11/26/2007 - New marking drill and umbrella force

It has been one week since SoCal warmup and everybody is returning from Thanksgiving break. Last week, we only had a slow one day practice on the Monday right after SoCal warmup. With that in mind, this practice was also very slow and very sluggish.

Warm-up
-Golden 70's
-Standard conditioning

Drills
-New break-the-mark drill was introduced. This one involved one player marking with feet only and the other player throwing fakes until stall 5. After the 5 stalls, the marker is allowed to use his hands and the thrower is allowed to throw. This happens until the mark has guarded 10 consecutive times. There were two rounds of this drill.
-The second drill was diamond drill to the breakside.

Scrimmage
Dark: Sully, KG, Jerry, Box, Miller, Dennis, Blazer, Ken
Light: Allen, Roeder, Sam, Peter, Bryan, Phil, Yangbin, Danny Tran, George
Both: Khosh (Dark 1st Light 2nd)

-The umbrella force was introduced today. The umbrella force is a force middle with the exception that you force straight up on the mark in the center of the field. Because the "center" of the field is arbitrary, this force is more complicated and requires a stronger field sense.
-The force proved ineffective in today's scrimmage. The opinion is rather split on the reason why. This force is used to keep the disc moving short by preventing the hucks and keeping the disc in the crowded area in the middle of the field. One reason why it was ineffective was because the defense was always lagging behind their defender. This allowed for an easy continuation for the score. The other opinion was that the force was not applied correctly because of confusion of which way to force on the field. Each defender needed to call the force before marking the offender. This communication breakdown lead to open offenders.
-Although this umbrella force was sloppy, scores were made on sloppy 50-50 hucks based on mismatched players. Not a good thing, especially if the defense is sloppy.
-Dark won each of the practice games.

Highlights (or plays on bad throws)
-Khosh had two skies over Yangbin, and one over Bryan.
-Sully had two contested grabs over Roeder
-Jerry had two 2-on-1 deep D's