Ultimate Frisbee Analysis of Strategy and Tactics: Help defence breakdown: Brute Squad v Fury, 2025 US National Final by Brummie

There’s a lot of good information about help defence online, but there’s also a bit of a misconception that adopting help defence is simple or easy, and that it will automatically lead to better outcomes than other defensive systems.

As a follow-up to my article Playing better help defence, I wanted to review a high profile game with examples of how help defence can have a positive impact for your team, but also examples of poorly executed or poorly conceived help schemes and how offences can take advantage of them. As ever, a team’s ability to recognise and adapt to their opponent’s defence is crucial, so I’ve tried to highlight examples where a team does the same thing repeatedly to show that these aren’t individual acts of brilliance that cannot be replicated; rather, they represent patterns that are recognisable and repeatable.

Good examples of help defence

Identifying cuts from deep space to under space

As per my other article Playing better help defence, identification is the first step in playing good help defence. Here are three examples where Levke Walczak identified an under cut developing and was able to easily catch interceptions; no crazy athletic plays required, just pure game IQ:

The footage sadly doesn’t allow us to see the deep space, whether other defenders are involved, or the timing of the poach in relation to the cutter & thrower movements, so there’s not a huge amount to break down here, but we’ll come back to how Brute Squad systematically poached on under cuts.

Picking off leading handler resets

Another situation that Brute Squad were able to generate turns was on sideline resets. Fury like to throw the swing into the middle of the field for the dump to run onto; this is smart because, in general, this throw leads the disc further off the sideline and makes continuation easier. See Sideline Resets for more on the subject of sideline resets. However, this type of leading throw is not without risk. The further the pass is thrown, the greater the opportunity for another defender to get involved. Brute Squad did their homework here, identifying the possibility of those leading throws and positioning themselves to intercept them by poaching off the third handler:

Poor offensive spacing is partly to blame here. Good offensive positioning makes poaching more difficult – and easier to take advantage of – while poor positioning makes it easier for defenders to poach risk-free. The clip below didn’t lead to a block, but shows how Brute Squad were able to poach off inactive downfield cutters in front of the disc. Fury’s #06 McKinley McQuaide gets caught near the sideline and doesn’t clear out, allowing her defender to clog the throwing lane directly in front of the disc without any risk; a few moments later, the same thing happens with #53 Esther Filipek:

We’ll see more examples of this open side poaching later.

It is worth highlighting that defensive units often need to take risks to generate blocks, a philosophy which is a little different to offence. Here’s an example where Fury’s Anna Thompson attempts a block by similarly poaching off the third handler, but isn’t quite able to get there; this leaves her out of position and Brute Squad are able to score before she can recover:

This is not an assessment of whether that particular bid was “good” or “bad”, it’s just the nature of playing defence as a unit. These risks apply just as much in a person scheme as they do in a help scheme. The point of showing this example is two fold:

1. help defence isn’t a magic bullet that will instantly improve your team. It requires a lot of skills & coordination to get it right.
2. Fury were just as capable of identifying opportunities to apply help defence as Brute Squad, it’s just that they were generally less successful at doing so in this game.

Forcing tough catches

Good help defence isn’t just about generating blocks or putting visible poaches in front of the thrower to make them look elsewhere. Help defence can also narrow throwing lanes and make completing throws more difficult. Brute Squad did an excellent job of forcing some difficult throws into tight spots, which in turn led to some tough catches from Fury. The combination of intense & tight person-to-person defence with opportunistic poaching & switching is what made Brute Squad’s defence excel:

Some pros & cons of help defence

A help scheme doesn’t need to generate blocks to be useful defensively. It can help to save your legs by reducing the amount of running you need to do, make the other team make more passes and/or work harder, or make throws and catches more difficult, as seen above. Switching & poaching work together very well; players who poach away from one player to help in other areas will often put themselves at a positional disadvantage if they need to catch up to that player, so it makes a lot of sense to switch assignments to help reduce the load on any one player.

The Ultiworld coverage of the final isn’t the best camera angle to show how help defence can be used to switch on under and away cuts, so I’ve borrowed a beautiful drone clip from a game between Brute Squad & Scandal from the 2025 US Open courtesy of Flatball Club which perfectly illustrates the benefits of switching on these types of cuts. We can see Levke Walczak poaching in the lane directly in front of the thrower and picking up under cuts with two of her team mates. It also illustrates one major challenge of help defence, which is that, eventually, one of the offensive players usually finds themselves wide open; keep your eyes on the right-hand side of the screen:

Watch carefully and you’ll see the following:

1. Two defenders – #23 Colette Pellegrini & #15 Emily Kemp – switch
2. #42 Levke Walzcak – in trousers and a visor – follows her cutter until the cutter is close to the sideline, at which point Levke chooses to poach in the lane
3. Walczak notices that there’s a cutter coming under, so she guards that cutter until the cutter bails; Kemp also follows the cutter under until this point. The poached off cutter also moves down the sideline. Pellegrini plays close defence during this section.
4. Two Scandal cutters move down the field, Kemp & Pellegrini continue to play close while Walczak continues to sit underneath in the lane.

So far, so good. But this is where things fall apart a little.

5. All three of the Scandal cutters move underneath, completely overloading the poaching Walczak. Kemp points to one cutter, presumably telling Pellegrini who to cover. Walczak closes up with the second cutter, leaving the third wide open in the middle of the field. Walczak & Pellegrini switch
6. Poached Scandal cutter gets the disc on the open side in the middle of the field.

I think this is a good example of great help defence; two switches and some opportunistic poaching shut down three Scandal cutters for 15 seconds. I also think it’s a good example of poor offensive spacing; these cuts are generally so close to one another that they make it very easy for the defence to poach on them. And it’s also a good example of the limitations of help defence; if you keep switching and poaching, sooner or later you’ll ‘lose’ someone. This entire interaction involved three defenders making two switches, and resulted in an offensive player being left completely unmarked, catching the disc in the middle of the field with no marker, which is generally a very dangerous situation for the defence.

Just how prevalent is this situation though, where offensive players are left completely unguarded in help schemes? More importantly, are offences able to use this to their advantage?

Finding unmarked players / abusing help defence

In the first point of the final, Fury turned over and played a “last person back” poach which allowed Brute Squad to walk down the field with ease:

If you consistently allow your opponent to walk the length of the field throwing only short uncontested passes, you are going to lose. In my opinion, this is the worst defensive strategy possible. With a little patience, Brute Squad were able to score without any risk. And they did it often; in the next clip, they swing to a poached player who is immediately able to hit a continuation pass. A few moments later, there’s a wide open cutter who catches the pass for a large gain, her defender poaching off deep. This is more a case of “bad help defence” than good offence:

Sometimes, help defence goes wrong through poor communication; in this next example, a good deep cut from Caroline Tornquist draws three Fury defenders. Brute Squad’s poached players then take advantage with two undefended passes:

Of course, you can argue that this isn’t necessarily “bad”: after all, you’ve prevented a possible goal. But if you’re going to give up undefended open side passes then you need another way to build pressure, and you could achieve the same thing – but better – by simply backing your person and pressuring unders. Or – and this is probably the nirvana for defensive coaches – you need seamless coordination between players so that one and only one defender picks up the deep threat, and therefore no-one is left open. It can be hard to draw a line sometimes and say whether what we’re seeing are examples of poor person defence – too far away, too slow to respond, getting forces wrong, etc – or badly executed poaching where one player is trying to do too much in isolation, without trying to work together with their team. Attempting to do too much can often result in defenders achieving nothing at all: they are too far from their person to prevent them getting the disc, and not well-positioned to What we *can* say though is that these clips are examples of poor defence.

Another example of this ineffective help defence from Fury shows Harris as the last back defender leaving a cutter open on the far side of the field. This poached cutter eventually gets the disc from Ospina who runs a quick give & go with her. Throughout this 10 second period, Harris doesn’t really do anything other than shadow another deep cut – but she doesn’t switch, and the other Fury defender sticks with the cutter. Even worse, Harris bites on an under from Walczak but stops, caught in two minds, leaving her “last back” position. How do Brute Squad score? With a throw over to the near side of the field, a position that Harris could have been defending if she’d been more decisive, or if Fury’s help defence was more structured so each player knew their role and responsibility. Instead, this is just one person poaching in isolation – something that Brute Squad were excellent at abusing:

Here’s another example where Harris was last back and Brute Squad were patient enough to find the unmarked player; you could argue that Brute Squad don’t really go anywhere during this clip, but I’d say that’s because of great person-to-person coverage on the stack cutters, with two attempted open side cuts aborted due to excellent defence:

A very short drone clip shows how Brute Squad poach both under and deep of the Fury cutters; effectively they have 4v3 near the disc, and 2v3 in the back field, with one cutter tightly guarded. Crucially, the Brute Squad deep defenders are deeper than the deepest Fury cutters, pushing them under towards the under poaches, while other defenders sit in the throwing lanes, “wrapping” the offence in a blanket; this is very similar to Hasami:

Compare this to when when Fury tried fronting and Brute Squad just ignored the deep space and overloaded the under, enabling them to take an uncontested pass:

Learn how to overload: Zone offence concepts 2: Going through | Overload

Ironically, on one occasion when Fury’s last back lured a deep shot, Harris had position to get a block but mis-times her jump and Walczak catches it anyway. This isn’t a strategy failure, just an individual having a bad moment:

Poor help examples from Brute Squad

Brute Squad didn’t always get it right. In fact, they sometimes gave up positions with failed switches in the deep space; here’s one that Fury quickly took advantage of:

Is this next clip, Brute Squad’s deep defender has position but doesn’t respect the amount of lateral space the offence have to work with and reacts too slowly, resulting in an easy goal:

Right off the pull, no-one picks up the cutter on the far right of the screen:

Immediately afterwards, the same poached player cuts all the way to the open side under space to catch the disc – running past two Brute Squad defenders who both follow her in, which in turn leaves another Fury cutter, Dena Elimelech, wide open in the same spot on the field as before; we can see all 7 Brute Squad defenders covering 6 Fury players as Elimelech jogs towards the end zone, and a Brute Squad defender frantically tries to get back in time. Fortunately for her, the offence wasn’t able to take advantage of the situation:

No-one picked up Irene Scazzieri directly off this pull either, and only a terrible observer ruling denied Fury what should have been an easy hold; this is an example of botched help defence from Brute Squad:

Overall, Brute Squad did a better job of playing help defence in a way that Fury struggled to adapt to. Equally, Fury’s help defence was generally inadequate against Brute Squad. That said, there were a total of 34 turnovers in this game, which is pretty high. As already mentioned, there are limits to what these camera angles show, and many of my judgements are subjective in nature. We don’t know the strategy that each team adopted at various points of the game, but these examples are sufficient to illustrate that there’s plenty of room for improvement with the execution of help defences even at the very top, and it’s worth bearing in mind that implementing help defence comes with both significant upsides and downsides; see Playing better help defence.

Being aware of these can help you to train better and play better.