Los Angeles Astra Join PUL
There is no escape from conference realignment
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Los Angeles Astra Join PUL for 2025 and Beyond
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Welcome back to The Breakside, and no sooner did the club ultimate season end than the pro ultimate news cycle started back up again. The biggest news of last week was Los Angeles Astra joining the PUL after a year-long hiatus and after being denied re-entry to the WUL. This is by far the westernmost team in the PUL, making a map of the league resemble the Big 10 or ACC after realignment this year. Los Angeles will play in the South Division with Washington DC, Raleigh, Atlanta, Nashville, and Austin. This move evens out the divisions in the league, with six teams in each. Interestingly, on the WUL side of things, Oregon’s re-entry after their year-long hiatus moves the league up to seven teams, leaving the possibility for an eighth team open.
Before I get into anything, it is worth mentioning that this is a conflict of interest minefield for me. I’ve done some volunteer work for both leagues in the past, will likely continue to do some for the WUL in the future, and have some connections to past ownership of the Los Angeles Astra1. However, this is my platform where I have complete control of what I say here, so I will be shooting straight.
The biggest thing: At first glance, it is wild that the WUL and Astra couldn’t work things out so that the Astra would rejoin the league and instead had to join an entirely East Coast and Midwest-based league. Does this make financial sense? Is this viable in the long term? These are the big questions that I hope everyone involved with this decision feels confident answering “yes” to.
It would also be impossible to discuss this situation without reckoning with Oregon, one of the two locations that left the WUL after the 2023 season, having a team in the WUL for 2025, and Los Angeles not. The public reasoning for that decision was given in some replies and quote tweets of the Oregon announcement:
The WUL announcement of the Oregon Soar joining the league for the 2025 season treats them as a completely new team. It does so for good reason, considering the Onyx, the previous Oregon women’s pro team, folded amid serious public complaints about players going long periods without being paid or reimbursed for costs the team had pledged to cover. The Astra’s year-long hiatus was precipitated not by organizational collapse and insolvency but by the previous owner leaving the area on shorter notice2 and the team being unable to procure a new ownership group promptly.
In the replies above, the WUL cites looking for teams that are “financially and operationally prepared” when looking to add teams. As an outsider to an admittedly opaque process, and with a little more knowledge of the Los Angeles situation than the Oregon one, it is hard for me to find meaningful differences in the team’s situations. Both locations had teams unexpectedly struggle to field a team last year, both locations found new ownership groups to carry the banner for women’s pro ultimate, and both applied to join the league for 2025, Oregon was accepted while Los Angeles was not.
If I had to guess, what “financially and operationally prepared” means is that Oregon’s list of roles they need to fill is not quite as long as this one that Los Angeles has, but at the same time, filling out the staff for a pro team is a catch-22 when that team doesn’t have a league that it is a part of.
Additionally, I think the most interesting part of the Astra announcement is this:
The PUL and Astra have been in communication with various stakeholders at the WUL throughout this process. The PUL does not have plans or intentions to add more Western teams to the league.
The PUL and WUL3 communicated about the Astra joining the PUL. Why is this interesting? Well, it undercuts the “financially and operationally prepared” reasoning because either the PUL and WUL came to different conclusions, and one league is very wrong about the state of the Astra. The WUL didn’t warn the PUL about some inside info they had about the Astra’s current state of operations or something else is at play with the WUL and Astra.
Additionally, while promising not to add more Western teams makes sense for the PUL and WUL’s relationship, it makes absolutely no sense from every other perspective for the PUL. The best thing they can do in the future regarding further expansion is to add more teams to the West now that the dam has broken on team geography. Especially considering that the number one way to cut costs going forward for the PUL and its teams will be to spend less money flying across the country and regionalize things a little more.
This whole situation is just a little disappointing, more than anything else. Yes, it is exciting that both Los Angeles and Oregon will field professional women’s teams in 2025. If you’d asked me my wishlist for pro women’s ultimate a few months ago, it would’ve included a return to play for both areas. However, given the six-team league the WUL operated with last year and the 11-team one the PUL had, I would’ve liked to add two teams to the WUL and one to the PUL. Not only does this likely squash expansion in the PUL to a new location this year, given that the divisions are balanced, but it also means we are now likely looking at an unbalanced seven-team WUL unless some last-minute team emerges. The travel will be challenging to and from Los Angeles for any team in the PUL, and it makes the way Austin stuck out geographically from divisional rivals Raleigh, DC, Atlanta, and Nashville last year look laughable by comparison.
And apparently, this strange situation is here to stay. Here’s the first line of the PUL’s Astra announcement:
The Premier Ultimate League is excited to announce the addition of the Los Angeles Astra to the PUL South Division beginning in 2025.
“Beginning in 2025” is the key. This is realignment arriving in pro ultimate. This is not a one-year type of thing. Every indication points to the PUL being the Astra's long-term home. And while I am not involved in making these kinds of long-term organizational and logistical decisions (thank goodness), this is not the outcome I would’ve fought if I had been in charge in any capacity. Emotionally and from surface-level analysis, this seems like a much more difficult status quo to maintain in women’s ultimate. Still, I’m even more excited for the upcoming season now to see how it all plays out.
What do you think about the move? Feel free to let me know!
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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.
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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).
The only light in that dark, dark tunnel that was my several months at Davenport University
To pursue a different opportunity in growing women’s ultimate, to be clear, not just packing up and leaving the team high and dry for no reason
Or at least the PUL communicated with stakeholders affiliated with the WUL