(See Parts 1, 2 & 3 on these links)

The roller pull is my absolute favourite throw. You don’t always have the right wind for it – a left-to-right cross-headwind is perfect (for a right handed backhand thrower) – but when you do it’s enormous fun to use, and there’s no better feeling in ultimate than watching someone lay out to stop the roll just as the disc says, ‘Not today!’ and turns sharply towards the sideline out of their despairing reach.

Why rollers?

Check out these two pulls (on consecutive points, so presumably in similar wind) from the recent Pro women’s game.

Which of these do you think is a better situation for the defence? The one that is ~5-10 yards longer, and quickly picked up in the middle of the field, or the one that is slightly shorter but rolls out of bounds, and is fetched, and played from tight to the sideline?

Rollers can be a devastating weapon. If you get it right, in a decent crosswind and headwind, it can be challenging for the other team to even play huck and D, as anything curved out of the pitch past your mark/cup is not going to come back in. So if you’re hoping to get field position on an upwind point, the roller should be one of your first options.

But I often see them performed very badly – so badly that the team quickly and incorrectly decide they have no value – so here’s a few pointers about what you’re trying to do and how you could achieve it.

Longer isn’t better

Well, OK, sometimes it is. If you are on a team where no one can pull close to the far endzone, then you will probably find that with just a few minutes practice you’ll be able to get more yardage on a roller than on a ‘normal’ pull. There are lots of teams who should be experimenting with this kind of in-bounds roller, even in still conditions, simply because they can throw it further than a flat pull.

And if the wind is strongly against, then almost every team can sometimes get more distance with a roller.

But distance isn’t normally the main reason for throwing rollers. It’s all about getting the disc out of bounds on the windy sideline (after first landing in-bounds, so it cant be bricked).

You don’t WANT a stable roll all the way up to the receiving team. You want it out of bounds before they can stop it, or – in a stronger crosswind – at least beginning to behave unpredictably and make a sudden turn to the sideline so that it’s hard to stop (like the 1st and 3rd clips here; the second isn’t vertical enough to ever roll out of bounds).

The perfect roller pull usually exits the field not too far past the brick mark, before the receiving team can reach it, and lets you set up a trap on the windy sideline.

Any time you can’t reliably pull all the way to the other endzone – either because your team simply lacks that kind of puller, or because the wind is preventing it today – you should be very much considering a roller out of bounds. Even if it loses you a few yards, it gains you a sideline start and a set defence, which can be huge.

Higher isn’t better

Something to note when throwing rollers is that you normally need to throw them low. If you’re going upwind, it’s important that the disc gets on the ground while it still has some speed and some spin. And of course, the wind is much stronger the higher you go, so if you throw something similar to your downwind blade it will just hit a wall of wind and stop quickly when it lands. For a good roller, you pretty much don’t want it to go above whatever height you release it at – just throw it low and hard and let it fall to the ground early.

The majority of people throw their attempted rollers way too high, up in the fiercer wind. But there’s another reason you don’t want height, as I touched on in the article about blades – throwing a high roller will cost you spin. A disc landing on its edge from height will be temporarily “taco’d” – it will briefly bend way out of shape. A lot of the energy currently residing in the spin of the disc will be ‘used up’ fighting to spin this new deformed object¹, and hence by the time the disc has recovered its shape the spin will have slowed significantly.

And for a disc rolling on the ground, spin is directly related to forward speed, just like it is for any wheel…

So get it on the ground early – maybe maximum 20 yards in front of you – and not falling from a great height. If you’re throwing it 40 yards before it lands, it’s more a blade than a roller. You might be fine downwind, or perhaps if the wind is mainly across the field, but it won’t normally work well into the breeze.

More vertical isn’t better

Another thing to bear in mind with rollers, particularly for people trying it out for the first time, is that you don’t actually want the disc to be vertical when it hits the ground. Partly, that’s because it isn’t balanced when it’s vertically on its edge – place a disc vertically on your desk now and you’ll see that all the weight is more towards the top of the disc than the point it rests on. It will tip over.

Actually, though, the balance point isn’t all that far off vertical. The more significant factor is lift.

Even though the disc is rolling along the ground instead of flying, it’s still travelling through air and will still be feeling many of the same aerodynamic forces. The lift it generates on the underside of the disc will be trying to tip it over.

So if you want a long straight roller, you’ll need it to be significantly less than vertical when it hits the ground – far enough from vertical that the effect of gravity trying to pull it down flat is just enough to counter the lift, at least until the spin declines and it suddenly gets blown off course. Depending on the speed of the throw, and the speed of the wind, that might sometimes be barely above 45 degrees, though normally around 70-75 degrees on landing is about right. Here’s one viewed from behind – note both the height it gets to (or rather doesn’t) and the angle at which it hits the ground.

It eventually becomes vertical, and then past vertical, and rolls out of bounds. But it is well short of vertical when it lands.² ³

Wind under the disc, or hitting the top of the disc?

Here’s a roller (almost a blade really) thrown with the wind hitting the top side of the disc.

It doesn’t change angle much, and rolls out of bounds with the wind pushing it all the way. Compare that to this one, that you’ve seen already, where the disc flipped over through the vertical to go out of bounds.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of both options? When would you use one or the other (assuming you have the luxury of both a lefty and righty puller to deal with either wind)?

If you’re throwing with the wind under the disc, you will normally throw it straight up the pitch – starting from near the sideline and rolling it straight up the field until it flips out of bounds. That means it’s taking the shortest possible path to gain yards.

With the wind on top of the disc, it won’t flip over late, so you need to aim it at the sideline, which means starting near the middle of the pitch and throwing it across the field at an angle, as we saw in that Wisconsin video. As Pythagoras will tell you, that costs you distance down the pitch in itself, and it also has the wind pushing the disc back towards your endzone too.

So when distance is less of an issue – e.g. a strong crosswind situation with only a bit of a headwind – you might throw it across the field with the wind hitting the top. But with a strong headwind it can be almost impossible to get that throw even to halfway.

When distance is a real struggle – a strong headwind as well as a crosswind – you’d normally want to aim it straight up the field, with the crosswind underneath it.

Of course, you might also want to consider the risk of an error. When throwing it across the pitch, wind-on-top, your risks are that it gets too much lift and stays in bounds, or that it gets pushed too hard and goes out quite early. Neither is totally awful, I guess.

When you throw straight up the sideline, with the wind under the disc, you’re likely to get more distance and potentially really annoy the offence chasing it down, but the risk is that the wind blows it out before it lands and leads to a very short pull indeed.⁴ It’s a lot more aggressive, and a lot more fun⁵, to throw the roller up the sideline that dives away from the receiving team in a hilarious way, but once in a while you’re going to give a short field. Still, though, they’re going downwind – a short field isn’t nearly as severe a problem as it would normally be.

In conclusion…

A couple of thousand words on this is probably plenty… let’s wrap it up.

Practice rollers. Throw rollers. Experiment in different winds.

If someone is playing huck and D against you in a crosswind, you must try a roller to see if they can do that from the sideline too. If you’re struggling for distance on your pulls, find out if a roller could get you further, or even just as far but on the sideline.

95% of pullers have never practiced rollers, despite them being the best option a significant portion of the time. Expand your toolbox.

¹ Thoroughly un-rigorous physics, but you get the idea.

² If you’re planning to throw rollers, you should practice before the game starts and judge the way the wind is behaving that day, and what angle you need the disc to be at (but then you should be doing that more than you probably do for ordinary pulls too!).

Bear in mind that the release angle and the angle it hits the ground at are going to differ also. Into a serious headwind, you can almost throw a flat disc – even a low laser, with no stall, will flip over out of the hand enough to reach the right angle. In lesser wind, you might need to throw more OI, but still you would expect the disc to tilt more through the air after you’ve released it. Only downwind would you expect to release the disc close to the preferred landing angle, and more often than not you’d be throwing the blade not the roller in that situation.

³ The video above was me throwing pretty much into a straight headwind, and it still turns and rolls out of bounds quite nicely at the end (though it’s a little long and would perhaps have been stopped). In a crosswind left-to-right it would be much better – the disc tends to hold its line nicely until its spin declines to a certain level, and then it abruptly turns 90 degrees and rushes out of bounds, as you can see the discs doing in that video from the Pro Flight Finale (though those discs are thrown a little nearer the centre of the field than I normally would for a roller).

⁴ Under USAU rules, they could even middle it. Under WFDF, they’ve at least got to choose either a brick or to play it from the sideline where it went out. That little difference may be enough to change your mind about the best option in some circumstances.

⁵ Lol…

