The offensive skill set.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a good ultimate player and what it means to be a good ultimate team.  In my limited experience, I have played with and against 600-800 different players over the past 5 years or so.  A few have been great, some have been good, many have been decent, and many more have been poor.  

Similarly, over the past five years I have played with and against about 40 different teams.  I have never played with or against a great team, but I have watched a ton of game tape of the Buzz Bullets, Sockeye, Wisconsin, Florida, Chain, Rhino, etc and they qualify as great.  I have played against and been beaten by some good teams.  I have played on, been beaten by, and beaten some average teams.  And I have played on, been beaten by, and beaten some poor teams.

Looking at the players I've seen, I think that the offensive skills needed are:

1. Moves well.  This, I believe is the number one skill on the field.  This doesn't necessarily mean fast, although having good speed is a plus.  It has to do with being able to put one's body in position to make plays more often than not on offense and defense.  A lot of this skill comes with experience and anticipation of the plays before/as they happen.  Moving well accounts for all defense and all offense that occurs without throwing or catching the disc.

2. Has Good throws.  This comes closely behind number one.  It doesn't mean that a great player has to have 70 yard perfect hucks from the forehand, backhand, and overhead.  It means more that the player completes nearly all of his easy to medium difficulty throws and completes a fair percentage of his difficult throws.  It also means that the player doesn't throw difficult throws very often, either because he's so good that the throws aren't really difficult for him or because he decides to take a different throw in that spot to avoid a potential turnover.

3. Has Good hands.  You have to be able to catch the disc, obviously.  Having good hands means that you can make the difficult catch with a defender on your back, catch a floating disc in a crowd, and layout to reach discs that you can't reach otherwise.

Even a great player needn't have all of these skills, so long as he can make up for what he lacks in one area by being excellent in another.  For example, an amazing thrower doesn't necessarily need good hands to be a great player.  Or a player who makes astoundingly good cuts as a receiver and is a shut down defender doesn't necessarily need good throws.

But, a player who is lacking these offensive skills should at least know what he has to work on in order to get better.

It is much more difficult to determine what offensive skills a team needs.  Great teams are not all built the same way.  Some teams thrive on high risk offense based on taking long shots down the field.  Other teams attempt to control the disc and practice risk avoidance.  The one thing that is clear about the great teams is that they all know exactly who they are and they play to the strengths of their best individuals.

I don't think that a team can really start by saying that they are going to be a high risk/high reward offense.  If that is the sort of offense that their personnel dictates, then that is the sort of offense that they should play.  But, just deciding beforehand that that is "the best" offense doesn't really make sense to me.  Similarly, I'm not sure that a team can really decide without looking at their personnel whether to run a horizontal stack, a vertical stack, a split stack, or a German.  It all comes down to what individual skills a team has and how its members play together.