Preserving the Teams and History of the Club Division
Adventures in amateur sports
Ultimate discourse on Twitter and me. A relationship, I dare say, akin to that of the Bat Signal and Batman. When I see it, it’s like a call that echoes deep in my soul, but instead of violently dispensing justice on the streets of Gotham City, I fire up my computer and pump out an opinion no one asked for. If you think about it, the two have more similarities than Batman, or I would admit.
This week’s agenda: the USA Ultimate club division. More specifically, how can we better organize USAU’s premier division of competition in a way that protects in the interests of all players, fosters competition, and preserves the history of our sport?
The inciting incident? A beloved DC-area club team (Red Wolves) folding, as well as various thoughts regarding why teams fold, sticking with teams that aren’t the best in the area, and the general structure present in the club division.
The USAU Club Division
For starters, let’s consider the club division as a whole. Despite being much newer, pro ultimate in the US still tracks closest to professional sports in the United States. There is a regular season, divisions, playoffs, and a championship game. This formula is largely repeated across all three pro leagues and most professional leagues in other sports in the United States. Club ultimate, I would argue, looks more like club soccer does overseas. In both, we see a wide breadth of teams showcasing a wider breadth of skill and ambition, competing in different levels of competition at the same time, and in one or two big competitions with everyone.
While this intimidating link spells out all the details of the USAU Club division, I’ll do my best to break it down into a slightly more digestible version. At the elite level, the Triple Crown Tour and flight status of teams drive participation in the most prestigious tournaments of the year. For those who may not know, this is how flight status at the USAU club level works:
1. Pro Flight – Top eight teams (1st through 8th) based on performance at the prior year’s National Championships.
2. Elite Flight – Next eight teams below the Pro Flight (9th through 16th), based on performance at the prior year’s National Championships.
3. Select Flight – 32 teams. Next highest finishing four teams in each geographic region, after Pro and Elite teams, based on performance in the prior year’s Regional Championships.
"Top Select" teams are Select Flight teams that were the highest finishing Select team from each region (eight total) from the prior year’s Regional Championships. The Top Select team is the team that lost the "game-to-go" to Nationals.
4. Classic Flight – All other teams participating in the Regular Season or Postseason of the TCT.
I’ll be honest. This is a bit of a funky way to do it, but organizing club ultimate is hard, and this, broadly speaking, makes sense after someone explains it to you.
The Churn
However, how this is set up focuses much of the season on the most elite teams in the division. On the surface, it isn’t awful when running a competition to focus on the most competitive aspects, but one thing that has been highlighted in the wake of Red Wolves folding is the amount of churn that happens with clubs in the Classic Flight. Even clubs that have maybe been Select Flight feel this. The longest-running programs in any given area are often those that are perennial attendees of nationals.
This is one key difference between club ultimate and club soccer. Some of the oldest clubs in the world have spent large portions of their time outside the top flights of competition, or even for a team like Wrexham, outside the professional level of the sport. The sport's tiers encompass teams competing with backing from nation-states to those encompassing teams that are just collections of people with day jobs. And one of the magical aspects of the sport is when there is competition between those two tiers.
While our sport is much closer to the latter as a whole, the dynamics between the teams going to semis at nationals every year and the ones that show up to sectionals hammered out of their minds are certainly familiar.
Now, what I think the key difference is, however, is the large amount of teams in the middle. Three full tiers of professional soccer leagues in England are below the Premier League. If we do the math on flight status in Ultimate, there’s only really one level of status below national caliber in select flights. And proportionally, there are only about 2/3s the amount of non-top-flight “professional” teams in ultimate competed with soccer. Another issue is that, in ultimate, the amount of roster turnover means that teams are often quite different from the group that earned their flight status the year before. Players also move around very freely, even between gendered divisions and mixed divisions, which creates the kind of situation where teams fold.
For mid-level regional players and teams, life is constantly in flux. The teams that may actually happen depend on who signs up to lead them and swears off top-level ambition for themselves that year, and their selection process is all oriented around the most established teams in the area. The life cycle isn’t incredibly healthy or tailored towards the growth of players or teams little ways off the top of the heap.
And so, we have a situation where tryouts, rosters, and decisions on where to play are all tailored around established teams with big goals. Very rarely do new programs come along to challenge existing ones, and when they do, it’s normally at the cost of a different team. Sidenote: there’s a super interesting case study on the Boston mixed scene with Sprocket, Wild Card, and Slow to be done.
So What?
Isn’t that how competition is supposed to work, though? Maybe, but we’re definitely missing some middle-option teams for players to get opportunities to grow long-term. I think many people have that same sentiment about the club division. Having longstanding clubs with unique cultures and established reputations of growing and developing players would be a healthy place for the sport to get to.
Dunking on USAU and demanding change is hardly new to this outlet or the wider Ultiamte community in general. But honestly, I think changing the fabric of the club divisions and the longstanding incentives present for teams and players to behave the way they do now in favor of creating long-standing clubs and healthy competition all up and down the skill and ambition ladder of the sport sounds really hard to do.
That won’t stop me from chucking out some ideas here, though. Realistically, local disc organizations are probably the groups that can do the most work regarding fostering a thriving and, most importantly, consistent middle-tier club team. Many of these teams carry a ton of sentiment and local disc history with them. Abroad, these kinds of local soccer teams are often the lifeblood of their towns. And while you could write for hundreds of pages on the cultural differences between the US and Europe both in and out of sports and why we’ll never have the same relationship with our sports teams here that they do with soccer teams there, broadly speaking, the point stands. There should be teams that are cultural institutions of the local disc scene that are not the Ring of Fire, PONY, Brute Squad, and Molly Browns of the world.
Granted, club ultimate teams don’t really have ownership stakes available, but what if local disc orgs took more “ownership” of the local club scene in general? More proactively finding coaches and field spaces, maybe even helping with team logistics? The cub division has a distinct lack of structure and is very decentralized. Part of that increases its charm. But it also can leave teams, players, and leaders out to dry trying to hold a program together or start a new one. There isn’t really a collection of resources you can turn to for establishing a niche for your team in the local club scene.
I don’t know if I have any of the answers, and this has turned a little more stream-of-consciousness than I intended. But I have personally had so many bad experiences with tryouts and finding a team that’s a good fit, as well as having heard those same issues from friends and teammates as well, that it’s clear to me the “free market” method of club ultimate team and roster creation is not the best way out there. I’d love to see a community come together to foster a truly collective program-building experience that meets the needs of many different kinds of players.
About The Breakside
This newsletter aims to tackle what I see as a gap in the present coverage of Ultimate as a sport. I hope this newsletter will provide an outlet for important yet overlooked people and stories to receive the coverage and perspectives they deserve.
My resolution for 2024 is to keep this up more consistently. I’ll do my best.
About the Author
My name is Noam Gumerman (he/him). I am from Chapel Hill, NC, and I studied Journalism and American Studies at Brandeis University as an undergrad. I was one of the captains of Brandeis TRON, the open division team. My claim to fame within the Ultimate community is running the @being_ulti account during the week of the 2022 WUCC tournament. I currently write for ClutchPoints Sports. Check me out here. Contact me for discussions, feedback, story suggestions, and more on Twitter at @noamgum or via email at noamgumerman@gmail.com.