Our newest series on coaching explores coaching concepts from multiple angles. Our first edition focuses on how much feedback coaches offer to their athletes.
July 21, 2025 by Ben Wiggins in Opinion
Welcome to Coach Considerations, a new series at Ultiworld where we share coaching concepts and ideas from the perspective of multiple expert coaches. There are so many different viewpoints on how to teach and strategize in ultimate, and while that lack of centralized consensus can create challenges in finding the best practices, it does create a space where various opinions can be formed, refined, and tested. We’ve invited Ben Wiggins to be the primary coach for our first series of articles, so each issue will center around his thoughts and then we’ll share responses to his viewpoints from several excellent, extremely experienced coaches.
Feedback Density
Coaches give feedback, and there are as many good ways to do it as there are coach-player relationships. Depending on your players, this might be written thoughts or one-on-one discussions or talks in the team huddle (and there are places and times for all of them). If you have an ultimate background with coaching of any kind, you have surely seen examples of feedback done both well and poorly. And we all strive to do it well! But communicating well is only part of the equation; you have to do it frequently.
Many developing coaches struggle to raise the density of their coaching. For whatever quality of communication you have, you can do more to help your players learn by communicating often so they can learn as much as possible. Coaches that wait and watch through segments of practices or games and speak only in huddles are missing opportunities.
Imagine learning as a cycle: A player faces a situation, tries something, gets feedback on that attempt, and then marginally changes their mental framework for the next similar situation. If you run a cutting drill on the backhand side for 20 minutes of practice and then verbally assess team progress, you are contributing to that learning cycle, but not by much. You’ve given group feedback, from which the player can guess at how much it applies to them personally. They can change their mental framework for some generalized model of all of the repetitions that were had in that twenty minutes, but not for any specific case they experienced. You can think of each player as having used 20 minutes to go through a single learning cycle. They had some reps, but crucially they cannot usually decipher whether theirs in particular were good or bad compared to either the group or to some standard. The coach in this case has achieved accurate, game-relevant feedback, but so little of it!
Instead, imagine that same drill as run by a coach who keeps up a verbal chatter. After one rep: “Nice!” After a third rep: “We’re doing really good.” Each minute or so, they chime in with a mention of hard work and keeping effort high, so that the drill focus doesn’t float in the breeze as the collective mindset gets farther from the inspiration that the pre-drill huddle had instilled.
Over the course of 20 minutes, this coach’s patter is giving 10-20x more verbal feedback, and this feedback is allowing individual players to partially assess their success on individual repetitions. For each “Well done!”, there is a player who now has data to build a comparative framework of what success feels like for a particular play. That will help to increase the number of learning cycles dramatically. It requires a willingness on the part of the coach to use their voice frequently, to broadcast as a kind of soundtrack for the drill (which is awkward and energy-consuming), and to be willing to judge individual plays quickly which requires an active/quick/focused mind. While this isn’t easy, it is helpful.
It also isn’t enough. The coaches we should strive to be are more than just frequent speakers, although finding those moments is important to greater coaching density. But imagine that same coach replacing the wash of positive generalities with individual statements:
- After rep #1: “Mary, great balance.”
- After rep #2: “Serat, way to keep your left eye in the play.”
Notice that we are using names to specifically target the feedback, but that every player — even those it isn’t directed towards — gets the benefits of seeing/hearing the critical feedback for those reps.
- After rep #4: “Chance, face the mark.”
- After rep #6: “Wynn, give me a face as you start that cut. Getting open starts here.”
- After rep #17: “Better, Chance, you can face it even more next time.”
Let’s go one stop further.
- After rep #35: “Mina, hold there. Pause, everyone. Mina is going to do this again, and everyone watch how they step out and forward instead of out and back. When we step back, we lose power and let the mark take that space. Stepping forward gives us power and more break throwing options. Ok, go.”
- After repeating rep #35: “Excellent, Mina. Did you all see where that power came from? Ok, let’s continue and try to do that on each rep.”
This coach is giving second-by-second feedback, individualized, and critically is giving both positive and negative attributes on which players can judge their own mental models. Each player in this drill might actually be going through 5+ of their own cycles! They’ll develop instinct for the game more quickly because their personal instincts have an external judge, and they can focus on trying out these new models repeatedly.
If you are like many coaches I have worked with on this topic of ‘coaching density’, then you probably have at least one of the following questions:
1: When is coaching chatter too dense? When am I taking away the opportunity for players to think for themselves?
If your chatter is ahead of a decision, then it is direction and not feedback. For example: “They are open, you should throw it” while the disc is still in the player’s hand means you are coaching them through a decision instead of critically feeding back on their decision. This actually prevents a learning cycle instead of helping to complete it.
2: What if some piece of advice I give during this chatter is wrong?
You won’t be 100% perfect, that is absolutely true. But neither are your huddle talks or your written feedback. Just like being a player, coaching is about your best and not only what you can guarantee is perfect. Apologize, backtrack, and edit what you’ve said when you need. Most importantly, thinking of this denser coaching as trying to achieve a strong percentage, just like what you do with your backhand to a cutter.
If you are hitting 85% and establishing a dense coaching chatter, then this turns down the intensity on any single coach-player interaction. This can be hugely helpful to you as a coach. Above, Chance heard twice that he should do a thing, but he also heard many instances where other players were critiqued. That decreases the overall social cost of being “called out,” and typically builds more trust as players come to realize the feedback is intended as growth-oriented and not on evaluating their worth as an individual whole player. Setting the tone in this way for frequent feedback (both good and bad) in an open atmosphere of improvement is not a risk, but rather the single biggest benefit of denser coaching.
If you are reading this and identify with the less-dense coach, then your development can be quick and positive as long as you don’t try to do too much. My suggestion is to be near a drill (close enough to have players hear you) with a device in hand and a timer set to buzz you every two minutes. Your goal is to make a comment to a player within each interval of two minutes at your first practice with this mindset. You will a) grow more accustomed to thinking about the time and space available to coach within, b) see how huge two minutes of practice time actually is, and c) be able to deliver at least some feedback on this timescale. Most coaches I have worked with find that a single practice with these reminders sets them up for a smooth increase in coaching density from “rarely” to “a density they can operate at more or less on autopilot,” which is different for everyone. Crucially, this end-stage density is more than you would speak with your family or friends, because you are taking on a role where this kind of speaking is professionally useful. Changing your own coaching talk is its own learning cycle, and you can start that improvement at your next coaching practice.
Coach Responses
We reached out to a network of great ultimate minds and leaders to get their thoughts on providing quality feedback to athletes. Miranda Roth is one of the world’s most accomplished coaches, and is currently as a part of the US World Games staff, among other high level coaching roles. Jaime “Idaho” Arambula is a long time coach who offers his insight in various capacities. Sion “Brummie” Scone is a UK-based coach who has coached various GB National teams, including at the World Games.
Miranda Roth
A few weeks ago, one of the parents on the sideline of my high school girls’ division game asked, “Do you coach the same way when you coach the national team?” I’m sure this was in response to the litany of coaching comments I make from the sideline during a Paideia Groove game, perhaps wondering if adults need the same amount of positive feedback or are open to that amount of feedback at all. “Yes!” I said. “Of course. Every team and athlete deserves this kind of attention and care. I say some things at a different level, but for the most part, in a game, I’m just encouraging effort.”
While I do call some plays from the sideline, to varying degrees of athlete acceptance (Groove welcomes it, Chain is lukewarm on it), I am mostly reminding athletes that they have the stamina, skills, and smarts to do what is asked of them on the field. I buy in to the Positive Coaching Alliance’s rule of using five (although I shoot for nine) positive comments to one constructive comment, no matter what level I’m coaching.
You may be wondering if Dylan Freechild needs the same amount of positive feedback as one of my Paideia athletes (he does, we all do), but it’s only partially about need. It’s what these athletes deserve. Part of the purpose of my life, that I’ve found through coaching, is to empower the athletes I coach to believe in themselves and stick up for themselves. You’ll find, when coaching, that your word comes to mean a great deal to your athletes – keep that coaching talk density high and positive to bolster your athletes’ confidence and performance. You might just get to see it have an effect on and off the field.
Jaime Arambula
I have thought about a more systematic template to coach verbiage, the Positive Coaching Alliance, for example. But for me, as a coach, especially with a team I have really invested in, I have to take a look at the roster, and take notes on everyone; just like I would in terms of skills. I also factor some intangibles like sports history and off-field successes for each player.
Did the player participate in sports in middle school, high school? Did they win state? Were they a starter? What else did they have success in? E-gaming, physics, 4H , pickleball…..anything. Did they work with just one coach or teacher before me? Or a handful of them; a staff?
It’s time consuming, but I have to make time early in the coaching phase to either start an email thread with them, or sit down with them pre- or post-practice, and ask these sorts of questions to decide how much feedback each player needs. It really comes down to maximizing their performance on the fly, under stress, and even when they are in an in-game flow state.
Sion “Brummie” Scone
The biggest challenge I found when increasing the density of my feedback to players is that the conversations felt one-way; I was giving small snippets rather than having the chance to provide detail. Inevitably, some players ended up confused, or just wanted to expand the conversation. That’s absolutely fine, but a three minute 1-on-1 conversation with each player will take an hour of your time if you have 20 players at practice. Time together as a team is precious, and that hour of talking can be done elsewhere. I also found it difficult to digest all the information I was giving out as a coach, and trying to remember it nearly impossible, which made post-practice reflection more challenging.
One technique which you can use to make this easier is to split the responsibility of giving feedback (coach) from the responsibility of receiving feedback (players); each player might only have 5-10 snippets of feedback from a session, compared to the 100+ things a coach might say. I set up online documents, one per player, that only they & I could access, and gave them the responsibility of logging any feedback, their own reflections and follow-up questions. I would then follow up after practice with more detail & any action points. All totally optional of course, but for those players that engaged with the process, it was highly effective.
