Resources on Learning Ultimate Frisbee

This year I started playing regularly on an Ultimate Frisbee team (wooo 30 Foot!) through our local organization MODS. I've always loved throwing a disc and have thrown regularly with friends over the past 4 or 5 years. I'm completely new to team sports with offensive/defensive strategies and formations, so its been a lot of learning and fun so far.

There's a lot to learn about the game, so I thought I'd post up links to some of the various guides I've found really helpful in teaching me backhand and forehand throws/grips, as well as introducing me to different offence and defence strategies. If you're like me, instruction, technique and practice is what its all about. Think, you might hear an amazing musician, but his or her music is the product of hours of unseen practice, mistakes, correction, hard work, and instruction. The same goes with most things in life, including Ultimate.

Read on and enjoy! There's stuff from learning to throw for the first time, to playing a rabbit 1-3-3 zone defence.

Learning to Throw

This is the most essential part of the game, fortunately its also the easiest to practice and improve on. Instead of needing a dozen people to team practice all you need is 2 people to effectively practice throwing. In fact 2 is best as you get in the most throws.

If I could only give one piece of advice to those hoping to improve their throw, its this: you have to change your throw to improve it. This sounds so obvious, but all the time I see people throwing exactly the same way 10 times in a row hoping that the result will be different. Throwing 100 times with bad technique will develop a bad habit and will take you that much longer to correct that technique. So keep experimenting by modifying grip, disc angle (left/right as well as up/down), wrist snap, arm position, weight shifting/rotation. That being said, be patient too! It took me several summers before I felt confident with my backhand and forehand.

Below I've listed the best guides I've come across in throwing. Careful reading them though, I almost broke something in my room when I went through it (you can probably imagine the situation).

Learning to throw Backhand [UltimateHandbook.com]
Learning to Throw Forehand [UltimateHandbook.com]
Various Disc Throws [Wikipedia.org]
Throwing Various Articles by an Australian Ultimate group

Learning the Game

Ultimate really appealed to me for its regard for sportsmanship and that its really accessible to new players (like myself who hadn't played other competitive sports). Here's some guides on introducing the game of Ultimate (rules, the field, players, history, etc):

Ultimate in 10 Simple Rules [UltimateHandbook.com]
Article on Ultimate [Wikipedia.org]


Learning to Play as a Team

I don't have much 2 cents to put in here. I come from a solo classical musician background, who got into solo endurance sports, who studied computer science. LOL so not much working for me there :P. Having watched and played good teams has taught me how essntial team skills are. Here's some guides on different team strategies that I've read and are really good:

Offence and Defence - Various articles by an Australian Ultimate group
Ultimate Basics [Ultimate Handbook.com] - Use the toolbar on the left, a bunch of articles covering basic offence, defence, marking, cutting, catching, etc

Most of All

Love the game and have fun =)

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