Scandal finds a way to punish poaching defenders.
October 23, 2026 by Sion "Brummie" Scone in Analysis, Sponsored
Washington DC Scandal looked impressive throughout their run to a gold medal at the World Ultimate Club Championships this summer, rarely looking flustered and consistently able to deal with whatever their opponents threw at them, be it tight person defense, traditional zones, or shifting help defenses. It’s that last category that I want to focus on, since help defense gets a lot of attention and is poorly understood compared to the others.
Force Teams to Give us an Advantage
Scandal coach Ty Aderhold: “I’d start by saying that as we sat down at the start of the season to figure out how we wanted to play offense, we aligned on the fact that we had a lot of great cutters who are dangerous in big spaces, and we wanted to force teams to deal with that. So our system cutting and our pull plays are really designed to force teams to either guard us 1-on-1, where we think we have an advantage, or help in some way that we then hope we can exploit.”
Recognizing your team strengths is a great place to start dictating to your opponent. This clip is a great example of how Scandal’s big lane cutters work the field, and how Brute Squad used help defenses in an attempt to slow down or stop them:
Let’s break this down, move by move:
- At the start of this clip, Scandal’s #20 Kira Flores has the disc just outside their own end zone and two central cutters (#19 Verena Woloson & #17 Katrina McGuire) are pushing deep.
- Woloson comes under; BS defender (Levke Walczak) spots this and poaches into the lane.
- Flores spots the poach and swings to the poached player (#37 Claire Trop) wide, near the sideline.
- The two central cutters change direction (peppermill), and their defenders signal a switch; McGuire, coming under, spots the poach, points to where she’s going to attack, and Trop hits her in the lane.
- Walczak immediately poaches to prevent continuation, and McGuire returns the disc to Trop. Meanwhile, Woloson cuts deep again.
- Woloson cuts under. McGuire’s defender peels off to try to intercept the pass, but Trop’s pass is accurate and fast enough to get there before the poach.
- McGuire stands in a central position and offers an immediate offload, which Woloson hits before yet another poaching defender can get there.
Every single one of these help defense interventions is strategically sound, but Scandal’s communication and speed was simply too quick for some of them, and whenever the help slowed Scandal down, they were able to find a way to exploit it to give themselves an advantage again.
It doesn’t always have to be an elaborate scheme either. Defenses mess up all the time. We’ve all played on teams playing matchup defense and said “No one gets beaten up the line” or “Don’t let them get the disc on the open side,” but guess what? Offenses are smart and it’s tough to stop athletic cutters from doing what they want to do. Since we know this, we need to recognize that help defenses, or zone defenses, or any defenses, will sometimes just get it wrong.
Here’s a simple example: Brute Squad are defending peppermills with a bracket; one defender stops the deep cut, one stops the under. But one of the Brute defenders follows deep instead of covering the under, giving an easy pass up:
Likewise, just because you have a lane poach doesn’t mean a good cutter can’t just run straight past the poach to get the disc:
Lapses in attention are frequent sources of frustration for any defensive coach. No matter how perfectly positioned you are on defense, one moment of lost concentration can be disastrous:
Of course, there’s a difference between a defender simply losing concentration and an offense forcing a defender to make increasingly difficult decisions under pressure. Scandal were particularly good at the latter, repeatedly threatening dangerous spaces until the defense was forced to give something up.
“How do we Punish what we Just Forced?”
Aderhold: “When I see a team giving us free unders because they are helping deep or free swings because they are worried about the force side around the disc, it isn’t a bad thing in my mind, but more like we forced them into something and now how do we punish what we just forced.”
What I like about this approach is that Scandal aren’t necessarily waiting for their opponents to make a mistake. They’re deliberately creating situations where the defense has to make a choice, and they’re prepared to take advantage of whichever option the defense gives them. This is a good example: we can see Scandal trying to re-establish their stack and a Brute Squad defender switches to cover an open side cut, leaving #13 Tyler Smith wide open in front of the disc. #3 Sami Smalling quickly takes advantage, and Smith is quick to hit continuation:
One thing worth highlighting is that Scandal did a great job of compounding their gains whenever possible; it’s one thing to hit a static poached player, but does that really give you the most advantage? For me, one of the biggest advantages of finding a poached player is that they usually won’t have a mark, and they should be able to find another player immediately. In this example, a poach is punished and Scandal go from line trap to red zone in two easy (and uncontested) throws:
The more frequently a team tries to switch, the more likely it is they will eventually make a mistake. This could mean a communication failure handing off cutters, or simply taking their eyes off the ball. So sometimes, all it takes is patience, like this example where Brute Squad can be seen bracketing cutters at the start of the clip, but Scandal respond by identifying gaps – much like you would with a zone – and “pop” into those spaces1. This had the effect of dragging the poaches around, forcing switches and causing the help scheme to break apart, eventually leaving a simple deep throw available because the original deep help got dragged underneath:
Scandal waited patiently to find the open seam, then quickly and decisively finished the point with a few quick passes to open receivers:
Aderhold: “We try to make cuts that threaten a dangerous space and then have both cutters and handlers on the same page about the spaces we should attack if we pull help. We devote lots of practice time to build chemistry, and then lots of film review with the team to highlight times we were good or bad at it.”
Learning to Recognize and Exploit Help
Aderhold: “In practice we spend a lot of time talking about and running through the counters to the common poaches. So if we see deep help, we’ve already discussed what space has to be free and which of our players is likely to be free.”
A sideline trap against horizontal stack is a classic example of when to use a help scheme; see help schemes for horizontal stack. In this example, Brute Squad’s downfield defenders set a deep and under bracket poach, but Scandal respond by simply sending two cutters underneath, and one of the Brute defenders doesn’t maintain position:
Having a game plan for how to attack the gaps in a help scheme helps you to maintain the pace of your offense. In this example, Fury are using a dedicated deep poach (far off screen to the right) and leaving the third handler free while also bracketing the cutters. When cutters attack the open side under space, the help defenders are forced to reposition which in turn creates a gap that Scandal are able to exploit. Even better, once that first pass connected, there was no stopping Scandal, who connected on three quick and relatively easy passes to score:
In the final point of their quarterfinal, Scandal had the disc with an opportunity to break and win on universe. I would argue quite strongly that giving #4 Allie Wallace a huge, uncontested under, followed by enough time to throw whatever she wanted without a mark, is not a sound defensive strategy. Yet this is exactly what Brute Squad gave up when #96 María Angélica Forero Becerra switched with #99 Lia Schwartz to cover a break side under cut from #77 Marika Korpinen.
The switch immediately went wrong. Becerra tried to recover and catch up with Wallace, leaving Schwartz to pick up Korpinen. But Schwartz turned away from Korpinen at precisely the wrong moment, failing to spot her decisive deep cut. Wallace, now with plenty of time and space, had a relatively straightforward throw for the winning goal.
In the middle of all of that, #33 Amanda Murphy spots that her defender has poached off and immediately cuts away from the poach.
***
I see a lot of inexperienced teams struggle against help schemes because they think “oh, there’s a poach, there’s no point cutting over there.” This is usually an error that plays into their opponent’s hands. If the defense isn’t forced to do anything, that’s a win for them. If, on the other hand, they must keep switching, assessing, poaching, picking up threats, and working hard, they will eventually leave gaps for the offense to exploit. Scandal were effective not just because they created those gaps, but because they had spent time learning where those gaps would appear, who should attack them, and how to exploit them before the defense could recover.
My biggest takeaway from my conversation with Aderhold was that an offense can deliberately force defenders to help, knowing in advance how it intends to punish them. Beating help doesn’t have to be reactive, it can be proactive.
