Universality

Is the move towards hybrid players good for the game?

Universality is a buzzword that is heard a lot in coaching circles; the essential idea being that all players should be able to fill all roles. It’s certainly an alluring idea as a coach: a team with no weaknesses, players that can plug and play into any position at any time would naturally make some aspects of the game simpler.

This is a trend you can see in a lot of team sports at the highest level. Since professionalisation in the late 90s, rugby forwards have dramatically increased their skill levels, and rugby backs have become stronger and more physical creating a lot more overlap in roles on the pitch. ‘Positionless’ basketball has been on the rise with the traditional guard/forward/center positional designations becoming difficult to apply to the best players in the league.

In Ultimate we’re starting to see more teams talking about having hybrids on their offence lines, all players comfortable assuming handler or cutter positions and swapping in and out during points.

Broadly I think this change is positive, particularly for youth and developing players. Coaching players during the early phases of the careers should broad and open minded. Players develop different aspects of their game at different speeds - and from personal experience as a player I can verify that you might not develop some at all even if you work really hard at it - but the important thing is to give everyone the chance to develop, and to experience the different aspects of the game.

As a coach that mainly works with older players at the performance level it’s always quickly clear to me when a player suffers from one of these:

• sees themselves as ONLY a handler or cutter or ONLY a offence or defence player (or can only mark X type of player, or…there are so many ways players pigeonhole themselves)

• get annoyed when a handler doesn’t look for them in a certain spot, or is grumpy if no cutter is available for them when they get the disc in their favourite spot, or many other things that tell me that they’ve never experienced on the opposite side of the situation

These are learned behaviours. Players pick this up from their coaches and their environment.

The negative side of universality

I already mentioned earlier that this trend is broadly positive. Coaching players to try and develop a well-rounded skillset, and ensuring that they aren’t pigeonholed into certain roles early on is great.

At a certain point however, it is empowering for a player to be given a role that highlights their strengths and minimises their weaknesses. Maybe it’s because I have so many weaknesses of my own, but I love flawed players. Figuring out how to take a player as they are right then and putting them in a place to use their strengths to help the team brings me a lot of joy - when it works anyway.

The concern I have with more hybrid style offences is that it reduces the scope for these flawed players, my favourites. This is something that we can see when we look at the sports mentioned earlier: with the increasing demands to have players good at everything the type of player sought at the higher levels has narrowed. It’s probably not a tragedy that you can’t earn an NBA contract any more just by being over 7ft and able to run, but my interest in football has dwindled along with the loss of the archetypal lazy genius No. 10 who used to be everywhere and always my favourite players to watch.

For me, as a coach working with performance teams from a small community my philosophy has always been that the average level of our players is going to be less than countries and teams with deeper resources, but the combined level of our strengths can be higher.