It seemed to me at times throughout the year, that I should have just taken a tape recorder with a few phrases that I find myself repeating over and over again at practices.
Theses phrases were: "Play like professionals.", "You don't break the mark with fakes, you break the mark by pivoting", "Don't fake for faking sake, a fake is a throw that you decided against at the last instant!", "Disc, receiver, defender... everytime.", "Cut Long!!!", and the phrase I repeated over, and over, and over again, was: "TWO HANDS!!!".
I am going to write about two handed catching, why it is important, and why everyone should do it.
One of the hardest things for great cross-over athletes to learn I have found is that two hands is better than one hand. At lehigh, every year or so, we get a couple great athletes and they always are far more comfortable catching the disc one handed than with two. I don't know why it is, and when you try to correct them, it is a hard habit for them to break, especially since they catch better one handed than most of the other kids on the team can with two.
Let me start out by saying that although I am considered to be okay at ultimate, I think I suck. Well, I think everyone who currently plays ultimate sucks since if Allen Iverson were to decide to play ultimate, everyone would see exactly how crappy they really are.
As for why I am considered an okay player, it is just out of shear willingness to grind. There is nothing that sets me apart from other athletes, I just have a willingness to run when I am tired, and throw myself at the ground again and again. I possess no real skill other than I think about positioning, bodying out, and strategy a lot more than most people I talk to.... oh, and i want to win more than you.
Anyway, so when I started playing ultimate, I couldn't catch at all. I seemed to just not understand that function since I only played Tennis and ran XC in high school. In tennis, I was a serve and volley/ chip and charge player who crashed the net at pretty much any chance at all. Since I started playing tennis in high school, there was no way for me to win by out hitting someone who had 10 years of stroke fundamentals down, so I had to win games either by two ways, running to the net and just being a bundle of reflexes, or just scrambling in the backcourt putting the ball back and praying that the other guy mis-hits the ball short so i can tee off on it, or hits it long so the points over. I prefered the charge to the net approach, so i became really good at batting things down out of the air (which made me really good at hand blocks in college... going for handblocks in club gets you in trouble because the handler is just like, oh, yeah, i can just throw it here.... and then you are broken).
Batting things down isn't an effective catching technique, and it took me several years to learn this, but the single most important factor in my improvement was the taking 5 steps back, and then charging at the disc when you are playing catch with someone. when you are just throwing back and forth, it is easy to get lazy and not think, also, most people don't have a hard time with catching when they are standing still.
Anyway, here are the pros about catching with one hand:
1.) You can grab the disc at your absolute fullest of extensions.
2.) If a defender has already become even with your shoulders, sometimes it's necessary to change your trajectory (i.e. lean into him) and catch with the opposite hand.
The Con's about catching with one hand:
1.) it actually is incredibly difficult to catch a disc directly in front of your body (like head or chest height) without moving your body to one side of it to make it easier to attack the disc from more of an angle.
2.) because of 1.) you will give up a lot of body position and forward speed.
3.) because of 1.) you will give up a backstop of your chest and abs to use when everything goes wrong.
4.) When going to a disc hard, I have yet to see too many people actually attack at a disc one handed... they normally move their arm back to try to lessen the speed of the disc when they catch it, which decreases your extension.
sooo... now, what is so great about catching with two hands...
well, the biggest benefit is actually hard to describe to younger players because they are not fully aware of the art of body position when they are cutting... i have just started to experiement/ become aware of body position this year, so I am pretty new at it too. anyway, it lets the cutter keep his body between him and his opponent, and (the claw style especially) lets him utilize his reach to his fullest.
essentially, you make a juke, and your juke should leave your opponent a few steps behind you. if you made your juke close enough to the defender, the defender is now sort of positioned behind your back/shoulder.... if you just keep your defender there while making a cut, it is very hard for him to get a D no matter how good or fast he is because essentially, he is right behind you and has to layout through you to get the D. this is body positioning, and it is your friend. If the defender is a really skilled defender and he is behind you/slightly to one side, he can layout and reach around you, but chance that he can layout further than you can lunge/explode into a calw grip fully extended out in front of you are slim... especially if you attack it at full speed.
this is where my biggest beef in ultimate comes into play. most players throw way faster than they have to. from a receiver stand point, they want the disc thrown to a space that they are cutting to moving at a speed that they can run as fast as humanly possible to get. bad handlers don't understand this because they either, a.) can't run fast, or b.) only catch 1 mph dumps and think all throws are easy to catch.
1.) you just about double the surface area that you are stopping the disc with with a claw grip, and you are giving yourself a whole lot of area to work with when you use the pancake style catch.
2.) You keep your body positioned in front of the disc. This is why college ultimate, summer league, and especially women's college ultimate has so many turns: no one takes the effort to get their body in front of the disc, and they stick their hand out for the disc to meet it, and oh my god, i am shocked that it bounced off or a defender ran by when you were trying to catch one handed with it to the side of your body. to me, body positioning is about 85% of catching a disc going to it... 5% is to remember to explode into the catch, and 10% is making sure that your hands are actually in a position to catch the disc.
3.) It's just professional. When you watch profession baseball players (the one's who aren't showing off for the crowd) catch grounders or pop flies, they get positioned in front of it, and then they use both hands (naturally, they primarily use the glove hand to catch it, but they use the other hand to back it up). The same is true for NFL receivers... they catch with two hands whenever they can. They got there for a reason, and they got their through proper fundamentals.
4.) In windy situations, the clap catch works wonders... everyone has had a disc they were trying to grab pop up or dive down on them in the wind, but, players who were trying to pancake it in that situation normally have a greater tolerance for the wind.
okay, i will talk more on this later, but i am hungry.
-josh
