Practice, Practice, Practice

I convinced my son to head out with me today.  Temps in the low teens again, but we were ready for it.  We had the park to ourselves. Might have more to do with the Packers playing the Bears for the NFC championship today.  (Go, Pack, Go!)  Still, it was sunny, the wind was light, and the snow around the practice target and the base of the sledding hill was nicely compacted.  Time to fling some disc.

I worked pretty hard on the weight transfer issue, but I'm finding that when I go for power, I throw high and lose distance.  So I backed off on the power, and my average distance shot up from about 120 ft. to 165 ft.  My forehands seem to edge out my backhands for distance (+10-30 ft.), but I need to adjust my orientation since my forehands are going way right of my target.  I tried a couple overhand thumbers and tomahawks--fun shots, so I might have to spend a day focused on those sometime soon.

Now, my son is on a mission.  He's got a couple friends who have blown a lot of Christmas money on gear and their kinda full of themselves, so I think he might be a little envious.  But when I took him to Glide a couple weeks ago, Mike (the owner) hooked him up with an Innova Archangel in red and and Innova Stingray in orange.  Mike took him very seriously and treated him with the same respect as he would have an adult customer.  And he was able to convey to my son that having a lot of discs to start out would only make learning that much harder.  

So, armed with his trusty discs, my son is ready to practice.  Like I said, he's on a mission: to "cream those guys"!  Evil glint in the eye and all.  (We had the good sportsmanship talk a couple times, so I'm sure he'll keep the gloating inside.) He's making good progress.  He's throwing about 40-50 ft., and he's mostly throwing in the right direction.  At that range he's anywhere from hitting the post to missing by a max of 3 ft.  Not bad, newbie!

I couldn't talk him into throwing on even part of the course today, but that's all right.  We got a solid couple hours out there.  Looks like the temps are headed to the mid 20s for the whole week.  Might have to head out again soon.

---SDJ