Be-do-have pt 3: A regionals to remember
I always knew mindset was important, but now I have full proof that it really does change everything
This is Part 3 of a 3 part series about the Be-Do-Have mindset.
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A few weeks ago, my team, BW Ultimate, played a regionals tournament to remember. We were seeded 8th — yet we managed to take the #2 seed to universe, beat the #1 seed (a team that we had never beaten before), and place 5th in arguably the toughest region in the country.
This season, we pulled off something pretty spectacular.
But if you had asked me a few months ago if I believed we could achieve a feat like this, there’s no way I would have said yes.
A season of doubt
Early season was hard.
It started with an exhausting tryout season, where we unexpectedly lost some players and had to wrestle with tough roster decisions.
Then came a hard loss to LIT, a rival of ours in the South Bay.
By midseason, things still weren’t clicking - D-line struggled to convert breaks, and O-line couldn’t get the disc back after a turn.
As we continued to slog through practice after practice, doubt started seeping in.
It was never out in the open, but you could feel it. At practice, people were tentative. Some didn’t fully trust their teammates, others didn’t trust themselves. I saw the doubt crawl into side conversations, where people murmured about our team’s ability to perform, questioned their decision to join, and half-jokingly talked about creating a new team with none of the same issues.
I had started the season feeling so optimistic about what we could create, but as someone who is so deeply affected by other’s emotions, I too began to feel hopeless.
It’s all about mindset
Everything changed at Fruit Bowl.
Fruit Bowl is a tournament out in Seattle, and it was first really high level tournament of the year. There were definitely nerves going around, fears of being so bad that we’d get clobbered.
But once we got there, things felt different.
It was a new location. We were playing completely new teams with whom we had no history. In that new environment, we were able to make a mental shift. We thought less about the rankings of the teams we were playing. Instead, we focused in our ourselves. We realized we could take on our matchups if we ran hard and committed. We believed in our abilities, and we owned it.
And the results showed.
That weekend, we, the 13th seed, placed 9th. We found a small bit of momentum, and what we found continued to grow.
It almost didn’t happen
Fast forward to regionals weekend. The final tournament of the year. All of our throwing, practices, and mental prep was for this very moment. It was time to make it count.
But we almost didn’t. Game 1 on Saturday, we came out tired, slow, and unfocused. There was no energy in our play. So we played as expected - winning our first game against a lower seed, losing our second against a higher one. I even felt pretty good about how we played against the number 1 seed, because last year we had done so much worse.
When we entered our 3rd game against LIT (our true arch nemesis who beat us early on in the season), we just weren’t in it. Before we knew it, we were down 4-1. Then they took half.
We brought it in for half-time, feeling frustrated and defeated. At that moment, one of our coaches spoke.
“If we’re going to win this thing, we need each and every one of you to commit to owning your matchup.”
She looked around the huddle, pausing to hold each of our gazes.
“Are you ready to commit to that?”
At that moment, something changed. It was like we woke up. We finally grasped that if we lost this game, our season would be over.
In that low moment, we each decided that we could do better. It didn’t matter how down we were or how tired — we would make this count. With new belief in ourselves, our play changed. We came back and eked out the win.
Flipping the mental switch
If we didn’t know it before, we definitely did now. Mindset was everything. “Be”-ing was everything.
We then won against a team seeded above us that we hadn’t beat this season - all because we believed we were less tired than them and could win the energy battle.
There’s this diagram that shows how teams perform at a range of levels, no matter how good they are. It can depend on the weather, injuries, mindset.
I’ve always known that lower ranked teams can beat higher ones, but this was the first time I really began to believe it.
That weekend, we stopped judging each team by their seeding. It didn’t matter. When we turned on our mental game, we could play at our peak. And when that happened, every team was fair game.
On day 2, we fully bought in. We embraced that we were dominant players that could win our matchup, and showed up with sick grabs, good decision making, and relentless work to get open, even against top players. We took ownership — leading sideline cheers, rushing to our players regardless of a score or loss, and giving each other high fives. We committed to identities that would keep us silly, loose, and positive.
We were “be”-ing, and it made a difference.
We came back from a 2 point deficit and played to universe against the #2 seed, just barely losing the chance to make it to the 3rd place game.
We continued to rally and came out strong against the #1 seed (who fell to the 5th place game), winning against that team for the first time in our team’s history.
I’ve been on plenty of teams where we talk about mental resilience. We all know that mental game is a huge part of performing well. But never before have I been on a team that actually made massive gains in it.
It’s so damn hard to actually believe in yourself and your team’s abilities, to actually adopt the “Be-Do-Have” mindset. But this season showed me that my team can. And that having that belief makes all the difference.
What other factors contributed to our season’s success?
Mental game was big for us, but it wasn’t the only factor. If I had to identify what else made a huge difference, it was the following:
Having coaches: Having coaches this year was a game changer. I especially loved our coaches because 1) they really knew our team culture (having been players on our team before), 2) they respected the team’s input and encouraged feedback and discussion, and 3) they were able to objectively view how a game was going. With their tremendous frisbee IQ and EQ, they were able to help us become aware of our energy, understand what was and wasn’t working, and then adapt in each game. And they did this so so well (and as first-time coaches too!!)
Having calm, steady captains: It didn’t matter if others lost faith in the team because the captains never did. While the rest of us were stressing about roster picks and the performance of our lines, our captains came in with a groundedness and clarity of vision that we could all come back to — and that was so important.
Being able to learn from our weaknesses and adjust quickly: I was so impressed this year with leadership’s ability to identify our weaknesses and then quickly do something about it. We ran so many experiments - from converting our d-line to using a vertical stack setup, to introducing a new continuation cut style, to practicing new defensive, offensive, and dump looks that we could add to our toolkit. Not every experiment worked, but that was okay - we learned from each failure and then iterated again. We got so good at this that we were even able to make changes mid-game.
Every team tries to peak during regionals. This year, we truly peaked at the right time, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
Thank you BW Ultimate for a wonderful season. Until next year!