Train Like A Champion: Mosquitos 2025: Building a community by Christoph Nurschinger, Christopher Kelmendi and Jakob Dunshirn

Background

Mosquitos were founded in 2008 near Vienna. We used to train next to some woods near the Danube, so there were a lot of mosquitos! We now train a little further away but there are still plenty of mosquitos. Our first medal was a 3rd place finish at the Austrian mixed championships in 2015.

Mosquitos won our first youth championships in 2019, and our first Austrian championship in 2024, repeating this in 2025. These successes have been repeated in Europe, qualifying for our first EUCF in 2022 and finishing in the top 8. In 2023 we beat Grut at the Elite Invite, then finished 5th at EUCF 2024 before winning EUCF this year.

Club structure

Club structure is overlooked by many. A club has to provide structure for things to grow. If you start off with structure, it feels over the top at first but suddenly the teams grows into it and if you already have structures in place – financial, logistics, safeguarding etc – it makes growing that much easier. Structure also keeps us safe, and takes a lot of the mental strain off the players & coaches. Take as many little jobs as possible off the coaches to reduce the mental load.

Youth

Peter Scheruga started youth club at school, now there are hundreds of children playing in the school; when they play the school cup, that number is somewhere around 700-900 as most of the children in the school play. Within Mosquitos, we have 50 kids aged 10-15, 20 of whom are aged 15-17.

When Mosquitos started, we recognised the importance of building a sustainable program via a youth program. The investment we made into these young players has paid off with a pipeline of players coming into the first team with a good grounding. As they grow into the team, there’s no real transition to playing with intensity as they are used to it from the youth system where we value intensity in both practice and games, instilling the will to develop and the drive to win from a young age. We work collaboratively with other youth teams in the Greater Vienna area to ensure that there’s a space for everybody, from someone who wants to just play casually right through to people with aspirations to compete at the top. Ultimately, it’s a numbers game: the more kids you have, the more you’ll bring through that want to compete, although we also shape them to enjoy the competitiveness. Youth practice is immediately before the first team practice, so the young players get to see the senior team members arrive and we have a group cheer together as the segue between the two. Some of the youth will hang around to see the main practice and get a feel for the intensity.

Jakob Dunshirn (aka Dunsis) works in safeguarding in sports, so naturally we have a lot of know how within the squad, and we’re working on embedding it into our structures. Our coaches need elearning certification – provided by the Austrian Federation – before they can lead practices.

We encourage kids to coach as well as play; we have 16-17 year olds who are coaching the smaller kids (with adult oversight).

Culture

It can be fun to be pushed and be competitive. We try to offer both – we have over 120 players in the club – so we have space for everybody and all levels. Previously, we lost players because we couldn’t offer them what they wanted. Now, we aim to offer everything, although it is really hard to manage everything so we ensure that the top team is our priority. Our driving force is our top team and playing in that team is a natural progression – and goal – for our younger players.

That said, some people do too much; they will try to play u17s, u24s, national team, club, all while coaching… spreading yourself too thin means lots of tournaments and very little downtime. There’s a period between April & September where people might only have a few weekends off ultimate. A lack of recovery impacts performance and increases injury risk. We aim to do a little less so we can do it with full focus and full force; for instance, our 2025 club tournament season was only four events, and 2026 will be similar.

Besides all the youth-practices we have one elite practice, one practice thats open to all adult members of the club and one open/women-practice which are more relaxed and has spaces for people to try out new things.

Intensity

Intensity is one of our driving factors in what we do and how we do it. So, how do we maintain intensity? One thing we started saying before practice was that we wanted to “make this practice the best practice in Europe”. This really resonated with the team… in fact it gave me goosebumps! We always take a time out ten minutes before the end of training, then give a scenario such as “it is 12-12 in the semi finals” so we ensure that we ramp it up and finish practice with our best effort, playing exactly as we would in elimination play at a major competition. Things like this mean that, when we got to tournaments, the intensity & pressure was nothing new to us.

We do vary things at practice though. We used to use a colour code at practice for how expansive or safe players should be. In skills-based drills, we would allow people to experiment with new release points with prompts like “I want you to think of one type of throw you haven’t used all season. Use it in this drill and aim to add it to your toolbox for next season”. With some practices we are explicit about what we’re looking for, e.g. “we are looking for intensity now”. When people feel the intensity we make sure that we highlight it and say that we need to maintain it.

For the first few practices of the year we push ourselves to find the right level of intensity that we’re looking for. Once we find it, we point it out to the team and establish it as our benchmark not just for that practice, but for the entire season. There are natural slumps in intensity throughout the season, so we confront it by asking “are we at the right level?” and make adjustments if required. With 25+ people at practice, we don’t need to worry too much about rest times but this might be something to consider for practices with smaller numbers. We inject rest time if the intensity drops.

The last point from the EUCF 2025 mixed final shows Mosquitos starting in a horizontal stack, then primarily using their handlers in a 1-6 vertical stack before finishing to an isolated cutter coming from the stack

External validation

Dunsis is a big factor, bringing championship experience with Grut where they played for two years. Adding them provided a mental boost to the squad – Jakob has “walked the walk”, so the players would listen to what they had to say in a different way to the other coaches they are used to hearing from. Sometimes, the same message delivered in a different way – or by a different voice – can help. Dunsis was able to drive home the message that other teams don’t have magic drills or a secret sauce, it’s just all about focus & intensity. There’s this temptation to believe that next year, we’ll unlock a new tactic that will enable us to beat everyone, but it’s a myth. The truth is, we always had everything we needed.

What really helped was having Ben Oort visiting and running some practices in spring. He’s such a great coach. He played for Truck Stop so he brings that external validation… people listen to him in a different way. Most of the content of Ben’s trainings were almost exactly the same as what we’d already done – Ben would ask Head Coach Christoph Nurschinger (or Nurschi) what to focus on then just repeat the same content in a different way – but the focus was just intensity & communication. Ben also looked at the team and proposed a few things to work on and ran sessions on those themes as well. Ben really helped us to overcome a hump, making that intensity become a norm is credit to our other coaches. We’ve used other coaches too, Katharina Meissl came in to help us overcome a hump with our zone defence, for instance. Take outside perspective as much as you can. We’re going to try to get some more guest coaches. Coaches can learn from each other, and bringing in new ideas and perspectives gives our coaches a chance to learn.

Some of our team suffered from imposter syndrome, not really believing that they were in the same league as the top players. Getting noticed by Ulti.tv etc helped some of the younger players to know their worth. Suddenly, they are being coached by players with championship experience at the highest level, they have players in the squad who have won championships, and they are getting their names mentioned in the same conversations as the top players, and they began to recognise they had everything they needed to be the best.

Performance

Last year, lots of players recognised that they need to do more in order to compete at a high level, and some felt that they were doing more than others. We created a physical performance plan that people needed to follow through winter and into summer. Coaches never enforced it, but players realised that they just wouldn’t make the team if they didn’t follow it. Even players who didn’t make the roster still had a strict performance plan in the off season.

Buy in was critical, and is extremely high in this team, both mentally & physically. Not just the team that won gold, but all the practice players who pushed us all the way. Buy in from the top level is a given for the top tier of players & its normal that some people can commit more than others, but the average buy in is very high. An example is that people came to Euros knowing that they might not play at all in the big games or if things went badly. The willingness of the whole team to give everything, run the drills, follow a conditioning program, and throw in all weathers even though they might only play a small role. We must cherish those people and let them know they are cherished. Star players know they are nothing without those supporting players.

This year, we have put together a plan for WUCC, including ramping up our mental game. Previously, we have sometimes built up expectations and started to see the team getting caught up in their own heads. We started working with a mental performance coach and it has worked wonders; this was something we pre planned at the start of the year, with the simple mantra of “you gotta bring to practice what you’re going to bring to Euros”. It is a mistake to plan to play “extra hard” at a tournament; the truth is, you will bring to a tournament what you always bring to a practice. This isn’t a negative, in fact it gives us confidence; when we were playing at Euros in the big games, we could hear players saying “this is just another Tuesday”… that’s how we approached it. We warm up the same way in practice as we do at tournaments. We even brought part of our home turf to Wroclaf, just so we could say “this is our home”.

What this means is that we know we can deliver our best game in practice: we play as we practice and we practice as we play. In September we did a mental workshop with the team because we started to struggle with our high expectations for EUCF. The team were about to fall apart in August but came back much stronger after the mental workshop. Before that the O-Line was struggling especially hard. After the workshop they unlocked a new level that we havent seen before. Our D line simply cannot break the O line any more.

In the EUCF final, we didn’t get phased by going up 3-0 because we prepared for it, just as we prepared to go 0-3 down and we prepared to trade all game long. Our coaches have been exceptionally well prepared for every opponent. Every player had an assignment, every player had a purpose. Each player just needs to do their job, and we will win.

The winning pass is between just two players... but many years of work from many people led to that moment

Our coaching approach

We usually split our practices into sections. Jakob runs a more skills-oriented session during the first half, then hands over to a non-playing coach to allow him to focus on playing. The use of multiple coaches across the session – including player coaches – means that players are used to hearing different voices, different messages with different emphasis so they don’t start to switch off mentally. It also drastically reduces the effort required of any one coach; rather than being responsible for an entire practice, they just need to run one drill. It’s a great way to introduce people to coaching too, getting them to dip their toe in and this means lots of new opportunities for people in the club to get hands on coaching experience. Making more people contribute to the team in different ways is something that we want to continue with. Having these coaches then take part in the drills & games means they get to learn directly from the current best crop of players, people they can copy & match up against.

Compartmentalisation of coaching is key to our approach too. Nurschi doesn’t need to teach the players how to throw better, how to run resets, etc. The skills elements are taught by other coaches, so Nurschi can focus on which players to call in at critical moments, when we need a time out, etc. We plan our practices ahead of time and share them with our coaching staff. Usually we have one lead coach per practice.

2026 and beyond

WUCC is next year, but our focus is not really one year ahead, we’re thinking multiple years ahead. We’ve seen clubs which had a one year focus burn out after that big event and basically come to an end, and that’s not something we want. Martin Fürst, our club president, is a big proponent of this philosophy: we don’t strive for one big success, but want to be part of a bigger more sustainable team, and a bigger more sustainable domestic scene. Better to be 3rd out of 20 teams than 1st out of 5. We believe that what we’re doing is going to help Austrian ultimate above and beyond what we’re doing just within Mosquitos, and we want to keep growing.