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Two Players Of Note | |
Two players that come to mind when I think of good footwork are Idris Nolan offensively and Hensley Sejour defensively. Idris is quite a good basketball player, which requires a significant amount of body control as well as footwork. Hensley, coming from a football background as a defensive back (I believe) has worked on his footwork extensively. Whether offensively or defensively, Idris and Hensley have the same traits in common: 1. Awareness of the current situation. 2. Positioning themselves. 3. Making people commit. Their awareness, positioning, and footwork to make people commit or recover allow them to make plays on offense and defense. Over the past two years, our teams have started to implement footwork drills during track sessions. Most of the footwork drills are ladder drills at this time. Our workouts in sprinting have incorporated some footwork drills, but usually the focus is on Ultimate specific type of sprints. Everyone on our team has noticed that their footwork in Ultimate is better from even doing something simple as ladder drills. I think the Ultimate community is very slowly coming to the realization that there is a proper way of doing things, but have yet to make the change. Mostly because there has not been an authority figure to say this is the right way to do something. For instance, we may do some defensive drills, but each player executes their footwork as they know how and are unwilling to change because they have been successful in the past even with poor footwork. This will change in the future, as I see the implementation of soccer and defensive back football type drills into ultimate, as players start to make the association between the footwork in those two sports and Ultimate. This implementation will have to come from players who are/were low level college players who have practiced the footwork and know the drills that work to improve footwork. With few exceptions, we are not there quite yet…but we will be shortly. | |