Indablog

Ladder Singles

Posted on June 23rd, 2007 by Flywheel

Here’s a link to the corresponding poll, and here are some notes about the content:

I made it to Jax Beach in time for the first World Gitis Day, Sunday May 20. (I missed the Jammers prelims on Saturday because I had been pitching Indaba.org at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC. One benefit of being in New York was the opportunity to join the Thursday night A*T in Central Park.)

Pat Marron asked me to use his camera to take video of the finals, which meant seeing the whole event through a little viewfinder. OK. It was a worthy sacrifice for the cause. Then Tommy L. decided it would be a good idea to have someone stand on a ladder filming indies of the players below. I was enlisted again. Right away, it occurred to me that those singles might provide cool material for a demo of what Indaba.org can do.

None of the stuff I shot made it to Paul Kenny’s DVD of the tournament, so Pat sent it to me later. I cut that down to 18 moves that I considered to be worth watching, which became my first posting to YouTube.

I excluded all moves that ended with a drop, except for one of Tom’s, because it included such a nice, clean view of some superslow body rolls. You can actually make out the stamp while the disc is turning. Tommy also pulled off the single best move of the series… a brilliant display of consecutivity. I only captured the end of it, unfortunately, because I had gotten into a rhythm of hitting “record” as the thrower and receiver got into position, and he caught me off guard on that one by starting off his own set.

Eighteen indies were too many for a proof-of-concept poll. For now, the Indaba ballot works well with as many as ten candidates. So I reduced down to what I considered to be the best clip for each of the 8 players that pulled off dropless indies, plus two more that were strongly competitive. It was a tough choice, but I’ve done enough FPA judging and officiating over the years that I decided to trust my instincts.

If the player community finds this technology useful, we can use it to publicize the sport in lots of different ways. It seems to me like it would might work for archiving the rounds from various tournaments. But I’m more interested in trying out concepts like routine of the year, routine of the decade, play of the month, and so on.

Geoff Gregory captured some photos while we were shooting. Here’s Amy finishing a big move.