Lesley Sim on Skill Acceleration in Ultimate

Commonplace Expertise

Lesley Sim coached the Singaporean Ultimate Women's World Championship team in 2020. We open with an introduction to the sport of Ultimate (sometimes known as frisbee), her experience coaching the women's team in late 2019, and then move on to her remarkable approach to pedagogical development and skill acceleration in the game of Ultimate.

Along the way, we talk about desirable and undesirable problems in training, playing to play vs playing to win, and how she used a training method originally designed for dolphins and dogs and adapted it to humans — with great success!

Lesley's Twitter — https://twitter.com/lesley_pizza
Lesley's Personal Site — https://lesley.pizza/
Newsletter Glue — https://newsletterglue.com/
Karen Pryor's Book Reading the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals (on TAG Teach) — https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2412884
How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis — https://www.goodreads.com/el/book/show/1837402.How_to_Get_Rich
Sticky.fm, Lesley's Podcast on Building Sticky Newsletters — https://sticky.fm/

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (03:25) - The Sport of Ultimate
• (10:29) - Defining The Metagame for Ultimate
• (15:14) - How Lesley Got Into Ultimate
• (17:27) - Different Styles of Play in Ultimate
• (20:42) - Coaching Singapore's Women's Worlds Team
• (31:01) - Using TAG Teach as a Teaching Tool
• (37:31) - Why Positive Reinforcement
• (44:16) - Failing Forwards as a Training Philosophy
• (56:27) - Desirable and Undersirable Problems
• (01:08:37) - Drills and Simulations But Nothing In Between
• (01:13:23) - What Makes for a Good Drill?
• (01:16:23) - Playing to Play vs Playing to Win
• (01:23:07) - On Newsletter Glue