I was once told that kids in Seattle start young with ultimate, and pretty much grow up with it. That's not hard to imagine, because there are so many great ultimate teams in Washington, on all different levels. In 2004, Seattle celebrated a club trifecta, with Sockeye winning the Open Division, Riot winning the Women's Division, and Shazam Returns winning the Mixed Division.
So what is it that makes Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest in general, such a hotbed for ultimate? I thought I could get a pretty good perspective of this by having a little chat with Emma Fuller of UChicago Supersnatch, who attended prep school at the Northwest School in Seattle.
First off, tell us a little bit about your ultimate background.
I started playing frisbee in 6th grade at my middle school. I had friends who had older siblings that encouraged us to play, and my middle school had a team. During high school I played on a number of teams. At the end of 8th grade I was invited to play on Moho (which stands for More Horizontal), the coed youth club team in Seattle. The team was made up of high schoolers from all around Seattle. For the first two years it was coached by James Evans (a University of Washington player, and now a D'Oh player) and by Ben Wiggins and Miranda Roth (of Seattle Sockeye and Riot, respectively) my last three years. We went to a variety of tournaments throughout the year sometimes splitting up into single gender teams, other times going coed. There were a few junior ones, but mostly adult club tournaments were all that we could get to. I also played at my high school, the Northwest School. I made varsity my freshman year and played all four years, captaining my senior year. My sophomore year, because our high school team was still coed, I played with the girl's club team from Seattle, Deluge, which went to Nationals. For junior and senior year, Northwest sent a girl's team, as we were single gender at that point. My senior year was the first year that Youth Club Championships were held, and I played on the Seattle girls team, Hyak, and went to Minnesota with them. Once I got to Chicago I joined Nemesis, the women's club team out here, for the fall of my freshman year, along with Supersnatch. I've alternated between Nemesis and the coed club team out here since, depending on how much time I have to commit to club frisbee during the summer. I became captain of Supersnatch my second year, and so this will be my third year as captain.
What makes Seattle, and Washington in general, such a great spot for ultimate?
I think the biggest contributing factor to Seattle's dominate ultimate scene is the degree to which top club players get involved in junior ultimate. My high school coach was a Riot player, and the coaches of my high school club team were a Sockeye and Riot player. My little brother's just starting high school (at a different school) and he'll also have a Sockeye player coaching him. To have these very talented players coaching middle school and high school teams makes a huge difference. More kids get excited about (and good at) the game, more kids are out playing at pickup, and fall, summer, and spring leagues and the scene grows exponentially. Combine that with Sockeye and Riot's dominance on the national scene, and Seattle continues to draw top college players from around the country, which in turn helps the junior scene. And it just continues to snowball.
Having transplanted from the Northwest to the Midwest, what's the difference in receptiveness towards ultimate? Why is it so much more successful in the Northwest than it is in the Midwest?
Frisbee definitely isn't as big in Chicago as it is in Seattle. Again, I honestly think a lot of it has to do with how the club players involve themselves with the frisbee community. I haven't seen a ton of outreach of the club players (except for a few individuals) to the junior scene at all. Kids under 18 aren't allowed to play summer league, for example. There's no way to grow up into club ultimate here really. There aren't a ton of high level players volunteering to coach junior years or college teams. So by playing here in Chicago as a junior or college player, you're not going to get all that good unless you're really self-motivated. In Seattle I simply fell into frisbee by accident in middle school, and by freshman year I was completely hooked. In Seattle the club players coach at all levels and, in return, a large number of those kids go on to play club.
Now, I'm a big college basketball fan. Even though I'm not a huge fan of my school's team, the Fighting Illini (I'm all about the UConn Huskies), I do read a lot about them. A big problem with our recruiting is that a lot of our state's top talents (read: Derrick Rose to Memphis, Jon Scheyer to Duke) choose to flock to other schools around the country. We see that in ultimate sometimes too, with schools like Carleton benefiting from the imported talents of the Paideia School's Grant Lindsley and Amherst's Sam Kanner. However, in the Northwest, you see a lot of the local talent staying close to home, with Nathan Hale's Claire Suver and Shannon O'Malley staying together at Washington, and guys like Nate Castine of Nathan Hale going to Western Washington and Jeremy Norden of the Northwest School choosing Whitman. Why do you think so many local players choose to stay in the Northwest? Do you think this has helped strengthen the region? Is this a strength this region enjoys that others don't?
Haha. When I was home this summer I was actually talking to some friends about this question. This is what we came up with. In Seattle the frisbee talent is spread out in a large number of schools, both public and private. While in other junior frisbee hot spots (I'm thinking about Amherst specifically) all that talent pretty much comes from one school. In my experience, more private school kids tend to go out of state than public school for whatever reason. And actually the girl's talent (my year at least) was much more evenly distributed than the boy's (most of the talented boys went to The Northwest School). So you see a much stronger showing at the college level for women's than men's (look at University of Washington, for example) because the girls stuck around, while all the boys went out of town. But in general, Seattle again has a great club and pretty good college selection of teams, so it's much more appealing for Seattle kids to stick around because they have a huge number of options to improve their game.
Is there a "model" of Northwestern ultimate? (i.e. a certain way leagues and teams are run, a certain style of play, etc.) If so, can this model be duplicated in other regions?
So I have to be honest, in high school I didn't really pay a ton of attention about the way that leagues, tournaments, or even teams, really, were organized. I was spoiled by the wealth of frisbee in Seattle and pretty much assumed that everywhere was the same. Only now that I'm at Chicago have I been paying attention to how frisbee activities are structured. Furthermore, by the time I was in high school and firmly entrenched in the frisbee world, Seattle had a well established frisbee community. But from what I remember is that, most importantly (to me at least) juniors were allowed to play at adult leagues and tournaments. DiscNW (the Seattle area frisbee organization) is well run and puts together a number of tournaments (both adult and junior), clinics, and leagues. Leagues weren't hat, you could make and bring your own team. As for whether or not that could be duplicated in other regions, I think there should be a bigger emphasis on junior frisbee. But I think it may still be necessary to have hat leagues to encourage people who don't already have links to the frisbee community here to get involved. As for a style of play, I'm not sure whether it's regional or more temporal influence. When I was learning the basics (middle school and high school) we were taught vertical stack, with two handlers back almost exclusively, along with 3 person cup zone. Towards the end of my time in Seattle (junior and senior year) we were doing some horizontal stack, 1-3-3, 4 person cup, split stack, and some of the other common offenses and defenses you see at club level. Once I got to Chicago I found that most people played in some version of horizontal stack with 3 handlers back. Whether this is a regional thing, or more of a temporal thing (by 2005 horizontal stack was way more popular, more teams were doing it, more teams were learning how to defend against it, etc.) I have no idea. And the only team that I've played on out here where you're teaching new people how to play is Supersnatch, and I've been doing most of the teaching. But if I had to say one thing that I learned to appreciate in the Northwest was the dump and swing.
Finally, how can the appeal of ultimate be spread to communities like Chicago?
I know I've been harping on it, but I think more involvement at the junior and college level. Having club players willing to donate their time to coaching and teaching will do a ton for getting kids interested in and sticking with frisbee.
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I'd like to thank Emma (who neglected to mention that she was an alternate for the Junior Worlds team in 2006, and was also a Great Lakes All-Region selection last season) for taking time out of her schedule to answer a few questions; it was definitely an interesting read for me, and something I've been hoping to write/learn more about all year.
While this interview focused mostly on Seattle and Washington, the Northwest as a whole really has an incredible degree of parity. If you look at the women's teams at the college level, you've got incredible teams like UBC, Washington, Oregon, and Stanford, just to name a few, and on the club level you've got teams like Riot, Fury, Zeitgeist, and Slackjaw. It's really absolutely impressive how competitive the ultimate is over there.
Something that Emma talked about in depth was the development of junior ultimate in the Northwest contributing to the "production", if you will, of great ultimate players. I agree with everything she said, from how integral it is to the development of younger players and an ultimate community, to how having more elite club players getting involved in the junior ultimate scene in Chicago could help make the sport more popular here.
Something that my old friends and I who currently play ultimate say a lot is that we wish we would have known about ultimate back in high school. Unfortunately, the West Loop wasn't exactly a hotbed for youth ultimate in Chicago, and if it was, then it was way beyond me, obviously. Now I know about CUJO and I know Whitney Young formed an ultimate team in recent years, which is super awesome, but what can we do to make ultimate more marketable in Chicago, and in other communities like it?
Obviously, like Emma said, it would help a lot if the existing ultimate community here were more accessible to younger players. Let the younger kids play in tournaments and in the leagues. Let's help them set up teams and leagues in the school systems and in the park systems. Let's have more guys and gals like Matt Stupca (of Machine) coaching college and high school teams. But when it comes to Chicago specifically, I feel like we're in a much different market than say Seattle. No offense to Current Dominant Chicago Coed Team (I say this because I haven't the slightest as to who this is anymore), Machine, or Nemesis (both of whom are doing really great this season), because they're all great teams whose skill level greatly exceeds my own and what it will ever be, but our local elite teams haven't really done anything significant in the past few years. In a sports market that will accept nothing less than championship material, how do we promote a sport that has no real local hero, let alone local figures willing to donate their time? I mean, the White Sox won the World Series a mere three years ago, and all of us spoiled Chicago fans are currently hating on them. I won't make any bad "Hustle & Flow" allusions, but it's definitely an interesting question I'm hoping to explore further as I meet more and more people within the Chicagoland ultimate community.
In any case, some of you probably know that this past summer, I worked as a resident assistant with the Junior Statesmen of America Summer School at Stanford (Gotta love it. "Good afternoon, Junior Statesmen Summer School at Stanford; this is Joann, how can I help you?" while in the background R.A.s are dropping televisions off the backs of golf carts, taking their pants off while bouncing balls into newspaper baskets, humping chairs to "Lollipop", and playing Text Twist while eating an unhealthy number of turkey sandwiches... ah, what a summer). Anyhow, I was known as "that R.A." who always looked totally badass with the bandanna, and was all hardcore about frisbee, and all the Robinson boys always invited me to play with them, which was fun.
Now, I don't claim to be a talent agent or anything of the sort, but Alex Eckert, if you ever one day stumble upon this blog, I want you to know that you're going to be a beast at ultimate if you choose to continue in the sport. I'm tellin' all ya'll right now, this kid will grow into a dominant defensive player if he keeps at it: you can call him The Skywalker because sky D's are his specialty. He read the disc better than anyone else, he had ridiculous speed along with his sick hops, he had little regard for his body, and he snagged down EVERY disc that came his way on D. I'm not even exaggerating when I say that every time he was on D and the disc came his way in the air, he owned it. There was never a doubt in my mind that it was a D. On O, he was an active receiver, who owned bitches (Can I call my residents bitches? Well, I just did) deep and was always reliable on the in-cut. Another kid I was always happy to have on my team was Nathan Allen (who is also an incredible speaker ... don't be surprised if you hear this kid speaking on television in a few years). He too used his speed to his advantage and was able to run down discs I didn't think anyone would catch, and his vertical was sort of ridiculous. He was more patient and willing to pass to me than the other boys, and even though I'm not totally sure he completely understood strategy, he knew the importance of the dump and swing better than any of the other kids; he knew that losing yards on a dump wasn't the end of the world. So if these two guys enter the world of college ultimate in two years (I believe that they're both currently high school seniors), know that they're legit, and that at some point I have probably reminded them to wear their name tags or have walked them/driven them to class or dealt with their crazy-ass mothers over the phone or something.
1 comment:
random, but... katie shiro's REAL name is Axis and i feel like you should change it. (not if its too much of a hassle, but if you can it would make me happy)
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