I didn’t know much before I entered college of what life there would be like, but I knew before my senior year of high school that I wanted to play ultimate in college. To understand my ultimate experience in college, you have to realize what it was like in high school and before.
My brother D.J. went to the summer camp CTY where apparently throwing the disc is the thing to do. He came back and threw with me and taught me to throw a forehand. Once I learned the grip, I actually managed to make it fly straight immediately. Though I’m so far from being an athletic savant, as a 9 year old, I learned to throw a forehand, or flick, quicker than many new college players. It simply came naturally to me, and has been a better throw than my backhand for as long as I’ve been playing. I even tried to show off and threw a flick from our hill onto our neighbor’s roof, where it got stuck. When I went to summer camps, there were invariably some games of Ultimate Frisbee and I always played. At Camp Coniston, we had a formal team and I threw the disc almost every day.
My high school Roxbury Latin (RL) was small, with 50 boys in each graduating class. With a culture where just about anyone that can play a sport has to, there really aren’t too many free athletes come springtime. Ultimate at RL should never really exist. Nonetheless, the indefatigable Luke Joyner (’05) was an absolute Frisbee nut. He went through the painful process of creating a team from scratch, and armed with a few devoted friends, managed to get a bunch of games on Sundays and days before exams after spring sports had ended. I went to a few of those games as a sophomore and then just about all of them as a junior and realized that I loved it. The level of play was atrocious, we had no concept of a stack offense and thus no offense at all, and only a mild understanding of zone defense. My skills and athleticism thus were shockingly very high for that level. In high school I had worked hard to try to excel at a sport, from basketball to tennis to wrestling to track. You have no idea how happy I was to be playing well in ultimate. Not only that but the sport is just an intrinsically fun one. Nowadays, having played over 2,000 hours of ultimate in the last 4 years, it’s funny to see how much I looked forward to playing games then. I often didn’t know when I would next get to play so when I got the chance, I attacked it with absolute voracity.
So after Luke graduated, I agreed to keep the program running. This involved being in touch with the Boston Ultimate people running high school leagues, setting up a schedule, getting uniforms from the athletic director who was otherwise unaware of us, and most importantly recruiting players. People at RL are busy and think they’re busier, so even some people interested in playing would turn down the opportunity. Furthermore, the people who weren’t interested in playing thought ultimate was a complete joke. I constantly faced a stigma associated with the sport – it was seen as a nerd game, not a real sport for real athletes. This is a big problem because you need real athletes to win at ultimate. You need people who were some combination of tall, fast, skilled, coordinated, agile or explosive. So I spent a lot of time trying to convince my athletic friends to play, and somehow kind of succeeded. In our first game against Arlington we put out a really good team and trounced our opponents. In another game against a good Belmont High squad, we lost by 1 after two of our best players had to leave at halftime. The rest of the games were a struggle trying to scrape together 7 people to put on the field without subs, regardless if they had any of the above physical characteristics. I had to cancel many games because we simply didn’t have enough people to come. It was very stressful and sometimes depressing. I found better success playing in organized summer league but my ultimate experience before entering college was unsatisfactory.
I arrived as a freshman super eager to play, emailing the captains and attending their first practice even though freshmen hadn’t really been invited yet. I thought I was good because I had good throws and I ran track, so I had to be faster than these schmoes. With that mentality, freshman year was doomed to be a disappointment. Though I had 2 years of organized ultimate experience, I didn’t realize how amateurish the level of play had been. I still didn’t know what a stack offense, the most basic offense, was which befuddled our coach. I clearly didn’t make a good first impression with my undeserved cockiness. Playing time, which I would complain about for all four years, was justifiably minimal that year. I had the makings of a good forehand huck then, still my strength, but I wanted to throw it all the time. I really didn’t know how to manage the game and I couldn’t guard a chair. Also as a freshman, I always had the worst seat on our long car rides and invariably slept on the floor of the cheap motels we’d book. The lowlight may have been a day tournament at UMaryland in early spring, where it inexplicably began snowing. We were all inadequately dressed but our team at the time was quite small and so most players stayed warm by playing. Rooted to the bench, I nearly froze to death. I had to leave and go to the bathroom during the game in order to warm up. All my digits had gone numb and even if I was allowed to play, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. Nothing about that day reminded me about ultimate, the fun sport I had always loved.
I was so mad at the nonexistent playing time that I actually didn’t go to the second day of sectionals, citing a brutal paper. I seriously reflected on whether I wanted to continue playing. As negative as my experience that year had been, I still knew that it was what I wanted to do. I still loved the sport and I loved that we got to practice 3 times a week and that we played, and I played, every practice. Coming from high school where the sport wasn’t even viewed as legitimate, it was still great to be surrounded by people who dedicated themselves to becoming better players.
My coach that year wrote us all an individual letter on how to get better over the summer. I read mine 50 times and took it to heart. That summer, despite teaching tennis in the mornings and working downtown in the afternoon, I played ultimate two or three times a week and worked out one or two more times. I joined a summer club team that turned out to be a ton of fun and found consistent pickup games to go to. I ran whenever I could and jump roped whenever I couldn’t. That was also the summer I did Air Alert, this brutal workout that increases vertical leap. Actually writing this all done, I’m really stunned I was able to do that. I must not have hung out with friends too much.
So sophomore year was a lot better. I hit the ground running much improved and really saw playing time all year. During our spring break tournament to High Tide, injuries and odd circumstances had left me as the only experienced handler on the team. For three days, I split the handling duties with 3 freshman. I distinctly recall playing 8 or 9 points in a row at times and I may never have been more sore. Combined with the Vietnam War beer pong we played at the beach house that we trashed, that was still one of the most memorable experiences of ultimate and indeed all of college. Also during sophomore year was Trouble in Vegas, another 3 day tournament in Las Vegas dubbed “The Best and Worst Idea Ever.” What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that was also one of the highlights of college.
Sophomore year ultimately ended with a disappointing sectionals tournament, in which I played particularly bad and was rewarded with less playing time. That summer and fall though, when I went to Beijing and Dublin, would not only permanently change me, but also change the way I saw ultimate. A random introduction in Brown actually gave me a Beijing ultimate friend before I even arrived, and combined with a simple Google search, it was not hard for me to find the one weekly pickup game (though I did get disastrously lost the first time I went) and joining the one league which played on Sundays. So I played twice a week in the smoggy Beijing air and loved it. Mostly an expatriate group, there were a growing number of Chinese natives playing with us and we often had to conduct stall counts bilingually. The group was also very outgoing and friendly and both games were often followed up with dinner and drinks. When I sprained my ankle at the end of the summer during a game, I had three people calling up and checking in on me. I had never realized how much of a social tool ultimate could be but it provided me with a great group of friends in a totally foreign city.
Dublin was an even better example of the social power of ultimate. As a study abroad student only there for a semester, it was surprisingly hard to make real Irish friends. We didn’t live on campus (and neither did they for the most part) and were generally in very different stages of life. Many of my American friends never really made any Irish friends. I wouldn’t have either if I didn’t join Chilly O, UCD’s club team.
Ireland is such a small country and ultimate such a new sport that the level of play was very low, which I thought amusing. Our team captain, who was quite a good athlete but didn’t have a fully reliable flick, was actually on the Irish National Team. The 2008 Cork Open had basically all the best players in the country and I looked around and realized I had some of the better throws among them. Besides the ego boost, the other great perk for playing with Chilly O was partying with them which was also an eye-opening experience. Let’s leave it at that.
The rest of junior year, American side, was very disappointing with my developing tendinitis in my ankle, a vestige of my flat foot combined with the sprain. Contrastingly, our team that year, led by the twin towers Logan Rhyne and T.J. Ryan and the not so towering Alex Laws, became our best team ever. Our program had never made it to Regionals, always stymied by either the University of Maryland, the Univeristy of Delaware, or the hated George Washington University. Still the best game I’ve ever participated in was our game at 2009 Sectionals against GW. The winner would make regionals, the loser would have to win two more games to qualify. In a tight battle where every offensive possession was tense, we found ourselves down two breaks at halftime. In the second half, down 9-6, we finally got our break on what amounted to a Hail Mary pass that Nick Corey managed to come down with, over at least 4 other people. From that point on, the intensity on the sideline became immense, with the B team and the women’s team arriving from their games. Every yell helped change the outcome and we had this amazing momentum that I have not felt before or since. We ended up winning on a long huck by Logan that two of our players could have gotten. Alex Wilson took charge and layed out through to fully secure our first ever berth to Regionals.
With such drama, Senior year would be hard to top. But personally, there was no comparison. One of the greatest parts of being part of a student organization for four years is the leadership you’re given towards the end of your run. Even though I wasn’t elected to any positions, by default I had a lot to do. For example, we needed 21 year olds to rent the cars (and throw the parties) and as such, I was much more privy to the organization behind our exploits that I had just taken for granted as a freshman.
Every ultimate player I know has independently “created” a personal highlight video in our heads, that we play whenever we want to pump ourselves up. A lowlight video could also be assembled but that would just be depressing. The highlight of my highlights are both games that took place on campus. As seniors, we managed to host the national-contending UVA team in February. On a Saturday night at Harbin field, about 150 fans attended the game, about the average size of the football crowds that also assemble there. For me, it was the culmination of everything this sport has meant to me. With our friends actively cheering us on, it was a confirmation that my involvement with this silly game had achieved recognition. I didn’t play that well in the game, but I left with a highlight which is all I need to take away. Catching a continuation pass on the backhand side of the field, I immediately looked for people going deep. Forced forehand, this was not a good position to huck. Nevertheless I saw Mike Drost streaking deep, several steps ahead of his man. Reacting entirely instinctively, I let the pass fly and was shocked by how straight it flew. When Mike secured it in the back of the end zone, I experienced a high of a lifetime. If nothing else, all the practices, sleeping on the floor of dirty ends, suicides and track workouts that made me throw up, games in terrible weather – if all of that made that moment possible, it was worth it.
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