Interview With Gabe Colton (part two of two)
Interview With Gabe Colton (part two of two)
Is a DiG/Scoop model transferable and scalable? Also great news! The Boston open scene is officially disbanding, and in it's place will be the first Galactic Empire!
Welcome back to my interview with Gabe Colton! If you missed part one, check it out here.
Correction: I’m afraid I have to issue a correction from part one of this interview. In it, I, from my own experience in having two coaches during my time on TRON, referred to Colton as one-half of the most dynamic duo in the college coaching game. There are now four TRON coaches, as I was recently reminded, so just pretend I put the same intro in here, and instead of a dynamic duo, it’s a quality quartet or something. Anyway, here’s the rest of the interview. Enjoy!
How transferable to other hot spots and elite programs is trying to do something like this? I would love for this sort of thing to be the way of the future. Certain areas do youth development incredibly well, but there’s sometimes a lack of opportunity for adult players to develop once they're out of a college system.
Yeah, totally. I don't know. I think the triangle is a very interesting use case. I don’t know a ton, but it seems like the YCC level is really good, the college level is phenomenally good, and then there's maybe a gap after that. Maybe the top five guys from UNC and three guys from NC State go and play Ring of Fire directly. But then there's the rest of those college rosters that could play Ring eventually, but I don't really know what they do in the meantime.
Again, I don’t know as much about the scene but I know there’s Raleigh Durham United, and there's been Cash Crop in the past. There are other teams, but maybe there's an opportunity for Ring to create a developmental team or a more obvious pipeline.
Another thing that could improve things, which we've been working with USAU on, is roster management. In European soccer academies for example, there's the top club team and U-23 or U-20 teams that feed to that top team. There's some amount of movement in between where some player who's killing it on the U-20 team goes up and plays for a couple of games. Maybe there's like a young player on the senior squad who isn't reaching or playing to their potential, and they go down and play a couple of games in a new system or where they're getting more reps.
We petitioned USAU to allow for increased roster mobility within these defined programs. Many of the roster rules exist so that you can't game the system to earn bids to postseason tournaments. For example, if there were no rules, DiG players could play as Scoop to jack up Scoop’s rankings and then earn an extra bid to regionals or nationals. So there are restrictions and timelines for when you can switch teams, but you can't switch back, and that's to protect the sanctity of the bid process.
But what we’ve petitioned USAU on is if there are ways we can have more roster mobility so that we can do what's best for each individual player’s development. Maybe there's a player who we think would really benefit from the practice reps with DiG, but maybe we don't see them contributing or getting that much playing time in the series. So, can they play with DiG for a tournament, play with Scoop for a tournament, maybe play with DiG again, and maybe go back to Scoop for the series? Or, similarly, for a player on Scoop who's killing it, could they come play with DiG for a tournament without jeopardizing the rest of their season on Scoop?
Not that roster mobility is what’s preventing a bunch of teams from doing this type of thing, but I think if USAU's recognition of these multi-team programs were more public, maybe more teams would try it. Or it would just make things easier within those existing programs to prioritize individual player development.
That could be an interesting opportunity for them to endorse a certain way of player development rather than the everybody goes crazy and ends up on a random roster model we have now.
I actually have a question for you.
Yeah, go ahead.
So right now in the New England open scene, there's DiG and there's a bunch of teams that are in the game to go in the game to go to the game to go, regionally competitive. Teams like Sprout, Big Wrench, maybe Bag–sometimes Bag is better than Big Wrench, you know? [Author’s note: get wrecked Bag for life] Red Tide in Portland [ME], Tire Biz in Burlington [VT], maybe Colt in Connecticut. And it seems like many of those teams exist in their own little bubbles. Knowing what you know about New England Ultimate, which is maybe not a ton of the club scene, but knowing what DiG has tried to do with Scoop and is trying to create this cohesiveness, what do you think is like your ideal imagined state of New England open ultimate?
Is it that these teams continue to exist and have their own cultures and localities? Or is there some sort of greater cohesion?
That's such a good question. Boston and the general New England area are so deep in talent, not to mention that the club region includes southeastern Canada, New York, and New England. There are just so many distinct hotspots.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but to me, the problem is that there are a lot of conflicting interests. If you’re asking what is the best way for New England open ultimate or Boston open ultimate to compete on the national stage (speaking of soccer and soccer academies) the answer is you go full Red Bull. You adopt the Red Bull soccer development ethos. Put everyone under one tent. Launch a serious development program to get everyone on the same page regarding skills and certain systems. You get everyone in as early as you can for as long as you can, and then hopefully, there's buy-in and there's enough coaching that everyone feels like they're getting something by being involved. Ideally, there isn’t really infighting over where people shake out in the pyramid of talent, and people are generally aware of where they end up because everyone is improving and bought in.
However, I do think that teams like Tire Biz, Bag, and Iditarod, which are keeping large portions of their school teams together, are important. Maybe those groups aren't ready for or don’t need that one club experience. From my own experience, coming from a different school and getting to play on one of those teams, it's also incredibly valuable because those teams do a ton for those school-based ultimate communities. It helped me feel a lot more connected to the area in a way that a big tent and me being closer to the bottom rung in that system wouldn't have as much.
So, more cross-pollination.
Yeah, that's good for ultimate. On the grassroots level, it's dope that there are club teams that come from college teams that want to keep their players playing together and having fun, not in an incredibly high-stakes environment.
And then sometimes there's a team like Tire Biz a year or two ago that is on a real heater pushing some really good teams to the limit, and that's also really special. My ideal version of how this would look for New England is a middle ground that expands the DiG tent.
You know this about me, because you coached me, but I can get a little obsessive and perfectionist about playing ultimate and organizing it in general. My instincts say bring everyone in—as many people and coaches as possible. Do things year-round, go all in, and create something that changes the game and has to be emulated by other teams and areas.
One of the theses of the Breaksdie, of this platform in general, is that there is serious untapped potential in all areas of the sport. And club development is a huge, huge untapped area right now.
Can you say more about that?
Yeah. I grew up in a triangle, I was in the YCC system but never really the top end. It was very deep; there was a line and a half of players going to world's tryouts, and being one of the best three to five players on your high school team didn’t even guarantee you a spot on the B team because there were so many talented kids. Also, unlike Boston, Seattle, or any real big city, the triangle doesn’t have much of a mixed youth scene because the issues youth coordinators have recruiting girls to ultimate are worse in smaller areas.
I didn't stick around for college but as someone who wasn't in that upper level, it's similar to many of the dynamics we already discussed regarding Boston. When you are in an area that is surrounded by high-level ultimate, the talent bubbles up. But what do you do about the third quartile of players? All of them are talented and skilled but missing two different things off the top level. Not to just repeat things you were telling me, but coaching is also such a huge aspect of it because, as you said, so few people are willing to coach. Not to mention that there are even fewer good coaches. And then there are even fewer good coaches who are willing and able, even in an area that supports them, to do something developmentally focused. As a sport, we dedicate so much of our effort from the best and brightest in the game towards competing at the highest level.
That makes sense in many ways. But because there are so many of these seasons, semi-pro, club, and college, not to mention other off-season events, the whole system is a bit of a disjointed mess. It's very unfocused, and I think that somebody willing to get an area or a player pool locked in, almost like you can get a high-level college team locked in for nine months, would have a lot of success.
Granted, it's even harder because these are adults with lives, families, jobs, and everything else. And we're just out here playing an amateur sport. But whoever is able to harness the developmental aspects of college ultimate and the efficiency of that model, combined with the competitive commitment at the club level, can make something really special happen at a program or an area.
Now, is it realistic? I don’t know. It sounds like a great idea. But applying it to my time in Boston, how will you get 35-40 people in February in Boston to work out twice a week or watch four hours of film? How on earth are you going to logistically get that to happen with a bunch of adults who are all at different stages of their lives? Socially, familially, employment-wise, they’re all committed to a million other things.
It's a community organizing challenge, but most of my thoughts about the sport now revolve around community organizing.
Yeah. The community organizing piece reminds me of Scoop’s creation, too. Before we did this, as a part of its early stages, we talked to club leaders, both open and mixed. And we asked, ‘Hey, this is something we're thinking about. What do you think? Would you encourage the players that you coach in college or that you play with to consider this?’
By doing that, we got a lot of good information and data. A lot of it was from personal experience, too, people saying they wished that existed when they were 19 or whatever age or that it would’ve been helpful to have that kind of team available when choosing where to play. So then it felt more obvious that DiG and Scoop could be good for youth development, giving that option and a clear picture of what to expect.
To go back to your questions, can this be replicated elsewhere? A big component of that is asking, is this something the community needs? And will it be good for the community? This wasn't just us being saying, ‘You know what, we're going to make a second team. Let's just do it.’
Right.
We had enough experience in Boston ultimate, and then we talked to enough people to conclude that it would be good. And we kept reaching out, ‘Do you think this would be good? Do you think that this feels like a gap that this, that the ultimate community needs?’
That's a big component of it, too. We should not just do it because there are 60 guys who want to play ultimate. ‘Is this something that the community needs?’ is definitely important to ask.
Even from the outside, just having attended two DiG tryouts or however many, I've always admired how focused and vision-oriented DiG is as a program. Regarding our conversation about uniting the Boston open scene, it is interesting that it’s been such a challenge to unite a scene even in just one tier of one division across the multiple club and pro seasons that we have right now. I’m thinking of PONY and Empire’s famed lack of complete harmony. But with that in mind, I’m curious if you think an entire area could ever get its entire club scene across all gender divisions on the same page as far as both player development and national competition go. Especially considering that it’s possible to view the single-gender divisions and mixed division in competition with each other, even more so in smaller areas.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think it goes back to what you were saying when I asked you to describe your ideal Boston open ultimate scene. It depends on what people want. If the goal is to win as many national championships as possible versus the goal is to have teams that exist for as long as possible, or retain as many players that are playing at the youth and college levels in the local club scene as possible or if it’s just to have fun, whatever fun means to different people and different teams.
And that might not mean winning or trying really hard or developing players, as we’ve discussed. So if there was an alignment where people decided, ‘We want to bring this city as many championships across all divisions as possible,’ if somebody were able to convince enough people of that goal and that they should want that, then yes, that's possible.
And even if we just take what's best for an individual player, it would be great to have Brute [Sqaud], DiG, and Slow/Sprocket have tryouts, and we decide, with a player’s consent and input where we think would be best for their individual development and goals. That'd be really cool. I don't know how easy it is to unify around a singular goal like that. And in teams working together, or even combining and collapsing in some ways, people have a big worry that, ‘We're gonna lose our culture or identity as a team.’
If we work together, that's a pretty big hurdle, too. With the Philly example, Citywide existed first, Patrol came next, and then they decided to work together, rather than one team kind of creating another team. It’s a much different model with two pre-existing teams coming together. There's like a lot more history, culture, and existing ideas of what success is and how to build success. It’s harder to unify. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is not worth it to try. And I’m not saying that the answer is every team should just spawn another team because it's harder than combining with existing teams, but there are real hurdles.
That’s all I have for now. Thank you so much!
What did you think about part two? Is there anyone else you’d like to see interviewed soon? Let me know! Thank for reading.
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My name is Noam Gumerman (he/him). I am from Chapel Hill, NC, and studied
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