Early Season Tournament Strategy
How to use early tournaments to maximise success later in the season
I was listening to Sam Murphy’s excellent interview on the Breakside podcast this week and he kindly gave me a shout out for helping structure Ranelagh’s 2022 season to get them peaking at the end of the season.
I was also at Siege of Limerick last weekend watching Irish teams early in their season, and the European calendar for the year has recently been announced so between all of these I’ve been thinking a lot about how teams can use their early season tournaments to set themselves up to peak later.
You can look at how you treat regular season games as a scale where the extremes are trying to be perfect and treating game #1 of tournament #1 like it’s a major final vs changing up what you’re doing every point. Neither extreme is particularly fruitful. You want to be somewhere in between - not solely focused on winning every game but also not running random things so that you’re unable to learn anything.
My key overall principle:
I am avoiding doing the same things through the same players
It should probably go without saying but in order for this to work you need to have a plan beforehand. Ideally this is part of a season long plan where you know what style and standard you are trying to reach as a team. I think the best analogy here is a sculpture - you are hoping you end up with a beautiful refined piece at the end of the season, but you’re going to get there by starting off with a big hunk of stone and discarding what doesn’t fit.
The plan for an individual tournament should then fairly naturally form part of the steps moving towards the endpoint you have laid out. A well thought out and detailed tournament plan is particularly essential to put together in advance for a player coach or a less confident coach - get your team leaders together beforehand or between games and they can help you structure this. Then you just need to stick to the plan during the game, or make adjustments in case of injury.
Putting An Overall Framework In Place
When you’re planning you should be mainly thinking about these three elements
What: tactics and structures do you want to implement
How: do you want to play within those structures
Who: do you want to play each role
What
This is the bit every team presumably does think about - what offensive and defensive structures do you want to have ready for the end of the season. What are your primary, secondary, tertiary looks? Which looks suit which players the best?
How
Do you want your team to play fast or slow? Look for deep shots or work unders? Reset a lot or seek out forward momentum? Impose your style of play or adapt to what the opposition is doing?
Who
The majority of teams are going to need to integrate players at the start of this season. This includes both getting rookies some reps in competitive games, but also facilitating players stepping up from small roles into larger roles.
Teams always want to do this, but it’s important to actually integrate them. Structured plans help - allowing a player doing the same thing multiple times consecutively in a game is more meaningful than doing something completely different every time you step on the pitch.
I think it’s important to understand that integration and/or development doesn't work by throwing all your developing players out together - you need to give them successful reps and they'll do that by playing with your best players, not your worst.
Your Mental Framework
This is also of critical importance. YOU need to be very clear on this, and your players need to understand as well. The key components in my experience:
Be ready to lose (but don't want to lose)
This is the hardest part. I hate losing. But trying new things inevitably means you will lose games that you could have won if you had fully optimised for right now. And I don’t want to say you should never do that - quite often I had plans for each game in a weekend except if we made the semi/final when we’d go out to win. Luckily for me we never had that problem!
Be ready to lose trying things you're not good at
OK, with that said - just losing isn’t helpful. Lose because you’re trying to improve in some way. It can be very tempting (particularly if you’re running close with a team you think are better) to forgo the plan and start running what you think are your best plays through your best players…only to lose anyway.
Be prepared to lose by your developing players making mistakes
To return to the first principle - the worst use of time is doing the same things through the same players and losing. I’m definitely happier if we lose because our developing players make mistakes under pressure. If we lose because the players we already play through make a lot of mistakes then it was a fairly pointless exercise. This is a balancing act - you still want your stars to get reps and play their own games, but there will be a temptation in close games to funnel everything through them, and you won’t develop the rest of your squad if you choose to do that.
If you think you're good at something, practice winning with it
It’s not all about losing. Practicing winning is important too so make sure you have time planned for that.
How to Plan
The simplest structure is to set mini focuses each game, or each game segment - I usually do something for each half of each game for each line. Breaking the game down into any smaller segments than halves is probably too ambitious. If you don’t do lines then a different focus for each pod works the same.
This can be some, or all of (if you’re feeling ambitious), the following categories, however you should be picking a single focus from each otherwise you’re trying to do too much. The fewer different areas you’re focusing on the easier it is to learn from and adjust. If you have 4 focuses for each line in each game then how can you puzzle out what adjustment and what impact - I don’t know if you can.
Tactical: This is the structures you’re playing e.g. we're practicing vert stack in the first half and side stack in the second on O line, we're practicing our 232 zone in the first half and force middle in the second on D line. My approach to the start of the season is to try everything and drop stuff that isn’t good. I think a lot of teams still try to focus on perfecting one tactic first and then move onto practicing another but I don’t like coaching that way.
Patterns/style: this is usually going to be linked to your tactics but it’s more about how specifically you are approaching executing on them. For example you could set goals like the following: we're going to reset on stall 0 on the sideline, we're going to have an internal stall of 3 seconds to move the disc quicker, we're going to earn blocks before the opposition can leave their brick mark.
Individual: not to be confused with goal setting for individuals, this is more specifically integration of specific individuals into the patterns of play e.g. we want to get player X reps as our main O line handler, we want to see how player Y does marking handlers on the D line, player Z is going to pull this game
Results: As I stated earlier, it is actually important to practice winning games, so don’t lose sight of that. This can be picking certain games which you’re going to treat as a must-win game and call tactics and lines like you would at the end of the season, or you can do it as simply as having a defined plan to practice something in the first half then going all out to win in the second half. This latter option is definitely more palatable to players that haven’t experienced this type of season long experimentation before.
Good luck to all the teams starting their season. If you’re reading this and like the sound of it but you aren’t sure how to apply it then I do consultancy work for teams - send me a mail at Bettereverydaycoaching@gmail.com