Freestyle Players Association

December 1997

We need to encourage professional routines at major tournaments, and other thoughts

By Randy Silvey, 1997 World Pairs Champion

All I was trying to say is: Difficulty is not the only aspect of Freestyle. I was not implying we should abandon it.

The second point I was trying to make is that we have given so much attention to difficulty that we have not allowed the other aspects of our sport to flourish. I believe we need to nurture presentation as much as we have difficulty.

Please understand that I don't want to see freestyle turn into some creative dance/performance art piece. I want to see a marriage of all the possibilities and rock peoples' world's.

I watched the videos from Hawaii (I don't want to sound like a pompous ass) and frankly I found myself getting bored. Everybody is basically doing the same thing. Nobody is really trying to push the creative envelope regarding routines.

Some say (sarcastically) the "the" was the move of the tournament and I think they miss the boat on what Freestyle is and what people get off on watching. Difficulty is NOT the issue and going out there and jamming to some random music and doing what you think is difficult for 4 or 5 minutes is (in my opinion) extremely boring. I think this jamitude mentality is detrimental to the sports growth and the viewing public walks away going "Huh? Wow, those guys are really into themselves." I think most of the world class jammers are doing difficult moves, some more than others, some less, but the perception that there is this huge discrepancy (again in my opinion) is laughable. It allows those who have this view to use it as a crutch for being lazy and just continue to do the same stuff year in and year out.

This difficulty argument just burns me up. My philosophy towards routines is: FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION!! ! What I mean by this is if you create or put something together correctly and execute it the difficulty becomes a by-product at this level. The hard part is to create and execute. The top 50 jammers are not that far apart in skill level, but as soon as you start putting together a routine the wheat almost always separates from the chaff.

Here are some more of my thoughts:

I don't really have a problem with the way difficulty is judged. My problem has to do with the perception of its impact and the idea that there is this huge gap in skill level ( as I stated earlier). Between the elite players there is just not that much difference. Enough said.

Execution: Pretty straight forward.

My biggest concerns and where I think fundamental change must happen start with presentation and I think it is very simple.

Spontaneous/Random = Amateur-Fun Jam

As long as we continue to ignore this premise we will stagnate. Can you imagine a skater or gymnast performing spontaneous moves with random music and having any chance against a well choreographed routine? I don't think so. We have made presentation a non-category and tricked ourselves into thinking it is has something to do with artistic impression.

We need to reward the routine over the jam. We should have categories like (these are just off the top of my head):

Music Cues

Relationship to Music

Relationship between Players

Relationship to Audience

Theatrics

Quality of Choreography

Relationship with Disc

Relationship without Disc

Freestyle is a performance and is the one category we have to reward it. But it doesn't get rewarded today.

There should never be a situation where a choreographed routine loses to a spontaneous routine in presentation. As it is now this happens regularly. It makes the sport amateurish (skating/gymnast reference) and there is no incentive to put together a routine if all you have to do is get together, find out what spin you take, and shred and you have a good shot at beating the polished team. This kind of paradigm will weed out the people who put together routines and you will end up with spontaneous jams for tournaments. The reward for coming to a tournament prepared must be significantly higher and the deduction for not being prepared must be enough to reflect the difference.

I love to just go out and jam and see what happens, and I do it on a regular basis. A tournament should be a different forum from an afternoon jam. The only way I see this happening is to force people to comply with a judging system that rewards a professional approach rather than an amateurish approach. Maybe we need to have two different kind of tournaments, spontaneous and rehearsed. Our sport will never grow to the levels we all fantasize about until this is resolved.