“WHY DOESN’T ANYBODY ON YOUR TEAM KNOW WHAT TEN FEET IS?”
Last March I could be heard yelling that (or words to that effect) during a high school Ultimate Frisbee match in Chattanooga. I was yelling at the coach of the team my team was competing against. In doing so, I was behaving badly by the standards of the sport I coach. In fact, I think that kind of yelling is frowned upon in youth sports in general. I’m sorry I did that. Kind of. A little.
In fact, I'm not particularly sorry.
My lack of remorse may be seen as a betrayal of a cherished principle of my sport, “Spirit of the Game”, but in a peculiar way I believe that I may be showing fealty to it. As many people know, Ultimate, from its inception in the late 1960s, has governed itself in part by what we call “Spirit of the Game”. It reads like this in the official rules of Ultimate:
Spirit of the Game is a set of principles which places the responsibility for fair play on the player. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of mutual respect among competitors, adherence to the agreed upon rules, or the basic joy of play. All players are responsible for knowing, administering, and adhering to the rules. The integrity of ultimate depends on each player’s responsibility to uphold the Spirit of the Game, and this responsibility should remain paramount.
The aspect of Spirit of the Game that most people seem to focus on involves how players are charged with treating each other – with “mutual respect.” How that quality shows up (or doesn’t show up) in a match can take many forms, and not everybody agrees on what constitutes mutual respect. Are we supposed to high five our opponents? Is trash talk OK? Is spiking the disc after a score disrespectful? Is it essential that we gather in a circle after the match with our opponent and talk about how things went? There is not universal agreement on any of these questions.
As a fifteen-year youth coach I find myself less concerned these days with vibey mutual respect among Ultimate players than I am with what constitutes “knowing, administering, and adhering to the rules.” In Ultimate we self-officiate – players call their own fouls, sometimes on themselves. Part of the reason for this practice is necessity, for the same reason that rec league tennis matches and basketball in public parks have self-officiating – even if we wanted referees, we couldn’t afford as many as it would take to call every match. We have no choice but to do it ourselves. Beyond this practical consideration, self-officiating is also a concrete expression of the ideals of Spirit of the Game: players are enjoined to hold themselves responsible for fair play, as opposed to doing whatever they can get away with until a referee stops them. The corps of youth coaches are at the ground level of teaching the fair-play-upholding disposition that, combined with knowledge of the rules, makes sound self-officiating possible. We have an important job.
But it is a job with built in frustrations that can strain our self-control. Every youth coach in Ultimate knows that learning to self-officiate soundly is as difficult, in its own way, as learning to accurately throw a 30 yard outside-in forehand. There are many rules to learn, things happen fast in a match, and the protocol of settling rules disputes on the field is difficult for ten-year veterans to uphold, let alone novices. As such, we anticipate imperfect implementation (to say the least) of the rules in youth Ultimate. Fouls that aren’t really fouls get called, players who are out of bounds get called in bounds, a false understanding of the rules settles a dispute, the heat of competition erodes a player’s judgment. That’s how it goes. We try to roll with it, we try to stay out of what’s happening on the field and let the players settle things, and over time we train our players to improve in self-officiating just as we train them to make good cuts.
So we youth coaches have to be patient and tolerant about self-officiating fails in our division – they are part of the learning process – but I have lost my ability to be patient with a particular subset of rule violations, those related to marking.
In Ultimate, the person guarding the thrower is called the marker. As we often say to markers, “You are the most important defender on the field”, and they are. They have the role of trying to force throws into areas where the defense has the best chance of making a block. The marker has some rules to follow, though. He counts off the ten seconds the thrower has to make a pass – he can’t rush that count. The marker has to keep the space of a disc between himself and the thrower, and that disc space includes his arms – he can’t wrap them around the thrower and make it impossible for him to pivot. And the marker cannot be abetted by a second marker. Any extra defender focused on the thrower has to be at least ten feet away from the person with the disc.
It was violations of these rules of marking that had me yelling at a fellow coach in Chattanooga. A couple of months later in Conyers, Georgia, my outrage over a marking violation compelled me to commit another youth coaching sin: I made a foul call from the sidelines.
What is it about marking violations that sends this otherwise mild-mannered coach over the edge? A dubious line call might upset me, but I wouldn’t get into a shouting match over it. What makes marking violations so appalling to me that I break spirit protocol and feel so little guilt about it?
One way marking violations differ from other kinds of self-officiating disputes is that they have a whiff of deliberate disregard for fair play to them. Many problems with rule adherence (perhaps most of them) arise at least semi-innocently from the muddle of competition. Things happen in the maelstrom of a match that defy 100% just resolution - Was that a pick? Did you bumping in to me prevent me from making that catch? Did your foot touch the line? A player can commit a defensive foul without intending to, or honestly believe she caught a disc that may have brushed the ground first. But marking violations tend to involve making an unethical choice. Counting fast and double-teaming and wrapping aren’t honest mistakes – they result from decisions made by someone who either doesn’t know the rules (but should) or isn’t really committed to fair play.
In Chattanooga, the team we were competing against routinely violated the rule against double-teaming the thrower (the ten-foot rule mentioned above – the photo is from that match). In many instances my throwers found themselves hemmed in in ways the double team rule is meant to prevent. Some defenders even inched closer as the stall count increased, as though a high count somehow nullifies the double team rule. I urged my team to protest the persistent violations, but it kept happening. I had words with the other team’s coaches. Loud words. Why couldn’t they keep their second marker outside a ten-foot radius? Did they need a refresher course on basic units of measurement? It was mystifying. The other team seemed well-coached in their execution of a zone defense, so why couldn’t they execute it by the rules? The responses of the other coaches to my complaints weren’t satisfying. They said they had tried. I could see them trying, once I complained. However, considering the deliberate nature of marking violations, I had to wonder how hard they had tried, especially since the violations kept happening. I don’t believe these coaches wanted their players to cheat, but it appeared to me that in practice they had treated their duty to teach their players to know, administer, and adhere to the rules as an afterthought, and by the time their players were tasked with self-officiating in an actual match, they couldn’t do the job soundly.
Two months later in Conyers my team was competing against the top team in our division. We had little chance of winning, but of course I wanted us to put up the best fight we could, and my boys were answering the bell. At one point we forced a turnover near the other team’s goal line. This was a good opportunity for us to keep the match competitive. Our player who had picked up the disc and prepared to attempt a scoring pass suddenly found himself nearly embraced by a defender. He must have felt like he was getting hugged by Buddy the Elf. It was a classic wrapping violation. After a few moments our player called “disc space” and finally said “violation” and play stopped so the dispute could get resolved. All this happened right in front of me. As our player tried to explain his grievance, I feared that in the spirit of reconciliation this open-and-shut case of rule-breaking was going to get resolved as though it were just a difference of opinion, with some kind of appalling compromise. So I interrupted. The protocols of youth Ultimate would allow me explain the operative rule and then let the two players settle the dispute, but instead I went too far: I played referee. I physically imitated what the defender had done and said, “You were wrapping him. You can’t do that. He has to be allowed to pivot.” In my mind I was adding, “This is obviously your second or third year of playing. How do you not know this? What’s the matter with your coach? Doesn’t he know teaching you to mark fairly is part of his job?” But I didn’t. I had gone too far as it was making a call from the sideline. That isn’t done.
I overstepped my authority in that situation, but that incident illustrates a second major problem I have with marking violations: the gratuitous burden they place on the thrower. One of the coaches in Chattanooga responded to my double team complaint by asserting that my players were free to call the violations. That’s true – they were. But anyone who has played Ultimate and thinks about it will realize what a big ask that can be. Getting a wrapper to back off is like having to ask someone to stop tickling you while you drive a car. Calling a marking violation requires the player who already has the most cognitively demanding job on the field to add needless refereeing to his analytical overload. At the time my player was getting wrapped in Conyers, he was busy trying to read the downfield defense and pick out a promising target and assess the reset possibilities and speculate about what throws he could execute. In ten seconds. Under pressure. That’s a lot for one brain to process without the additional challenge of refereeing. And, to reiterate, the refereeing challenge should never happen in the first place because wrapping is a violation that doesn’t happen by accident. My double-teamed throwers in Chattanooga had been presented with the same unfair predicament.
I don’t think anybody on either coaching staff was happy with me after those incidents, and I confess I didn’t set a good example for any of the players present. Spirit of the Game obliges us to seek more constructive ways to resolve conflicts than the anger-driven reactions I chose. Fortunately, I don’t believe any grave damage was done in either case. After each match we had a pleasant spirit circle with the other team. In Chattanooga the opposition had identified our player who best embodied the “mutual respect among competitors” aspect of spirit of the game and presented him with a quirky little prize, a fun toy, as a token of appreciation. That side of Spirit of the Game has become passé to some people, but I still enjoy it and I know my players do. I do love the good vibes. And yet, I think it would be better for the sport if coaches like the ones I encountered in Chattanooga made sure their teams spent more time learning the double team rule and less time shopping for silly gifts.
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