Maintaining focus?

[alt01]

My team is having some trouble in the way we play our games. We will have a decent plan (usually pretty simple), make our primaries and trade some paint just fine. The problem is that sometime in between gunfighting and taking secondaries people just zone out...I hear it get quiet and nobody is talking or throwing paint. This is usually closely followed by what appears to be a bus driving through the middle of the field as our guys just get shot out and the other team strolls up to the flag.

Any ideas on how to keep people keyed into each other and heads up on the field?

 

[Beaker]

2 things to try

1, at practice play a 3 on 3 or something. then have some spare players effectively 1 on 1 "marshall" behind one set of guys. All they do is watch what the guy is doing and keep talking to him - stuff like "are you in tight", "have you shouted the count","what is your front guy doing"," can you move". It's not to tell them what to do, but to challenge them all the time.

2, get them to talk to themselves during a game. Get them schizo and then they talk to themselves saying the same sort of things as above - it's weird but it works!

 

[shamu]

Beaks first suggestion works really well for getting people into the habit of talking.

My team also likes to rotate through a marker-less position. One person on each team plays without a marker, or carries their marker but can't shoot it. This forces them to work on communication.

Of course all this talking doesn't do much good if nobody's listening, so we do pop-quizes during the game. Whoever is coaching/reffing the game blows a whistle to pause the game, then asks the players questions - where's the other team, what's the count, who needs to be eliminated, etc. This really helps people to start listening and processing what they hear, instead of just shouting into the wind.