Horizontal Stack by Dylan Freechild and Jimmy Mickle

The idea behind horizontal stack is to create “attacking space” in front of the disc and give cutters ample opportunity to attack into the space. It is called horizontal because handler and cutters are spread across the field horizontally and the disc is swung horizontally to reset where the attacking space is. Once the attacking space is determined (area in front of the disc regardless of force), cutters string cuts together to open up that space and allow teammates to go one-on-one in the newly vacated attack space.

Fig. 1: Attacking space in horizontal stack

• • The primary aim is to make throwing long easy, so keep the stack short; approximately 8-12m from the thrower.
  • Try to use the full width of the field to spread your cutters out; if you have four cutters in 36m of width, that means each should be stood in 9m of space. This is a very simplistic view, but you can see that even from a completely static set up, cutters should have plenty of room to work with.
  • Starting with cutters spread out ensures that players are immediately isolated; ideal for exploiting deep space.
  • To make life even easier, cutters in horizontal stack tend to work in pairs to create space for each other. One example of this are Peppermills
  • Most teams prefer to use 3 handlers and 4 cutters; hence the other name for this offence is “3-4”

Classic footage of Sockeye running a Peppermill in a horizontal stack