My First Experience with Ultimate in Germany and Force Middle

Sorry for the lack of updates. I am in Germany now, and I am a lot busier than I thought I would be, and in the down time, I have not been thinking about ultimate as much as I normally do. I have played with the team here twice, and don't have much to say except about that, other than they play a lot of force middle, which I dislike, and are still mainly indoors, which I also dislike. I am also sick, again, which has halted any extensive plans to begin to get in shape or to play as much as I would like. As I continue to settle into life here and develop a schedule, I hope to attend practices more regularly. Oh, the vocab differences are kind of fun; a disc is a Scheibe, they force links and rechts when not doing "FM" (for "force middle," not mitte as you might expect), and handlers are Aufbauers. The stall count is still in English, though.

On the topic of force middle, does this work well for anyone? I find it really hard to play defense in a man situation when the force changes from one side of the field to the other. I am probably not a good enough player, either, but still, I think the team needs to be really good about determining when, exactly, they're going to change the force from a backhand to forehand, and potentially call switches on defense. Needless to say, joining up with a group of Germans and playing pickup ultimate in the park with them for the first time means that this communication on defense was not there.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I play man defense by lining up on the correct side of my woman depending on the force. If the disc starts off being force forehand, I line up on the correct side to stop the cuts to the open side. The disc gets thrown to the other side of the field, now it's a backhand force. Suddenly, I am on the wrong side of my woman, and she has an easier open side cut. I can see force middle upsetting teams' usual open-side offense, and if I were a better defender I'm sure I would have an easier time with it. I was just always taught that the force, at a basic level, was supposed to make the other defenders' jobs easier upfield, and force middle, as I understand it, does not make it easier on the defense. I guess it makes it harder on the offense, but is it worth it?

I did a Google search on "force middle" and found a blog post from four years ago on it. The poster himself said under the "how to attack it" section: "Additionally, don’t forget that the downfield defenders are having to constantly switch which side of their man to cover. The closer the cutter is to the frisbee, the less time a defender has to make up the distance." His post talks about setting a force middle with poachers, which is more than what the team I played with was doing with their force, so I could see it working better with poachers, and, like I said, intelligent switches. But still, I don't know why force middle would be your go-to defense without poachers and a tight, communicative defense. I guess it is giving me some practice on being way more aggressive on defense. And maybe as the season goes along, I'll develop a better on-field connection with the team and defenses like this will become easier. Who knows.

See, this is why I don't write about strategy. But it's all I've got right now to talk about right now. I'm pretty much just asking for input about force middle, benefits and downsides, things I'm missing. Comment away; in the meantime, I'll try to finish some posts that have been lingering on my computer for far too long.