Improving the VUL with Touring

Players

Presented by

Troe Weston

League manager

Vancouver Ultimate League

Touring Players and Incentives

Vancouver is lucky enough to have quite a number of touring teams, it changes a little every summer, but last summer included:

- Open: Furious George, Blackfish, Refinery and two Pro-teams – Riptide and the

Nighthawks

- Women’s: Traffic, Zephyr, Wendigo

- Mixed: TFP, Sleeper Cell, NPH

- Master’s: Legion, Muriqui

The VUL provides fields to our touring players all year round to practice on for a very minimal cost. They can also book fields through us for scrimmages or events, which is easier than going through our parks board.

In return, we ask the touring players to volunteer for our year round clinics and programs

They can also use our website for things like practice attendance and fee collection (this is a pretty new feature though and most haven’t used it yet)

What does the League get?

1. Super Clinic and Ultimate Day

2. Clinics throughout the Year

3. Boot Camp and Summer Camp

4. Hat Leagues

5. Mentor Program

6. Coaching our Juniors

Ultimate Day, The Super Clinic and other Clinics

1. Ultimate Day and the Super Clinic:

what are they? The VUL runs two huge learning events in the Spring - one right before our main summer league

begins called Ultimate Day and one about 3 weeks into the league called the Super Clinic

These are basically large clinics where we have hundreds of members attending and about 30 or so touring players lead/run and are FREE for all members to attend

Ultimate Day: Geared towards all levels. Starts off with our captains meeting then moves onto sessions that any member can sign up for. Some sessions are indoor, some are outdoor and offer a set of skills or information that might be useful in league (ie. ultimate skills, strategy planning, rules knowledge, injury prevention or taping, etc). At least 2 touring players run each session. We also provide a free BBQ running throughout the afternoon sessions.

The Super Clinic: Geared towards beginner players (we’ve had up to almost 400 attendees at this clinic before) Starts off with everyone together learning basics of backhand and forehand, but also higher level can try something different as our touring players come around to every pair to help. Then the members are divided up into 5 or 6 groups and rotate through the same number of stations. (Stations are usually something like cutting, defending, handling, rules, zone offence, and zone defense) Everyone does every station for about 30-40 min each. At the end of the stations, touring players play a 10 min scrimmage and implement things that were just learned in the stations for all to see. Then we open up the field for anyone to scrimmage and have a FREE BBQ and FREE BEER.

Extra incentive for Touring players: they are asked to wear their team’s uniforms so they can advertise for their team, they are also given opportunities to speak to the whole group at the end if they have any fundraising or other marketing they would like to do

2. Clinics: about VUL clinics

The VUL runs beginner, intermediate and advanced level clinics all year round

We have 2 months a year in which we have a more focused group of clinics, and that is in April, and September, right before two of our main leagues begin

Clinics are always focused on one or two types of skills (ie. Beginners throwing or advanced horizontal cutting)

We advertise that all of our clinics are run by touring players in order to increase attendance level and gain more buy in from our members

We have one touring player who is the ‘clinic coordinator’ for the VUL. This is a (very) part-time paid position (but could easily be a volunteer position). The clinic coordinator makes sure that we have enough instructors (which are volunteer) to run the clinics and is also in charge of making sure they run smoothly and the content is good

All of our clinics are FREE for VUL members

Why do these work? Ultimate Day and the Super Clinic both have a very number of touring players in attendance

that our members can really use their knowledge and experience by asking questions, we also try to have a ratio of at least 1 touring player for every 10 attendees in the skills sessions (often we have more touring players though) so that everyone gets one on one time with a high level player and everyone can get feedback

Because we run clinics all year round, our members can work on skills or connect with touring players to ask questions on a fairly regular basis

Seeing/interacting with higher level players provides examples and inspiration for playing in league and people get excited to implement their new skills into leagues, making the leagues more enjoyable

Offering a core group of clinics right before each league begins works as a marketing tool for the league and also as a tune up for skills before the league starts

Members are getting the most out of clinics by having a high level player teaching them and that also helps our league level increase as well

Spirit is really important in the VUL. This past year we’ve had the fewest spirit ‘incidents’ we’ve ever had, and I believe it partly to do with our growing touring program integration. When our highest level of players can demonstrate good spirit at clinics, etc. then our members can get an example of how to be competitive, but still be spirited – particularly in the scrimmage they watch at the super clinic

3. Bootcamp and Summer Camp

3. Bootcamp and Summer Camp

The VUL runs 2 camps during the year, a 5-week bootcamp that starts in March and an 8-week Summer camp that starts in June. Unlike our clinics, these are not free for members. Members sign up individually

We hire (yes, pay) one touring player to run the camps and then have about 6 extra volunteer touring players helping at the camps

Bootcamp: is gender specific (but held at the same location) and is 5 weeks of just drills (though we are thinking to mix that up a bit this year to include some scrimmages as well)

Summer Camp: 4 weeks of drills and learning the game followed by 4 weeks of scheduled games within the camp. Teams are made after the 4-week drill period and are all given a touring player as a coach/mentor/player

What these offer as opposed to the clinics alone is one instructor for multiple sessions and learning in progression from week to week. Lots of one on one time with the extra volunteers, and immediate integration into games of what they just learned

In the summer camp, players get to play along side a touring player to help with the flow of their game and to give feedback and strategy tips

Usually at least one of the Summer camp teams decides to stay together and signs up for our next league as a team together, how awesome is that?

4. Hat Leagues

4. Hat Leagues: how one hat league can

change your whole league for the better

Every league has hat leagues (at least usually), but do you use it as pretty much your only option at a certain time of year?

The VUL runs our main hat league (which is a 5 on 5 turf league) in the fall from September to December. There are other options at this time, but not in this format. The format became extremely popular very quickly and was our fastest growing league ever – we grew by over 200% in the past 3 years

Players sign up as either individuals, duos or trios (note that if you sign up as a duo or trio, you get a discount, but one in your group must be a lady)

Using informal surveys, we’ve asked players why they like this league so much and one of the top responses was because they get to play with touring level players. Of course we don’t force our touring players to sign up, but since this is basically their only option if they want to play league, there are a lot that do. So much so that every team is about 30% touring players

It was an un-anticipated side-effect, but we’ve found that our league level of play, league-wide spirit level AND player retention have all increased since this hat league started. Although we don’t know 100% for sure why this has happened, we believe it has a lot to do with touring players being a part of this league

5. Mentor Program

5. Mentor Program: using touring

players as mentors

The VUL runs a mentor program available for any league team in any league, FREE of charge

We have one touring player who is our coordinator for this. Team captains or members can email myself or our coordinator to request a mentor for their team

Teams can request the mentor for different capacities, either for one game, for a few games or for a whole season. They can even pick and choose what they want the mentor for – strategic help, individual skills or even spirit and rules assistance. Mentors may or may not play with teams, their choice on that as well

This can really help new teams get off the ground and it can help teams get up to a higher division or learn a new strategy (ie. Going from vertical to horizontal offense, or learning zone defense).

The VUL will sometimes also approach teams that either have not won a game (and usually by a large score differential) or teams with particularly low spirit ratings and we will either ask if they would like a mentor or we will pro-actively send them one

(Mentor Program Cont’) Extra incentive for players to become mentors is that we offer them stipends

for any coaching course they want to take

This fall, we tried something new with our mentor program:

We ran an 8-week women’s only hat league and advertised before hand that each team would have a mentor to help them out throughout the season.

We have yet to run a formal survey on the league (it ended only a week and a half ago), but I have so far received so much feedback on how amazing it was to have the mentors there, it’s been incredible

A lot of women even said the reason they signed up was because they knew they would have a mentor on the team. We had a total of 112 women sign up for this first time run league.

“Having mentors gives a designated leader to give pointers and call plays instead of any random teammate trying to take charge. Made it easier to bond as a team and have someone to ask my many questions.”

“Loved having the mentor on our team!! It was definitely a drawing factor for me to sign up. I also felt we learned a lot more.”

“The mentorship aspect was actually a huge part of the appeal for me (having felt like I benefited from the bootcamp last March, I wanted more of that experience). It was a great experience to get "real time" feedback on something and then quickly get back onto the field and try to implement it”

Coaching our Juniors

6. Coaching our Juniors

The VUL runs a large juniors program which includes:

Summer, fall and winter juniors leagues, (U18 players) run in team and hat formats

Skills camps and clinics throughout the year (U18 players)

Youth summer camps for even younger players (U13 players)

Large summer Club team juniors program known as the Misfit program (12 teams this year)

Touring players are used as our coaches for all of these programs to help integrate skill and spirit level into the leagues

New program the VUL is starting to implement is for schools to be able to contact us and we will find them a coach, we started this a bit last spring and will be fully launching it this spring. The goal is to increase VUL awareness for junior players and to make sure juniors are learning the sport in a healthy, spirited way

Integrating juniors with our touring players is a really great way to improve our league because not only does the VUL increase it’s membership database, but we are also investing in the future of our league by creating more players, some of which will become touring players and then get their turn to give back.

We really also focus a lot on spirit with the juniors so that our leagues continue to run smoothly once they are integrated in the adult leagues.

Areas of Improvement

It often ends up being the same 10-12 touring players that come to the clinics

– which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it means some teams are

pulling more weight than others, but we give the same discount to all of the

teams

Sometimes we see a high demand or request for a certain type of clinic, so

we have decided to run it last minute and then we sometimes scramble to get

someone to run it

Making schools aware of our coaching program has been slightly challenging so

we are looking for ways to improve this

Fewer teams each summer are asking for mentors, so we’re trying to figure

out why that is as we’d love to increase the number of teams with mentors,

especially in lower divisions

Ideas we have for the future

Better planning/more notice for clinic dates

Our summer juniors league currently has parent chaperones, we are thinking of switching this to touring player chaperones in order to help with rules knowledge and spirit level

Implementing a point system (similar to Toronto) so that the ‘work load’ is divided more evenly amongst the different teams

Potentially implementing a system where the touring teams can choose how much volunteering they do (none and pay full price for fields, or more and pay nothing for fields)

Mentor training day and integration at Ultimate Day – one idea we have is to have a session for anyone interested in becoming a mentor that is separate from Ultimate Day. Then have them attend Ultimate day to advertise the program.

Touring Player coffee dates – another idea we have is to have a sign up where players or captains can have a coffee date with a touring player to pick their brain about anything Ultimate related. I’ve done a couple of these and set a couple up informally and they have been a really great hit so far!