The Triple Threat Principle
Why Shredding is an "All or None" proposition
The Triple Threat Principle
For those who don’t know, the Triple Threat Principle ( TTP) has been around in basketball for about 100 years. It is now, always has been and always will be true, in every possession, in every game, at every level, with either gender, in every offensive set, against any defensive system; it is a principle. It is always true.
The TTP says that when a player in basketball catches the ball, they are in the triple threat position. From this position. they can shoot, pass or dribble (dribble drive penetrate).
If they begin their dribble and subsequently pick up their dribble, they are now only a double threat.
What are the implications or ramifications of this?
Let me ask you, who has more leverage on the defense? The player in the triple threat position, or the player in the double threat position?
Obviously the player in the triple threat position has more leverage. When a basketball player drops down to a double threat, the defender can play much tighter on them and apply more pressure.
The relevance in Ultimate is that players are always in the triple threat position in ultimate; throwers always have more leverage on the defense. They just never knew it.
Since the game was invented in 1968, in every point, in every game, at every level, in any offense, against any team, in any tournament, a thrower in ultimate has always had vastly more leverage against the defense then they ever realized. Nobody has ever understood this and I can say this as a fact because if players did understand how the triple threat changes the game, there’s no way in hell you’d ever play the game the way that you do.
This single principle is one one and only thing I’ve really focused on sharing with the community and I’ve been unwavering on this concept of the Triple Threat for decades. Anybody who has been following me for these past 30 years knows how consistent I’ve been about this one thing.
The three threats in ultimate are passing, scoring and shredding.
Many people have argued that a scoring attempt is redundant because it is just a pass, but when you think about it, there is a significant difference between the two in terms of how the defense reacts and responds to the separate threats of scoring and passing.
For example, there’s always a guy on the field who’s first, second and third looks are hucks. We all know a guy like this. Even if he’s close to the endzone, he’s more inclined to be looking to score first, and ask questions later.
As an entire defense or as an individual defender, you have to approach this threat differently from the threat of defending against just a pass to another player. This might seem like a subtle difference to you as your reading this, but in time when you mix in Shredding (dribble drive penetration) to your game, you’ll start to understand that simply the fact that you are offering one of these three threats will cause the defense to have a different reaction to it and you’ll start to notice a significant difference between a scoring threat vs. a passing threat.
What makes a Triple Threat player most dangerous is when they’re able to mix up and balance the three threats in a way that always keeps the defense back on their heels and second guessing themselves on what happens next.
The reason I use the word Shredding as the third leg of the triple threat is specifically because Shredding is intended to be threat-centric and I needed a word to differentiate what most players are doing from what Shredding actually is.
In other words, the entire point of Shredding is to be that third leg of the Triple Threat is because the whole point of Shredding is to prioritize placing a significant emphasis on the threat of dribble-drive-penetration consciously within the minds of the defenders💯of the time. I hope that makes sense. Whenever I see players dribbling or running give and go maneuvers, what I don’t ever see are any players wielding this threat as a weapon.
It’s not specifically that Shredding in and of itself is the weapon, per se, it’s the fact that you simply have it in your arsenal of viable threats that weaponizes it. In other words, the threat is more of a weapon than the weapon itself. I can play against a team that’s familiar with me, and never shred once, and still be effective with shredding because all I have to do is show it as a perpetual threat and that’s all that’s needed to apply a lever to the defense and get them to back off.
In a game that has an obvious and overwhelming offensive bias in the rules, why do conventional offenses allow the defense to have the upper hand? This doesn’t begin to make any sense. Incorporating the Triple Threat Principle into your offense will immediately give your offense the upper hand over the defense.
There are no half measures, there are no baby steps, there is no shallow end of the swimming pool, no middle ground and there’s no grey area.
Once you understand how profoundly this single principle changes the entire game, you’ll realize why it’s an ‘all or none’ proposition. Why would anyone ever say, “yeah, that’s too much power for me, I only want a fraction of that power”? How does that even make sense?
It’s not like it’s possible to pare down this principle down to the Double and 1/2 threat Principle. That’s nonsensical. To teach my offense is to teach one single principle, the Triple Threat Principle. The Triple Threat principle is indivisible. It’s a principle.
My personal preference in how to balance the three distinctly different types of threats is approximately 80% Shredding, 15% passing threats and 5% scoring threats (hucking or otherwise) but any team’s decision on what they’d like to see this distribution to be would be either a strategic or a philosophical decision. All shredding is, is basically a superset of tactics and a tactics’ efficacy is only as good as the person using them.
The Triple Threat’s Application in Ultimate Frisbee
For those who were around back in 2004 (where I began to carpet bomb R.S.D. with my assault on the game, culture, community and cult of Ultimate Frisbee), when I first began to assert that dribbling was a viable superclass of tactics in the game, I was soundly ridiculed and mocked for even suggesting such a thing.
Nowadays, it’s common for play by play announcers, players and teams to talk and think in terms of dribbling, but in all fairness, none of it is really the kind of dribbling that I promote or teach. Shredding is to Shaun White in the 2018 Olympics what contemporary dribbling in ultimate is to a 5 year old on the bunny slopes.
When you think of sports that have dribbling, there is hockey, field hockey, soccer, basketball, lacrosse and now ultimate frisbee.
What makes Ultimate unique in all of these sports that have some form of dribbling is that Ultimate Frisbee is the only sport where dribbling requires two people to make work. All the other sports you can dribble unilaterally.
These sports all have the concept of dribbling without moving around on the playing surface (eg. Indian dribble in field hockey, stationary dribbling in basketball, foundations in soccer, etc.) and this is also the case in Ultimate. The term I use across all these sports where you are dribbling in place is called idling, and idling is an important form of Shredding in Ultimate as well.
Knowing that idling as a subset of Shredding in Ultimate provides a crucial understanding of how the TTP works in the game. When you understand that Ultimate is meant to be in a dead ball situation between every reception, you can also see how idling completely negates the fundamental mechanics of the game. The action virtually never stops when you add idling to the mix. When I’m shredding, there’s simply no dead ball situation at all as it more or less defeats the primary guardrail in the game.
Does the TTP in Ultimate significantly increase offensive Leverage?
I’d like to think that we can all agree that if this Unicorn is real, that the promise is real.
In other words, if the Triple Threat Principle is viable in Ultimate, that means that an offensive system that has the TTP as it’s core tenet will vastly improve the amount of leverage, balance and efficiency a player and/or team can bring to bear on their opponent.
So logically, the obvious question one remaining question is, is it possible to legally run with the disc in Ultimate? If it is, that means that virtually every claim I’ve ever made about the legitimacy of the Triple Threat Principle is true.
In other words, is the third leg of the Triple Threat, the Dribble Drive Penetration real or it a unicorn.
If full on dribbling is a viable tactic in Ultimate, that means that the Triple Threat Principle is just as much as a foundational principle in Ultimate as it is in Basketball.
The truth of the matter is that I’ve been Shredding in Ultimate for 35 years. It’s absolutely real. It absolutely destroys the game.
Tactical Classes, Subclasses and Superclasses
In trying to describe, define and articulate what shredding is and what it is not, I find it useful to speak in terms of tactics, strategies and philosophies.
Shredding is a Tactical Superclass. It is a set of highly refined, highly advanced compound tactics that are composed of many different individual tactics combined in new and unusual groupings.
When I see players like Jonny Malks, Johnny Bansfield, Jack Williams, Dylan Freechild, Rowan McDonnell, etc. doing some what I would call “proto-dribbling”, what I’m seeing is an extremely small fraction of what Shredding actually is and in no part have I ever seen a single player who is an actual triple threat. It’s mostly just give and go style offense, with poor balance, copious amounts of traveling violations and zero leverage against the defense…..and it works.
In other words, if what they are doing with their burgeoning dribbling is more effective and efficient than conventional offense, just imagine how effective and efficient these players will be when they learn how to Shred!!
We can think of Basic Tactics as elemental skills such as a backhand throw or an in-cut and within each of these, we could identify a subclass of different variants. For example, a Tactical Subclass might be all the varieties of backhand throws:
Inside out backhand (right handed)
Outside in backhand (right handed)
Backhand airbounce (right handed)
Backhand flick (right handed)
Backhand lift (right handed)
Inside backhand (a ‘dad throw’) (right handed)
Inside out backhand (left handed)
Outside in backhand (left handed)
Backhand airbounce (left handed)
Backhand flick (left handed)
Backhand lift (left handed)
Inside backhand (a ‘dad throw’) (left handed)
etc. (you could even have finer granularity like OI backhand airbounce or IO backhand lift, etc)
In other words, we could have a class of tactics that we call throws, and within that class, we can have several subclasses:
Backhands
Sidearms (flicks/forearms)
Push passes
Upside down throws
etc.
Furthermore, we could identify several general classes of tactics, such as
Throws
Cuts
Pivots
Give and Go moves
Catches
And within each of all of these, you could delineate a significant number of unique items that make up the subclass for that class of tactics. Depending on the level of granularity you want to drill these individual tactics down into, you could literally end up with hundreds and hundreds of atomic level tactics that an accomplished player may posses.
Are you with me? When I teach Shredding, I like to think in terms of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), where you primarily are throwing some form of kick, jab, bob, weave and fakes, often times attacking with some sort of strike and the occasional haymaker.
Posture is important element in being able to simultaneously present three separate threats to the defense and all of the classes, subclasses and superclasses are the toolbox from which a Triple Threat in Ultimate Frisbee operates from.
So a sequence in boxing such as jab, jab, punch, counter punch, upper cut could be grouped into a single complex tactic and similarly a complex tactic in Ultimate could be a combo of a few specific, distinct fakes, a variety of pivots, check-offs, etc. all to set up a single throw.
A compound tactic then, could be defined to be something like a dump-swing that combines an assortment of tactics and is a mix of two or more players to achieve a specific objective.
Shredding is a tactical Superclass because it both a complex tactic in that it is inclusive of the full array of elemental tactics a player possesses in order to run with this disc, and it’s a compound tactic in that Shredding involves one or more teammates (also using specific tactics) to help facilitate running with the disc.
However, the extended family of compound tactics that become readily available once you establish a running game in Ultimate gets very interesting, very quickly. These can include:
Pick and roll (yes, you can run a perfectly legal pick and roll in Ultimate)
Play Action play
Stunt move
Up and under move
Killer Crossover Dribble (ankle breaker-I’ll give $100 to the first legit Ankle breaker dribble)
Drop Step Swim move
etc.
Conclusion
Of all the sports that incorporate dribbling in one form or another, Ultimate Frisbee is unique in the sense that the only way to possibly run with the disc is with the collaboration and cooperation of your teammates. It is precisely this very lightweight framework that I teach to enable this collaboration that Ultimate players bristle the most at.
The payoff for this collaboration however, is an astonishingly high level of leverage that Ultimate players never understood or knew that they had. The transition to Shredding in Ultimate is well worth the investment in time, resources and effort as well as accepting an a prerequisite framework that facilitates it. The Triple Threat Principle in Ultimate doesn’t work without it, so therefore, this framework is an essential part of the principle itself.
Obviously, my approach in teaching shredding is not to throw the players on a double black diamond slope and hope that they survive. I don’t expect players to be proficient that the hundreds and hundreds of various tactics an accomplished shredder has developed over decades, I only ask that they are proficient in this very thin veneer of a framework in order to create the environment for players to learn on their own how they choose to express themselves competitively, artistically, intellectually and creatively.
However, the requirement to teach a team how to incorporate my one sole principle (the Triple Threat) properly necessitates the need for a certain base level of not only Shred-specific tactics, but also a different set of fundamentals that are decidedly an anathema to conventional ultimate and this is where I have consistently run into trouble.
If you know about wave theory, there is constructive and destructive interference between waveforms. Let’s just say that there’s a significant amount of destructive interference between conventional tactics and habits vs. the framework for Shredding and it’s in everyone’s best interest to have amplification of waves (constructive interference) and so my objective in teaching Shredding is to maximize this amplification. To do this, it’s necessary to eliminate player’s patterns that clash with Shredding.
Make sense? It’s like, I can’t be running an Alcoholic Treatment center and having patients passing around a bottle of Jack Daniels in the bathroom!!
This is where players recoil and think that it’s ‘all or none’ with me or that it’s ‘my way or the highway’ (neither of which is true). In fact, my offense is so liberating that players who’ve learned my system wish they had learned it a long time ago. But in order for me to teach my one core principle (the Triple Threat), I need to get everyone on the same page and so it’s indispensable for players be in sync on what Shredding is.
The Triple Threat position is very much a straight upright position, for example. If you’re going to attacking with a dribble 80% of the time, you need to be in the triple threat position most of the time. This basketball player is in the classic triple threat stance, he’s simultaneously a threat to shoot, to pass or to dribble-drive-penetrate in virtually any direction.
When you stand and throw like these two following photos, you’re not in the triple threat and it’s basically impossible for you to be able to shred from this position. When you come to understand just how much of your power that you’re giving away by stepping out like this to attempt to throw a completion, you’ll never do it again.
So because it takes Two to Tango in Ultimate, the Shredder predominantly being in the Triple Threat position and constantly giving all three threats lethal viability is just one half of the Triple Threat in Ultimate.
The other foundational element to the Triple Threat is being able to simulate the hardwood floor in basketball. This is accomplished by making sure that all six other players on the field are in position and understand what their job is to act as the hardwood.
Shredding turns the game of Ultimate on its ear.
The Shredder is doing the lion’s share of the work while the hardwood don’t cut very much at all (relative to conventional offense). They really don’t need to, but then again, at any given moment, the hardwood player can instantly become the shredder so there’s plenty of hard running for everyone, just not all at once.
I scoured the internet looking for images of what the hardwood typically looks like and this is kinda, sorta, maybe a little like the hardwood.
None of this will make any sense to most players, and most players won’t even believe that any of this is possible, but it is possible, it defies everything you think is true about the game and it works against the best teams in the world. Key responsibilities of the hardwood are:
Rim catches as much as possible
Orient your hips so you are square to the shredder at all times
No upside down throws
Make yourself available to the shredder by anticipating where and when he’ll be coming in your general election
VANILLA. Your job is minimalistic. Remember, the shredder is doing 95% of the work in a Triple Threat Based offense, all you need to do is be of service to the shredder and give the disc back to them with the slightest movement (almost like handing off a baton).
Shredder side backhand. When the shredder is coming towards your right side, throw a righty backhand, when he’s coming to your left side, throw a lefty backhand.
Drift away from the area the Shredder is working in after you hand off the disc, to give more room for Shredding while simultaneously maintaining your viability as a hardwood option.
As long as everyone on the team understands how to be a triple threat, and as long as everyone understands how to be the hardwood, then you will crush everyone.
While these two sets of responsibilities seem rigid and limiting, it’s completely the opposite. It’s absolutely not an ‘all or none’ approach that I have or ‘my way or the highway’. Instead, it’s a very light contract. If you agree to stay in your lane in terms of what both the Shredder and Hardwood responsibilities are (when you are in either of these roles), then you can completely do whatever you want to do outside of that mandatory but very minimal framework.
I like to think of this thin framework as a very flimsy picture frame, and the game of Ultimate is the blank canvas for you to paint on.
Once you see this, you can’t unsee it.
Players are going to look backwards at pre-Triple Threat ultimate and see it as the extremely rigid, ‘all or none’, ‘my way or the highway’ kind of monolithic and unchanging albatross that it is.
Indianapolis AlleyCats
This is why my most recent episode with the Indianapolis AlleyCats was such a soul crushing experience. The owner, Tim Held, went all in on Shredding and I’ve always known that in order for a team to learn my system, I would need the backing of a legitimate team owner.
At one point, in our first group Zoom call, Tim literally requested that I not apply for the DC Breeze head coaching job because he wanted me to teach shredding exclusively to his franchise. Tim was committed to having me teach his players and in fact, to this day, he still wants me to teach Shredding to his coach.
I wouldn’t have agreed to the job had he not made this commitment. He wrote to Johnny Bansfield and myself (along with Travis Carpenter and their coach) that the AlleyCats running my offense was “a unique, once in a lifetime opportunity and that by August, the team would be the talk of Ultimate”. He also sent me a written proposal for me to teach his team Shredding (which is to teach the team the Triple Threat Principle).
At the point Tim made me the written offer, his organization and myself had engaged in over 10 hours worth of video calls, 6 hours worth of on the field training at Shredfest III in Indianapolis (which Tim attended the first three hours of) and I had been completely upfront that teaching the Triple Threat Principle was going to take a significant amount of time (3/4 of which would have involved getting players to unlearn poor habits that they had that were antithetical to Shredding).
It’s not like he didn’t know what he was getting into. It was literally a lifelong dream come true to have a Franchise owner, act like a franchise owner and make a firm commitment to bring me on to teach Shredding.
He reneged on everything he committed to in writing. Why? Because the way I teach shredding always causes friction, by design. In spite of the fact that Tim had put his commitment in writing, in the end he made the same mistake that Mike Denardis, Justin Allen, Matty McDaniel and Brent Steepe had all made; he bailed because of the friction. What is it about Ultimate’s culture that presumes that friction is unhealthy?
I love what Steve Jobs says about team building friction here:
You don’t fuck people over just because of a little discomfort or friction, you embrace the friction because it’s through this crucible of fire that great weaponry is forged.
Tim knows that he fucked this up (he has said as much).
He also has stated that given what he knows now, he would have done everything differently to make this work.
He still refuses to make things right.
ARe you gonna watch any UFA games this year and/or attend any alleycat games to see if they are gonna run your offense?