What Defines A Nationals Level Team?
Based on a rather unscientific method of “playing with data in excel and eyeballing differences,” the following is what I’ve got for main difference-makers in making nationals (probably as good a cutoff as any for “high-level college ultimate team” as any—your few elite also-rans get watered down with the large number of less-elite others). Perhaps more than anything else, elite teams have set strategies for moving the disc off of the pull and especially off of a turnover. They also are generally very keen to run transition zones, which suggests a level of defensive sophistication that can’t really be borne out fully with the data we have right now. The one catch—these factors also correlate pretty strongly with having a coach. It’s hard to authoritatively state “this is what makes the difference for nationals-caliber teams;” it’s equally likely, in my mind, that these things could merely be products of a coach’s need to impose their own strategies on their teams without necessarily ha
