Chatting to Coach of Belgium Open U24s Valerio Iani about the Belgian’s Hopes at the World Championships

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Valerio Iani is a coach who has developed youth ultimate around the World, most notably in the USA founding Oakland Ultimate and coaching their U17 and U20 boys teams to medals at YCCs. Valerio has coached in Italy, Spain, and now Belgium. Valerio wrote “Hexagon, the Bestagon: A Look Inside the Hex Offense” the most viewed article on Ultiworlds website in 2021. A proponent of motion offense – Valerio has run hex workshops for many teams. I sat down with Valerio to talk about his role as the co-coach of the Belgium U24 open team, learn more about the Belgians in the video below. Coming soon.

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Ultimate in Motion: A view of the game through a non-traditional lens

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This is a foreword written by Felix for the book Ultimate in Motion: Balance & Dynamism by Florian and Marie Gailliegue, with added illustrations. The book is offered to patrons joining the Swarm Tier (alongside a free Hive disc), or is available for purchase directly.

Florian and I first had contact in 2016 when he left a comment on the Hexagon Offence documentation; “The more I look into it, the more attracted I am to this offense.” I could relate to the feeling, but I couldn’t imagine that just a few years later I would be reading a book of his creation which goes far above and beyond that original content.

Florian offered to translate the documentation into French so it could be shared further. From that point on, we communicated regularly – including meeting up in Paris to discuss our thoughts about how the sport of ultimate might evolve in the future. Bouncing ideas around with another creative thinker with a great passion for ultimate is very enjoyable – Florian’s added experience with other sports, combined with his sharp intelligence, gives him unique insight and perspective, which means his ideas will pique the interest of all ultimate coaches and ambitious players of the sport!

A little history about the sport: ultimate started in Colombia High School in New Jersey, USA, in 1968. The first thing most people notice about the sport is its dramatic name – a question most players have been asked many times is “What makes a frisbee an ultimate frisbee?”. Incidentally, some sports names like American Football aren’t questioned enough – shouldn’t we be calling it “Handegg”?

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Ultimate In Kuwait

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The following article was written by Lujain Almulla, captain of team Pampered Cats and head of women’s ultimate in the newly formed Kuwait Flying Disc Federation. Lujain discusses the recent grass-roots development of the sport in Kuwait, as well as some of the unique challenges they face trying to grow ultimate as a mixed gender sport in a country hostile to mixed gender activities.

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Travis Norsen’s Games with Modifications / Conditions

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In this patron-only training article, Travis explains the two different types of game modifications or constrictions which can be applied during scrimmages, which he prefers, and provides a number of examples of modifications he has found to work well with a youth team training hex-style. Training Tier patrons can view the article here.

Reflections on My First Season

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The following article is a reflection written by hiveultimate patron Travis Norsen after his first season coaching his local high school ultimate team.  Norsen is a long-time ultimate player who also had considerable prior coaching experience, but in football/soccer, where he has been influenced by, championed, and even written a book – Play With Your Brain – for youth players about the philosophy/style developed and implemented especially by Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola at Barcelona.  Despite only stumbling onto hive ultimate around the beginning of his season, Norsen’s approach was heavily influenced by some of the same ideas (from the football world) that influenced Felix, so we thought his experiences would be of considerable interest to anybody interested in Hex and Flex, and get some interesting discussions going. Travis has also authored two training pieces: the Diamond Throwing Exercise and Keepaway.

As a football (or, as we Americans call it, soccer) player and fan for most of my life, I was delighted to volunteer to start coaching my kids, about a decade ago, when they became old enough to play and showed some interest in the sport.  We had a good time and my kids both grew increasingly serious about the sport over the years.  Coaching them also fanned the flames of my own passion:  I started playing more; following professional football more closely; and reading books about football tactics, the history of the game, coaches and coaching, etc.  I even wrote a book, aimed at young teen/preteen soccer players, attempting to explain in an accessible and compelling way some of the basic principles of the Cruyff/Guardiola philosophy that had significantly inspired my own playing and coaching.  

But in the last year or two, my kids aged out of (and got too good for!) the local teams where I was able to coach them, and I jumped at the opportunity to redirect my love of coaching to the other sport I have played obsessively across the decades:  ultimate frisbee.  I had helped out with the middle school ultimate team that my kids played on (when they could squeeze it in between soccer practices) a few years ago, and then last year I joined the local high school girls ultimate team as an assistant JV coach about halfway through the season.  But this spring I agreed to be the head coach for the whole girls high school program.

What follows is my attempt to summarize the season:  what I did and why, how it went, what I learned from it, and finally how it all relates to Hex and Flex.

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Should ultimate be in the Olympics?

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WFDF have been pursuing the Olympics for years now, targeting the 2028 LA games, but is joining the Olympics a good move for ultimate? As others have pointed out, joining the Olympics is only possible if we brush some of ultimate’s key values under the rug. But perhaps that trade-off is worth it, for the vindication of finally being at the big boys table, to show off our sport to the world and to provide once in a lifetime experiences to the athletes talented enough to represent their nations at the games.

The Olympics are an organisation that causes great harm. Kurt Streeter’s New York Times article highlights the major problems with how the games currently operate, most notably the sportswashing that takes place when authoritarian nations are hosts, the environmental impacts, the labour abuse and displacement of marginalised communities where the Olympics are held, and the silencing of athlete protests.

If ultimate became an Olympic sport, we would aid in the IOC’s effort to modernise the games and play a small part in fixing their problem with engaging a younger audience. Joining the Olympics would send a signal to people who may be interested in playing ultimate that we are willing to associate ourselves with, and contribute to, the harm that the Olympics causes.

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Hive Takes Over @being_ulti!

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Felix recently got his hands on the Being_Ulti twitter account. In case you missed it: here are the tweets gathered in one place for your viewing pleasure! (Click on the “Read the full conversation on Twitter” button to read the rest of each thread).

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Don’t teach your Beginners Stack

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Article written by Noah Brinkworth

You probably know by now that we’re not massive fans of stacks here at Hive Ultimate. But there are specific and important reasons why stacks (particularly vertical and side stack – horizontal is not quite as bad) are detrimental to teach to beginners.

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How can we characterise offensive and defensive systems?

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This article was written by guest authors Marie and Florian Gailliegue and is an excerpt from their book Ultimate in Motion: Balance and Dynamism, available from their website or currently part of the $25/mo Hive Swarm Tier deal.

Any situation in any spot of the field can be objectively characterised. Many factors combine – spatial (proximity to an endzone), positional (centering on the field), material (distribution of players) and initiative (separation / velocity, or other ability to dictate the tempo). During the game, each team will seek to tilt the advantages in their favour.

Strategy is long-term planning, and tactics are a sequence of calculated actions. Philosophy is from where one or more strategies flow. Structure guides how a strategy can be deployed effectively. Tactics are put at the service of the previous pillars to achieve the overall aim.

A structure is defined by the set of positions occupied by the players of a team. With 7 players, we can imagine a nearly infinite array of possibilities. When a strategy is decided upon, there are several structures that can be chosen to ensure the strategic goals are achieved. No matter the structure, the whole tactical toolbox remains at one’s disposal. The ensemble {Strategy, Structure, Tactics} creates a system. For the team to be as efficient as possible, the chosen system must match the philosophy.

ultimate systems

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Yina Cartagena talks BENT, Revo Pro and Becoming a World Class Player

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Este artículo también está disponible en español

Yina Cartagena has been a stalwart member of Revolution Ultimate for over a decade. She has been a part of a Revolution side that have won the 11 consecutive national titles, the US Open in 2017, and the inaugural PUL championship in 2019. She has also represented Colombia numerous times, being a key part of Colombia’s strong 2017 World Games team, and lead in stats by far in the Colombian Women’s team that reached the 2016 WUGC final.

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