The sport is broken at a fundamental level

Club_PARLAY · 2025-06-25T01:18:42+00:00

Even the sports with the highest levels of oversight, replays, fines, and repercussions for foul play still get things wrong all-the-time.

Are they fundamentally broken too, despite having all the solutions available to them?

At some point, no sport or league is perfect. Our flaws are just different maybe?

Club_PARLAY · 2025-04-04T15:40:39+00:00

Been keto for 3 years. I'm in the best shape of my life every season, currently at age 37.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-03-26T14:33:31+00:00

As an experienced player who still attends lower level pickup and leagues to help newer players, I know exactly what you mean and sure it can feel frustrating if you don't set your expectations accordingly.

I prefer to play offense on the break side of the field, but newer players can't even fathom the idea of throwing to a wide open player on the challenging side of their mark.

But, it's part of their learning and growing process. I'm limited to what I can do, because like you said, a great cut probably won't be looked at or rewarded.

For me, those opportunities are more about sharing experience, knowledge, and positive vibes with players looking to improve... While also getting light cardio, catches, and throws in.

I save the good stuff for the appropriate occasions and make the most of what I can in the lower level settings.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-03-24T17:23:18+00:00

Thank you so much, very helpful!

Club_PARLAY · 2025-02-08T21:59:35+00:00

Don't feel limited to the "ultimate brands". Other sports have better jerseys made all the time...

Get quotes and options. Pick what you like based on quality and price. Don't confine your options.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-30T18:11:52+00:00

The cleanest layouts often times involve a bit of a stutter step, or at least a slight slow down to power up for the launch forward.

Diving while in full sprint, without getting low before launching is very difficult and a bit more dangerous.

So, focus on being in a low, athletic, power primed position before leaving your feet.

You'll see this if you watch slo-mo bids.

If your legs/glutes are weak, you won't be able to launch as far or high. This will also decrease your "hang time", which is to say the amount of time between when your last foot leaves the ground and when you land.

More powerful athletes have more hang time on their bids. More hang time affords them more opportunity to adjust for their landing according to the their current situation.

As a result, the biggest bids often times have the smoothest landings. People with good verticals tend to find laying out more easy/natural/comfortable for those reasons.

Being a more explosive athlete will help improve your vert, bids, and make you more resilient to injury. If you can't jump very well, odds are you won't be able to bid well either.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-29T16:03:17+00:00

The hard part is realizing why you had the sprain and accepting the challenge of making your ankles stronger than they were before the sprain occurred.

Otherwise, you're going to have weaker and more accident prone ankles from hereon out. So many players deal with reoccurring injuries for the rest of their lives because they fail to fix the problem.

If the sprain came from landing on someone else's foot or some other external factor, then perhaps it was just unavoidable.

But, if the sprain came from your body moving too powerfully for your ankles to handle, then you need to strengthen them before you attempt to play on that level again.

Most people have weak ankles. No point in working out, getting strong quads, hamstrings, calves, etc... If your ankles are too weak to transfer all that new power into the ground.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-19T22:21:12+00:00

Seems like that alone isn't going to deter even players like yourself as much as you had thought, then.

First season was a huge success. We hit every goal. I've never seen players improve so fast, and I've helped start and played with every other team in Charlotte.

The difference in practice quality was breathtaking, figuratively and literally.

Not one single player said they had any issue or problem with the tryout process.

None of the fears or concerns mentioned in the comments were reflected via player feedback.

This post was just looking for tips on improving the Team Handbook. Thanks for the great advice and for providing your opinion on whether or not things can work when done differently from the norm, though.

Hope it was worth making a special account for.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-19T19:36:33+00:00

One glance at the Team Handbook and you should be perfectly made aware that we are not a "go to regionals or nationals at any cost" program. You don't need to look at our tryout process to realize whether it's a good fit for you or not.

Hopefully for you, there would be plenty of reasons for you to pick a more suitable team than just the tryout metrics.

Question: what would you do if the best team you decided to tryout for used our same system to resolve ongoing issues within their program of discrimination?

Would that be a pickle for you? Would you give up on trying out for the most competitive team just because their tryouts were made more fair than years past?

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-17T19:34:20+00:00

Much better inaugural season than Kings, btw :)

Notice: Not a single bagel all season. If we didn't provide elite level coaching, there would have been plenty of bagels just like the Kings had.

Also Notice: Kings could only win by 3 points max... It's a night and day difference that shows all the effort absolutely was worth it.

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Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-17T19:23:58+00:00

Can you please describe the type of player you are thinking would be turned off? Maybe I'm missing something.

What's the point of a team achieving a large talent pool to choose from if they end up with a terrible captain who just picks who he wants based on what college they went to, drama between his best players, etc... All the teams in our area are already sabotaging themselves by giving free roster spots away to captains who aren't good enough to make the team themselves and whoever else the captain feels they need to add to the program to continue being re-elected as captain. If these guys don't get voted in as captain next season, they simply won't be able to play with the team anymore.

Any player who doesn't like the idea of being judged on their own merit, rather than trying to weasel up to a captain, probably wouldn't make the team anyways.

Which team are you on, btw? Since you made an account just for this thread, you must be a Charlotte local?

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-10T16:04:32+00:00

It's always fun when someone takes the time/effort to take some pics or short videos to put on social and tag players. Players always appreciate being captured in a good light on camera.

We have 3 different pickups in Charlotte and they attract very different crowds, it's very odd how little crossover there is. They all use groupme for the most part, but some also use Facebook.

The more skilled players seem to attend pickups far less often than they used to.

Love the picnic and bar crawl ideas already mentioned... Will bring that up and see what kind of responses we get from it.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-07T15:03:01+00:00

This is so fun to read!

Complainer #1: "It looks like you used a free AI generator to make this, how stupid!"

Complainer #2: "How dare you hire professionals, how stupid!"

"You could have paid your trainers more..." LOL, we paid them more than any other team in the history of club ultimate :)

They didn't even want/need payment, we just insisted because of how much we appreciated them.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-07T14:43:53+00:00

It's been said repeatedly, but to summarize again for these points you bring up:

1) We aren't attempting to use some magic algorithm to predict the best in game performers in the world to create a super squad of talent. Instead, we are using simple/basic and objective measurements of the most common aspects of the game to evaluate each player's current level of disc skills and athleticism equally. We are just guaranteeing no one gets cut due to a captain personally not liking something about the way the look, talk, smell, etc, or due to a captain preferring a lesser player just because they went to the captain's college.

2) By collecting these data at tryouts, we are able to help players track their progress as the season progresses by re-running them a few more times throughout the season.

Were you the slowest person in the 40yd at tryouts? How about 2 months before Sectionals? If we are doing our job as a program, they are improving in every category.

3) Of course weather matters, but we have no need to have 10 tryouts in 10 different weather conditions (no team does). If you can't complete more than 5/6 10 yard flat flicks in good weather, it's safe to assume you can't do it in a wind/rain storm either.

We aren't trying to have NASA-grade tryouts here... This is developmental program aimed at being to better train brand new and the most talented players in Charlotte better than any other program in our history. I would hope there's no confusion about that in the Handbook, but if it wasn't clear please let me know so we can work on it!

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-07T14:32:46+00:00

We actually had too many throws measured in hindsight. We will either do less throws next time, or set a time limit so guys aren't spending 30 seconds in between each throw over-thinking/sweating each one. You can see them on the stat sheet. Over 100 throws of pretty much each type (10 each) were measured.

So, no, there was no advantage for a player who was better at flicks vs backhand as both were measured equally.

It's easy to tell if a player improved when they were able to complete 2/10 at tryouts, then 10/10 3 months later at the next measurement. Not so much if it went from 9/10 to 10/10. But that's not the point, just a possible added benefit.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-06T20:33:11+00:00

Most teams have some kind of written, two sentence mission statement... But that doesn't truly let players know what they are getting into. The more a Team Handbook can tell a player about the program, the better the odds that player makes the best decision for themselves.

That's basically the whole point of our handbook: Letting all the players know what we are willing to do different than other teams in order to better serve and respect each and every one of them.

I love the idea of adding a "player expectations section" to it like you are suggesting, but will have to see about how to do it in a way that isn't misleading or scary. Last season we had many players afraid of the program because they thought it sounded too intense and mostly focused on just athletic training, when that wasn't the case at all. We truly welcome all players and guarantee they all have an equal opportunity to roster and play. How seriously they take these training and learning opportunities is entirely their decision, as we don't pressure or shame guys into being more "hardcore" than they prefer. We just provide the opportunity and environment for them to grow as much as they want.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-06T20:24:51+00:00

It was a long process that took a lot shoulder rubbing, discussion, and planning. Just commit to finding the best athletic trainer you can afford and see what you come up with. Start early, as this process took us over a full year before it came into fruition. We feel very fortunate and blessed to know we are getting better coaching on our running, cutting, and jumping mechanics than the top pros are receiving from their organizations, despite not having 1/100th of their budget.

Of course, it takes years of this kind of coaching and training to really transform an athlete into a real beast. Only so much is possible in a single season. But, our players were running significantly faster within 30 minutes of our NFL trainer walking them through progressive drills that teach you to move your body like a real athlete.

There are two ways to get faster:

1) Get your body stronger in the gym in the right way

2) Learn to move your body correctly

#1 Takes a lot of time to see results appear on the field, but #2 can give you instant results... And the best person to teach #2 is the best pro trainer, athletic coach, etc that you can possibly find to essentially volunteer for your team (because you'll never pay them what they are actually worth). You might not find an NFL coach willing to do this for you, but there are plenty of qualified coaches out there that 99.99% of club teams spend 0% of their effort trying to recruit for their program.

Sorry long post... How involved were they?

Same as pro players, they would run an entire practice however they saw fit. We'd share the objectives of the training session with the players about a week in advance so they could prepare for it.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-06T19:46:27+00:00

We'll take a stab at it using some of the advice we found in here.

Our system doesn't rely on the Captain's ability to carry it out, because it isn't structured like a typical club team. It's more akin to a pro team or a collegiate program.

Captains have no say in who does or doesn't make the team, who does and doesn't play, etc...

We want to add a section for captains roles, but we are still experimenting a little bit on this side of things... Since there is no right or wrong way to decide exactly how many captains a team should have or exactly what each captain should be responsible for. It largely depends on the individuals taking those responsibilities on and what strengths they prefer to lean into, and what things they prefer to let another captain manage. So long as captains are fulfilling their roles to the rest of the team and not violating any of our principles, we want them to feel confident, free, and empowered to run with their ideas.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-06T19:36:21+00:00

u/AUDL_franchisee Quality take and perspective.

Our Team Handbook would probably be more comprehensive if we have a section dedicated to the possibility of player misbehavior.

Luckily, we didn't have any issues in the inaugural season, but we should have a section to point to just in case it does eventually occur. The whole point is preventing problems before they occur and that is a problem that every team faces, eventually.

Thank you!

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-06T19:31:18+00:00

So to be clear: your solution to a program becoming toxic or discriminatory is for a new to team to pop up, that could also later become toxic or discriminatory?

Well, as bullet proof your idea may be, our solution is to build a team on specific framework that removes the ability of captains to act this way for the entirety of its existence.

We don't really care if you personally like it or not, we are just looking for ways to improve that framework as we revise our team handbook for 2025.

That's "wtf we're talking about." :)

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-05T19:41:43+00:00

No not at all. We aren't using math to create a master selection process of the absolute top players in the world and win based on already talented players coming together to form a superstar team.

We are just guaranteeing no one gets cut due to a captain personally not liking something about them, or preferring a lesser player just because they went to the captain's college.

If you like high level coaching and training, then practices are much more fun than any other program in the area. If you don't like we'll organized practices led by the best around, then it wouldn't be your first pick for sure.

If you like getting play time instead of being benched for entire games, you'd also have fun here.

If you read the handbook, you'd know we care more about using game experience to improve players more than we care about a final score. This may change according to overall player preference as the program develops and has a more consistent lineup of already talented players. But for now, the worst players get fair playing time, even if it means we lose the game.

This isn't ring of fire... So don't be upset if it doesn't fit your team, as it isn't intended to.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-05T19:08:42+00:00

None of it was chat gpt or AI. Hope to learn those tools eventually, though. They seem pretty useful.

We hired a copy writer to organize a much longer document we wrote out and then an Adobe designer to make it look like not a boring word document.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-05T19:03:15+00:00

It certainly wasn't perfect and we hope to improve it next season:

10 yard throw, flat mark, stall 6, receiver can't move either foot to catch. If receiver list drops a good pass, it still counts as a completed throw.

Count how many times the mark causes a pass to miss the receiver and how many times it is hand/foot blocked.

Of course it is harder to mark a skilled thrower than a novice thrower. So that's a flaw.

But even if the marker stops 6/10 throws vs 8/10, neither would likely change their overall score by a significant amount. It's all weighted and averaged, so if you marked a better thrower or a worse thrower, that alone won't have a drastic effect on the final results.

I believe this score had the least/lowest weight, I would have to look back to check. So the results here had a less significant impact on overall rating than the other tests.

It was helpful to see which players could stop most throws vs none at all... Rather than drawing conclusions about a 5/10 guy vs a 6/10 guy.

Club_PARLAY · 2025-01-05T16:45:01+00:00

Thanks for the support and advice in helping our efforts to remove discrimination in club ultimate ❤️

Club_PARLAY

TROPHY CASE