Catch of the Year Poll on Ultiworld: A pointless exercise

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 20:23:00 +0530

Ultiworld, a popular Ultimate related magazine did a poll for it’s “readers” to pick the Catch of the Year. I wouldn’t have noticed it normally, but this time around Pranav Rajan, a player from India, featured in it. A lot of people in the Indian Ultimate community tried to ensure the whole community took notice and voted in large numbers!

[…] we studied many hours of tape and solicited your submissions to create a list of 16 finalists. Over the next week, you the Ultiworld readers will have a chance to weigh in and select the Catch of the Year.

Studying all these hours of tape and picking some of the best catches seems like a great contribution to the Ultimate community. It gives these players a good platform of recognition and it also gives all of us people to look up to.

But, I find this whole exercise of popular voting quite pointless. What exactly is Ultiworld trying to achieve here? It seems like it is just a competition to see how much popularity and support each player can garner.

Perhaps unsurprising to those who have followed along with our brackets in the past, Pranav managed by far the most votes in the first round, buoyed by a continent’s worth of support. If past brackets are any indication, it will take massive domestic support to take the young Indian star down in this competition. Can Sovell-Fernandez muster it?

In one of the tighter matchups we’ve seen in this year’s competition, Pranav’s U24 World Championships snag captured 56% of the vote to surpass another young star in the making, Allyn Suzuki of California Current. With the margin always close, Suzuki led as late as with 18 hours to go, but Pranav saw a late surge to claim victory.

The poll is unauthenticated. People can vote multiple times, with simple cookie tweaking. Even if we are relying on people to vote in the “Spirit of the Game”, I don’t see what the community gains out of this exercise.

The players, who featured in the poll, themselves are left wondering if they deserved to win given the poll wasn’t fool-proof and given that humans with all their biases easily vote for players they know, or players from their country, etc.

Ultiworld gets lots of page views and the like. The link to the vote was shared with lots of people who probably hadn’t heard of Ultiworld before or don’t care to read it. May be they found a few new readers?

I would’ve liked the whole exercise a lot more if Ultiworld just stopped at picking the 8 or 16 top catches, and putting them all in a post. But, may be that wouldn’t have got so many page views!

I refuse to participate in any such future popularity contests. And I think we all should.

Thanks to Meghana Iyer for sharing her strong views on this Ultiworld poll and for reading a draft of this post. Thanks to Shantanu Choudhary for encouraging me to write this post.

Glue Highlight Reels

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 14:33:00 +0530

As a leader on my Ultimate team, I spend a lot of time talking to my team mates. I get to hear out their complaints, their joys and everything in between. All these conversations got me thinking about what makes someone feel like an integral part of the team, where they are making a meaningful contribution.

Metrics to measure contribution

How do we measure our contributions to the team. What do we look at, to tell ourselves and others, whether we have made a contribution or not? I’m still trying to make sense of this, but here are a few metrics I found.

Highlight or Debacle reels

A lot of us tend to remember things as highlight or debacle reels - we make stories out of these events. If you got that layout grab or D, you tend to remember it and that leaves you with a feeling of satisfaction. If you’ve more highlights to remember than the number of debacles, you feel like you made a positive contribution.

But, I think games are not as “eventful” as we think [citation needed!] – especially when a team is playing good Ultimate. When everyone is making good decisions and executing them well, the game is quite uneventful. The credit for the success is distributed over the team, rather than one or two individuals. Are we capable of identifying this, acknowledging it as a meaningful personal contribution?

Tiredness

When we are done with a day’s play, we only have a few moments stuck in our memory. What remains as a physical manifestation is how tired we are, physically and mentally. A lot of us tend to use this metric, probably even subconsciously.

But, with a big enough squad that is being rotated well, I’m not sure this is a good metric.

MVP awards

At the end of every game, teams have a spirit circle where they discuss each others’ play, and pick a player in the opposition who made a difference to the game - Most Valuable Player. Being identified the MVP is definitely one of the easiest things that is used as a metric for contribution. Only one person gets it in a game, and often, the same person gets it in a few matches over the course of a tournament.

Sure, the MVP played well, but what about the dozen others? If you weren’t the best player, doesn’t mean you didn’t make a difference. Would not being identified by the opposition make you forget those contributions? Is there something the team can do to help recognize and identify them?

Being Challenged

When a game was very challenging, win or loss, people tend to feel happy and satisfied about it.

Just being challenged to their limits seems to make people feel like they have contributed. Or may be just makes them forget about asking this question.

Contributing in other ways

If I’m not having a good day, or I’m injured, I don’t mind filling water bottles and taking it easy. If I’ve been able to alert someone from the sideline and they make a difference, that’s a contribution I’m making.

Better metrics

Stats

Stats might help in a small way. For instance, just using a rotating scheme for calling lines, a lot of the not-enough game time problems seemed to go away. Just being able to assure people that there’s a system in place to ensure they get enough game time, took their minds away from it.

The usual kinds of stats - scores, assists, drops, etc. - might actually only end-up reinforcing the outlook of highlight and debacle reels. But, it may help with triggering some faded memories, which might alter the story we make up from the events recorded.

I wonder, though, if there can be other kinds of metrics that might help bring out some of the “grind” aspects of the game, rather than events. These stats will be harder to collect, but would there be a way to reward someone on how well they made space for the next cutter, or how they shutdown the person they were defending and took them out of the game?

Culture

I am beginning to think the problem is primarily cultural. In a world where we care so much about the number of likes and retweets, I think it’s just hard to remember the “grind”.

Sarah Griffith shared an interesting idea that she calls Glue players - players who just do the basics right, and aren’t necessarily involved in spectacles like a layout D or a super difficult throw.

Matty’s shout outs are for glue plays - reliable fill cuts for big yards, or somebody who committed to fronting their matchup because that was the game plan even though it’s scary as heck to give that cutter the chance to go deep on you.

And anyone who has ever played for Matty knows that these shout outs are a coveted thing, because you know that what you’ve done was selfless and helped the team succeed, and that’s an honor.

Matty Tsang is a great coach who has some revolutionary ideas on how to play and coach Ultimate. I’m not surprised the idea of glue plays goes back to him.

But, as a team without a non-playing coach, I wonder how to bring about this culture of identifying and encouraging glue players. May be having a handful of players who make it their job to do this for a few weeks or months, will set the ball rolling.

Sarah has some advice on how to go about doing this in her article.

When you’re holding tryouts for your team, look for who is facilitating scores even if they’re not always catching them. Look for who’s eliminating their person from the offense with great positioning rather than bidding all over the place on D. Look for who shows up, and who you can count on. And then let other people know. Celebrate it. Glue playing is contagious - make people aware of when it’s happening by calling it out and focusing on it, instead of the glory plays.

The idea of “Glue highlights” replacing the (figurative) highlight reels seems like a very promising idea. I’d like to give this a shot, as a team!

Thanks to Tariq, Tejaa and Shantanu for being excited reading drafts of this post, and encouraging me to publish it.

Culture on Noetic Nought