Healing, Growth, Ultimate

I'm a writer, sometimes I need to write through it

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Reflecting on the Year(s) Gone By

While there’s nothing super heavy in it, today’s edition of The Breakside does cover some personal struggles with mental health so consider this a little content note rather than a content warning.

While it is fair to say I am always working on and through my relationship with ultimate, two things have happened recently that have made me reflect more than usual. The first was Thanksgiving, and the second was interviewing for a YCC coaching role for this upcoming year.

To be clear, both were lovely. I spent Thanksgiving with family and friends. We were at the beach outside of Charleston, South Carolina, for a week. My interview was conducted predominantly by people I know pretty well and have a good rapport with. I returned from vacation rejuvenated and feel confident that I interviewed well, regardless of what happens next.

However, Thanksgiving was a difficult milestone because it marked the first anniversary since I decided to drop out of grad school and my ultimate scholarship at Davenport. My interview forced me to confront the fact that the job of YCC coach was what left me with my first batch of largely unaddressed big feelings about Ultimate eight years ago, and the thought of doing something anything remotely similar to what was done to me is beyond repulsive.

Loving this sport and dedicating as much of myself to it as I do can be incredibly difficult sometimes.

Sometimes, I talk to friends who I went through one of my three or four different abusive coaching situations with. Sometimes, they tell me they don’t really care anymore and could be and have been cordial with one of the people in question if they saw them in a casual setting. And I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because of how many times I have found myself in one of these awful situations maybe it’s some other reason. But every single time, I am shocked by how much anger bubbles to the surface when I think about these people and their effect on my experience and my life as a regular human. I have not let go, and I have not forgiven, and while I have certainly tried to forget, I haven’t all the way. Not yet, at least.

As an example, for this piece and my own morbid curiosity, I went looking for that time my abusive former YCC coach (who is still, to this day, on the USAU banned list) was given the Being Ulti Twitter account. And the ensuing Tweets of mine from the public crash course education I gave on why that was a bad idea. When I found them I was immediately back in the heightened state of emotion that had been in making those tweets two and a half years ago. Likely the same state that I blocked out eight years ago playing under him. Even writing this, I can feel the panic and fury I felt at simply confronting this person online years after our last in-person interaction. It sent me right back to the mental health spirals I was having last year at Davenport.

I often mention here or in conversation that I’ve had a hard time in the sport but don’t often feel comfortable going into any detail. It’s easier to simply acknowledge that things have been hard and that I used to feel very unhappy about many things concerning ultimate. It is much, much harder to admit that sometimes, those feelings return to the surface. That I haven’t fully dealt with them, and to this day, those past experiences from former coaches still impact my life and my relationship with ultimate. It feels embarrassing to admit that nearly a decade after some of these experiences, in ultimate frisbee of all things, the way I view myself is still warped and impacted by them.

I’m even hesitant to refer to the coaching I suffered under as “abusive,” rather than just bad. I have a hard time being honest with myself or a therapist about why these experiences still bother and affect me so much sometimes. Maybe I think that pretending it was just regular bad instead of very harmful will make it so. But that hasn’t worked for the better part of the last decade, so I hope to try some new things moving forward.

I was talking with a friend recently about some of this stuff and it helped me realize something important: While I wish I hadn’t gone through that hardship, it now largely positively impacts the way I interact with the world. I can choose to actively channel it into being a better, more empathetic person, friend, player, and especially coach. It’s helped remind me of how much I have gone through and what I have accomplished despite that.

Here’s where things stand. It’s been:

• Eight years since dealing with an abusive and now-suspended YCC coach

• Five and half years since having to get high school and Triange Ultimate admin involved in removing an abusive and incompetent high school coach

• Two and half years since the Being Ulti Incident

• One year since leaving another awful coaching and personal situation at Davenport¹

I’m only 23. It’s hard not to feel like these situations, and even worse, these people, have stunted my growth within the sport and as a person, and I often struggle with the unavoidable reality that, on some level, they have. But even just in the past year I have worked so hard and largely succeeded at repairing so much of my relationship with ultimate. And here’s what I have accomplished in that time:

• Coached youth ultimate for a majority of the year in 2024

• Poured exponentially more time and energy into The Breakside this year

• Returned to playing ultimate after a seven-month hiatus over the summer

• Applied and interviewed for some higher-level club coaching roles

• Took stats for the WUL and PUL, worked the scoreboard of a UFA playoff game

• Signed up for fall league but didn’t realize I’d been taken off the waitlist until the season was almost over but went and played anyway the last few weeks and had a lot of fun

• Went to club regionals and nationals to cover those events and write about them

• Earned my first dollars from my ultimate writing, and even a sponsorship (thank you Ultiplanet!)

• Signed up and am playing in two winter leagues

• Started work on more projects coming soon!

I am incredibly proud of myself. I am so excited to continue to have a long, meaningful, and ultimately positive relationship with ultimate, ideally for the rest of my life. But with a renewed commitment to the sport, the old challenges remain. Both personal and external. I think a part of me hoped that dropping out last year, taking a break, and potentially never dedicating serious time to the sport as a player again would solve things or make me feel better. It didn’t do any of that. But it did give me the perspective to move forward. And at the very least, I’ll try to cut myself a little more slack moving forward.

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About The Breakside

This newsletter aims to tackle the gap in present coverage of ultimate as a sport. Commentary, analysis, and community are some of the guiding ideals behind the Breakside.

If you enjoyed my writing, please consider leaving a like or comment, subscribing, or sharing it with a friend. There is now a paid subscription option to support the journalism I do. Please consider helping out in that way too if you are willing and able.

About the Author

My name is Noam Gumerman (he/him). I am from Chapel Hill, NC, and studied Journalism and American Studies at Brandeis University. I am a journalist by trade and have been playing ultimate for over half my life. I love nothing more than combining those two interests. Contact me for discussions, feedback, story suggestions, and more on Twitter (@noamgum/@breaksideulti now too!) or email (noamgumerman@gmail.com).

1. For men’s team! Y’all should really take a look at the women’s program I think there is so much to love that’s going on there!