brooke:

1. meaning, “as possible without letting them easily get the disc”

2. it's one reason, at least

3. I don't quite mean this literally, but, you get the idea.