[Hartley Greenwald]

One of the most common disputes in Ultimate at the moment involves different interpretations of marking fouls and boundaries, which are very difficult to adjudicate. In order to properly decide who’s at fault when there’s contact between a marker and a thrower, you need to be able to constantly keep track of exactly how far the marker is away (the torso can’t be within a disc space), and monitor if any points of their body are straddling yours. This is a lot to ask of someone as they’re trying to read the field and throw. Making contact between the thrower and the marker to always be a defensive foul, would resolve all of these situations. It might make defense a bit more difficult because you won’t be able to mark as closely then, but it would do away with all the marking infraction disputes.

[Nate Paymer]

If the thrower intentionally pushes the marker (something I’ve seen happen on the field — usually because they feel they’re being crowded), your proposal is that this should be a foul on the marker?

[Hartley Greenwald]

This does happen now, but like you said, it’s usually because the thrower’s being crowded. In my proposal, that would be a foul on the marker, but the consequence would be that all markers would need to mark far enough away that the thrower couldn’t touch them. In essence, it would create a zone around the thrower’s reach which belongs to them. Any entrance into this zone could lead to contact, which would always be a foul on the marker in my proposal.

I know it seems weird for intentional contact from the thrower to be a foul on the mark, but I think the personal zone reframing maybe makes it make more sense

[Duncan Tarrant]

This essentially negates the role of the marker if they must always be a lunge/pivot and arm+disc length away from the thrower at all times. We won’t see and hand or foot blocks and experienced throwers will be able to throw around any mark that is that far away without trouble. Let’s not even talk about the fact that such a zone would make dump and reset throws extra easy as a reset handler could intentionally use this zone for a “safe space” where their defender can’t follow them for fear of the marker touching them and resetting the stall count.

Furthermore, it has other consequences that massively favour the offence. If I cut and catch a disc and at the same time my defender makes a clean but unsuccessful bid and lands on the floor in front of me, they are technically within that zone that they are not supposed to enter in your vision of the rules.