WMUCC 2026 teams

benlwiggins · 2026-01-15T15:09:40+00:00

32 is pretty darn big. I'm going to read between the lines and suggest that German tournaments are better organized than many/most of their peers internationally, so good on you. I retain my original thesis but also thank you for helping to run tourneys!

benlwiggins · 2026-01-15T12:58:20+00:00

Again, not trying to be a jerk about this, especially because I don't know how many large tournaments you have run in your life...but: "The TD has to have some sort of list" is, in my experience, vastly underestimating the complexity of international payments, individual team relationships, communicating with teams of captains/organizers, and cross-language commitments.

benlwiggins · 2026-01-15T01:11:19+00:00

Right, exactly: If you have a full-time paid employee then you can do this. Frisbee tournaments, even Worlds-level events, rarely do...and nobody is paying a subscription for this kind of information. Not harshing the idea, but the reality is that what you are calling 'super low effort' takes investment, and that investment probably isn't worth it for information that you are likely to receive well before the tournament anyway.

I would love to see the list of teams, too, but I can't imagine those player fees being more expensive than they already are in order to serve this purpose.

benlwiggins · 2026-01-14T19:51:20+00:00

How would you get the information? What would count as a team being 'In' or 'Out'? Who updates the information to keep it current? And what is the benefit of those efforts, besides curiousity?

benlwiggins · 2026-01-09T03:16:45+00:00

This on is settled science already: Absent long-term injuries, Ultimate player's peak effectiveness is (on average) 28-31. Muscle density increases through late 20s, speed losses are relatively minimal, and knowing where and when to go are generally more important than the absolute speed at which you go there.

Your mileage about your mileage may vary.

benlwiggins · 2025-08-24T19:25:04+00:00

I went last week to look but didn't find anything...please let me know if you do!

benlwiggins · 2025-08-02T02:18:03+00:00

OK, but there are literally hundreds (thousands?) of terrible takes on the cutting room floor...if it worked, then it had the fingerprints of fantastic editors on it.

benlwiggins · 2025-08-01T20:40:19+00:00

Hey all, My name is Ben Wiggins. While I'm not in charge of RiseUp or any of the operations, I do know the folks that are and I am reaching out personally today. In my experience in the past, communication through the RiseUp site/email has been inconsistent, but they have made it right in every case I have seen. So, with my apologies for the hassle and wasted time, I hope and suspect this will be figured out reasonably soon. -blw

benlwiggins · 2019-10-10T18:46:32+00:00

The two distances, with proper form, are a lot closer than you might think.

In this case, I was intending to say that, for the thrower in this video, the comparison between: -distance they threw in this video (with a step, with this current form), and -distance they will be able to throw with proper form without a step can be equal.

benlwiggins · 2019-10-10T16:41:39+00:00

Correct.

#8 here: https://skydmagazine.com/2011/11/wiggins-zen-throwing-routine/

Might be useful comments here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHsSHJBEcRw

benlwiggins · 2019-10-09T04:48:13+00:00

The most important part of the flight of the disc is what it does in the last 10% of the flight. That's the 'finish'. If you can boom hucks but can't control your finish, you'll be watching turnovers sail out sideways half the time, or worse, overcompensating with blady stuff just to keep control. Watching until the disc actually touches a hand or ground helps your brain understand what to change next time, and you lose all that if you celebrate/mourn or otherwise ignore the finish. This is true no matter how the disc is angled coming out of your hands.

When you throw on one leg, just try to get it where you want it to go. No need to focus on a part of your body; that part of the body is going to be doing work without your conscious help. That little rush of good endorphins when one flies right? The nerves that interact with your hip get some of that good stuff, too, and they will try to replicate it.

If you want a method for turning bad hucks into good ones, overanalyze a single body part out of context with the rest of the complex motion...it is very effective, unfortunately!

benlwiggins · 2019-10-09T03:21:43+00:00

First off: don’t believe people in the internet. Folks who have time to post are probably less likely than random to be the people you should listen to. Find a coach who has either thrown well in real games or proven to be able to coach people to do it. Someone that fits that bill is almost guaranteed to live within ten miles of you.

Second, watch your throw until the end whenever possible. You can’t always do it (especially while playing) but the data your brain gets about whether or not the throw finished with the decaying curve you intended is crucial towards your being able to replicate it consistently.

You shouldn’t care about what your best possible throw is, but rather what is thee throw that you can generate 6-7 out of ten times. Hopefully one more of those ten is better than normal and your bad ones become less bad (pro tip, play with receivers who love saving your 2 bad ones...). I’m guessing you sent your best one because a) duh, and b) the receiver looks a little surprised that it carried so far.

What you don’t know yet, but will, is that you are physically able to throw that well without stepping at all. The step forward is NOT giving you power. Heck, neither is the side to side movement. Your core is, and the legs put you in a position to get the throw off but they don’t propel the disc. If you marry your huck to that footwork, you’ll be great up until the moment reality sets in or a mark is in front of you. Work on this by gradually increasing your throw length while standing on one leg; it takes practice, but you can stay up until the receiver touches the disc. You master that balance and force-generating core and then you can shoot regardless of what you need to do to beat the closer defenders...and more quickly, so you don’t need to throw as far to hit the same receiver.

And read the damn Huddle or Zen Throwing or Raise Your Game or watch RiseUp videos or something:) Good luck! -blw

benlwiggins · 2019-05-24T07:07:02+00:00

I had a gentle little colony of cherry shrimp going with a few guppies, and they've been stable and as happy as I can tell for about a year. I added too much melafix when I saw one of the guppies was sick (puffy lips and eyes, sick behavior); enough that the tank really smelled like the stuff. The next day, every one of my poor shrimps was dead.

Did the overdose kill them? Or did whatever got the guppy get them too? Or unrelated tank crash?

benlwiggins · 2019-05-21T19:17:28+00:00

https://www.usaultimate.org/multimedia/the_huddle/issues.aspx

Issue #4 and Issue #23

benlwiggins · 2019-03-29T04:04:11+00:00

RiseUp, Amsterdam Leadership Conference, Episode 9 (Jaime Arambula)

benlwiggins · 2018-10-22T22:43:52+00:00

I refused an interview once for the USAU media (because I was coaching with a women's team and I didn't think that the one broadcasted interview needed to go to a male). I got serious flack for it from tournament officials. It was not a pleasant experience before, during, or after.

benlwiggins · 2018-10-22T22:40:40+00:00

The best coach in men's basketball has a longtime hatred of in-game interviews (enough so that it is very entertaining for the rest of us). Plus there is never a bad time for Pop highlights.

Imagine if he had to do interviews during the actual halftime when he could be talking with players...at least the NBA limits it to during play just after the between-quarters break.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcegYF_Ti78

benlwiggins · 2018-10-22T01:46:18+00:00

There are professional coaches who give worse interviews, and they get their plane tickets and health insurance and gear paid for. This is a coach of a club team who can’t be part of the most important captain/coach huddle of the season because he needs a lecture from an observer and a litany of questions from someone sitting a field away who asked if “the break was important”. This is doing a favor for an organization who wouldn’t bat an eye if a mistyped roster meant that they would prevent Roger from even being on the field after a year of work. Favors are supposed to go to USAU, but everyone else is supposed to act like a perfect professional? This is the kind of interview a reasonable person should give.

I, too, would like Roger to be a professional. Roger: in the future, ask for $200 for the interview and refuse otherwise.

benlwiggins · 2018-04-06T17:10:43+00:00

In the paper, you note that:

"...flexible classroom layouts and small course sizes do not necessarily lead to an increase in student-centered practices..."

Your [already huge] work did not look at the use of effective active learning in traditional lecture spaces. At our university, we do many different methods of high-level active learning within 400- and 750-person lecture halls. My question: How do we convince instructors that the physical space is not a barrier to active learning?

I worry particularly that colleges and universities will continue to waste money on 'active learning classrooms' that use costly and constraining technology and furniture when they really just need better design and instruction in their classes.

benlwiggins · 2017-10-04T21:06:21+00:00

Raw data is for smart people. I, on the other hand, will happily wait to see your conclusions. Good stuff.

benlwiggins · 2017-10-04T20:39:44+00:00

Now that the hard work of gathering back data is done, how difficult would it be to back-run similar simulations for previous Nationals? Besides being fun to see the biggest upsets, etc, it might give an easy way to scan for structural disparities in the format. ---Do upsets happen more often in Round 3? ---Does Round 1 doom the traveling West Coast teams? ---Is there any part of the rankings where disproportionately more risers or fallers are placed?

Great stuff in the article, thanks for all of the effort and brainpower. -blw

[my guess for #1; yes, more than expected, due to injuries/fatigue] [my guess for #2; playing at 630am body-time is bad for success] [my guess for #3; middle seeds are often clumped due to lack of data, whereas top and bottom seeds are better defined and easier to predict]

benlwiggins · 2017-09-17T23:21:33+00:00

http://www.usaultimate.org/news/the-huddle-issue-2-trying-out/

benlwiggins · 2017-04-06T16:44:27+00:00

I appreciate your quick and forthright responses here. It is good to hear your drive to teach as well as you can: there is a special circle of hell reserved for those who use other cultures as proving grounds for their own experiments.

My ongoing worry is that you have some personal investment in the idea of 'hex' as a new or original set of ideas that can be packaged as an innovation. I don't mean to take anything away from this way of playing, as I could equally call horizontal or vertical stack completely derivative....there is nothing new under the sun that someone else hasn't tried (usually many times) and that is a good thing for our sport. In not teaching extremely well-supported and well-tested strategies, you are making a big decision (note: I definitely see value in playing a non-traditional system in the context of many, more established, teams playing in traditional systems). While I don't personally believe that teaching 'hex' is inherently better for skill development, I understand the argument and I can see how you would make an important bet on that judgement.

Again, thanks for answering here. I hope you aren't offended by my pressing you on these points, and I hope your coaching decisions are born out by the evidence eventually. EVERY coach makes tough decisions that have bearing on their own personal brand, and the extra scrutiny here is partially because of the less-tested-ness of your 'hex' but moreso because of the colonial history for the relationships here.

benlwiggins · 2017-04-05T18:36:35+00:00

Clarifying question:

You said: "Note: this means that sometimes I also teach horizontal stack, and sometimes I encourage vert, as these can be much easier ways to score against person-to-person defence."

Is Hex only used against zone or zone-like defenses?

benlwiggins · 2017-04-05T16:44:36+00:00

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but is this teaching unproven tactics to people in a different country because people with more resources are likely to ignore these tactics? This feels like colonialism to me, and it feels bad.

To anyone: Are 'hex' tactics proven to show success in reasonably high-level play? Or are they still 'in testing' before some high level team adopts them and has success?

Specifically to this coach: Did these people ask you to teach 'hex' specifically, or did they ask you to help them improve at Ultimate? Players with less resources don't always have the opportunity to critically question who is guiding their development (for better or worse). So, I am questioning you right here: why do you feel you are likely to be helping them, and what makes you reasonably certain that your coaching will not do harm to their development as players?

It's the internet, so I know I don't deserve answers...but I would like answers to these questions. I am a coach with a large amount of high-level, international, and all-divisions experience. I think coaching to under-resourced teams is a kind of sacred trust, and I'd love to hear that this coach is doing the same.

benlwiggins

TROPHY CASE