Anger Management - On the Field

This is from The Huddle:

Dear Huddle,
Am looking for any features/articles on SOTG within a team as well. Very often I see teams where there is a lot of fighting/blaming within the team especially during a tourney and was wondering if there any articles that address that.
-NVI

Dear NVI,

Great question. We tend to take a pretty strict view of SOTG as ‘respecting the game, respecting opponent’, so this doesn’t seem like a Spirit issue. For whatever reason, this seems like a pretty commonplace question issue with Ultimate. Why do Ultimate players get so mad at each other?

Three possible reasons:

• SOTG keeps us from blowing up at our opponents, and all of the extra emotion needs to go somewhere
• Ultimate tends to attract people that didn’t have traditional sports backgrounds where coaches regulated emotions
• The nature of the game and the importance of turnovers/decision-making leads to more frustration

Or maybe it is something else entirely.

In any case, what can you do to keep your team from the distractions involved in on-field anger? A couple of things have worked with our teams:

1. Accept some of it. The optimum level of frustration that your players vent, even at each other, is not zero. Venting helps people express themselves and prevents them from bottling up emotions that will come out in decisions and effort on the field. Players need to accept that playing on a team means that, sometimes, a teammate will yell at you for something that isn’t your fault. It’s sports…get over it and give your teammate some credit for being momentarily overcome.
2. Get a coach that everyone respects.
3. Play games and use drills that emphasize reacting to errors. There are drills you can do that are more frustrating than normal (trying to reach 100 straight catches, scrimmaging until a turnover, drills without defense, any kind of keep-away). There are also drills that help people work on reacting quickly to turnovers; this is what other sports do. Fastbreak in practices so that your team takes advantage of each other when you react emotionally instead of getting back on D. Use random ‘turnover’ calls in practices to simulate odd situations. Run drills that ask for a perfect rep, instead of many acceptable ones.
4. Keep stats and watch video of your team together. They’re hard to argue with, and they help to explain why we make the decisions that we make.
5. At some point, there are players that are skilled but will never be good teammates. If you aren’t prepared to drop them from the squad, then understand that while you care about this issue…you don’t care enough to make the change that you need. Tell them this.

This problem gets less-prevalent at the higher levels of the game, in our opinions. But maybe that is chicken-and-egg…maybe teams are more successful because they have figured out ways to deal with their emotions in a game that we all care about.

[Ben] Speaking personally, as a player that has significant anger issues, I don’t know how one of my teammates would have had any chance of approaching the issue from anything other than a team-success perspective when I was struggling at my worst. Making a point about the other team gaining strength from my outbursts, and our players playing worse, helped. Lots of ‘personal talks’ and ‘discussions’ generally just frustrated me and built up emotions that I couldn’t vent until game-time (which was obviously counter-productive).

Good luck!