The Intangibles

There are things in sports that are easy to measure. Speed, vertical, height, weight etc... However when you make it to the top levels everyone is going to have roughly comparable stats. So where do teams gain the edge? There are intangibles that push a team over the edge.

Things like game preparation, figuring out match-ups and strategy are important but there are two things that I feel like will put a team over the edge: conditioning, and my personal favorite, heart.

Conditioning became an overwhelming favorite of mine when my team made the finals of the Canadian University Ultimate Championships in 2009. The team we were playing in the finals we had beaten the day before by a safe margin. Although I still think it is safe to say that either team could beat the other on any day. But that day in the finals their superior conditioning showed as I personally found myself getting worked over on defence. It is unfortunate that it took such a big loss to drive home how important conditioning is, but I now put conditioning above almost any strength training during a season. Conditioning during practice time is also important. Some may feel that practice time should be used for strategy and working on chemistry, but to them I say...

having your team bust their ass running sprints and doing burpees builds a different kind of chemistry and adds to the heart of the team. The famous Roman army used to preach incestuous relations within their armies with the theory that you were more likely to fight harder for the man fighting beside you if he was your lover. Now scale that down a ton and get to my theory, you are more likely to work harder on the field for the guys who you have seen trying as hard as they can at practice working to make your team better. This builds the heart of a team when you are willing to lay it out on defence because you know that every other guy on your team would do the same. My University team this year, worked hard in practice every time, doing conditioning at every practice. So when our team was faced with some bad injuries to the top end we were able to overcome these by having faith in the other guys on our team who had worked just as hard and earned the right to play in big games. The heart of our team was the biggest of my four years at Western and we surprised some teams with how hard we worked every single point. Willing to grind it out whereas in the past we had been a little more finesse.

There is no stat for heart on a team, but i think you can generally tell how much heart a team has by how successful they are.