Breaking Down Your Mistakes


After a tournament, win or lose, there is time to think about your performance. On the ride home there is the usual highlight/lowlight recap: who made the sweet plays, and who make the boneheaded ones. Hopefully sometime after that, you get some time to reflect on your own performance. Many time the things that will stick out the most are the errors you made. This is natural, and even good. It is important to break down your error and analyze them. It's not sufficient to say, " I had 3 drops this weekend, I'll never do that again." You need to figure out why those three drops occurred. Once you have a grasp of the cause, then you can formulate a solution. Every mistake is an opportunity for improvement. If you understand the error, then you can correct it. In order to advance as a player, you need to take time to reflect on your performance.

There is a 4 part process to correcting bad habits or persistent errors:

1 Unconsciously doing the wrong thing
2 Consciously doing the wrong thing
3 Consciously doing the right thing
4 Unconsciously doing the right thing

On the ultimate field, you often go from 1 to 2, when I pull you aside, and say, " Do you know that you're doing something wrong?". Then for a while, you may keep error, but whenever you do it, you say, "Damn!" The progression from 2 to 3 happen when you reflect upon you mistakes, and find the root cause. The progressing from 3 to 4 happen through practice.

To give you an example of this process, I will examine my errors in the finals of the Tempe New Years Fest. I had 4 memorable errors in the finals: 3 turnovers, and 1 defensive lapse. My defensive lapse occurred when the player I was defending was hucked to. I was fronting, and in good defensive position, when the disc was thrown. I hear the up call, say the disc a read it fairly well. However I jumped early, missed the disc, and the O player caught it. What I did wrong: I was in good defensive position, but I could have waited longer to jump, since the O player was not in good position or being aggressive. If the O player is close by you, going up early is important, but if they are not close by, use the extra margin to make sure you get the D. My first turnover was a throwaway by the endzone. I was unmarked, and my receiver made a good cut to the front corner. He was open, but closely defended. I through the pass to quickly, and it went by him. I need to take a longer moment to center myself before throwing the pass. It was a good decision, but bad execution, because I needlessly rushed the pass. My second turnover was a bad decision, a huck to a guy who was open deep but out of my range. The third was a point block on a lazy pivot. I didn't fake to the open side before I pivoted, and didn't pivot far. Fatigue was probably a factor in this. The D player made a real nice play too. Well that's my break down, and hopefully you find the time to do something similar for yourself after a tournament.

Posted: Sat - February 5, 2005 at 10:52 PM          

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