Hello all and welcome to the very first edition of The Breakside newsletter! The goal of this newsletter is to tackle what I see as a gap in the present coverage of Ultimate as a sport. I hope that this newsletter will provide an outlet for some important yet overlooked people and stories to receive the coverage they deserve. Full disclosure, I have started this for a class on Social Journalism, but it is my deepest hope that this will be able to continue past this semester as a place people can go to learn things about the state of the Ultimate Frisbee community, and I will do my best to make sure it reaches that goal.
Introductions
For those of you who don’t know me, allow me to provide a brief introduction so you know whose thoughts and opinions you’re being fed. My name is Noam Gumerman (he/him), and I am a senior at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. I am from Chapel Hill NC, playing and captaining for the CHUF high school team, and playing a year on both the Lucky PuNCs u17 YCC team, and the Carolina Sky u20 team. I am currently studying Journalism and American Studies at Brandeis University, and am one of the current captains of Brandeis TRON, our 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, and for the life of me I cannot fathom why I was given that week to run.
I am incredibly passionate about the game, its community, and journalism as a whole, and hope to put all those passions together into a newsletter that can inform the public about important stories and cool people, and hopefully build a community of its own along the way. Welcome!
Community Organizing, Growing the Sport, and the Importance of Coaching
A conversation with Sam Farnsworth, Boston Ultimate Disc Association (BUDA) Director of Operations
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Thanks for joining me Sam, can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
My name is Sam Farnsworth, I use any and all pronouns. I'm 28 years of age and I'm the director of operations for the Boston Ultimate Disc Alliance (BUDA), the non-profit that oversees most of the recreational leagues in the greater Boston area and slightly west of us.
We run most of the youth programming in the greater Boston area. Specifically, our youth programming mostly focuses on getting Ultimate Frisbee into the hands of any kid that will excitedly toss a disc. I oversee the adult programming, our hat leagues, our club leagues (or clique leagues) and do all of the logistics for USAU Club Sectionals, Regionals, and the Boston Invite.
How did you first get involved with BUDA and community organizing?
I grew up in Massachusetts so BUDA was the kind of [YCC] team you wanted to shoot to make. I started playing in high school. I went to Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public High School out in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It's a hippie dippy charter school. We had a soccer team in the fall and a Frisbee team in the spring and I didn't care about soccer, so I played on the Frisbee team in the spring. I wanted to play on the YCC BUDA team, never made it, but BUDA helped run a lot of the tournaments that I went to so you heard about them or you heard somebody played for BUDA.
College is how I got involved in the community organizing aspect. Boston University has a long culture of people graduating and immediately coming back to volunteer as a coach. When I started coaching, I got to see what was happening at tournaments because when I showed up, the only other adult to talk to was the tournament organizer. Sometimes I'd wander over ask how things were going. Then this job opened up with BUDA, it was a really good marriage of work and what I like to do. My day job at the time I hated. So I said to myself, ‘Okay, what if I just did full time organizing and helping other people find Ultimate?’
That's how I ended up applying and eventually getting this gig, which is sick.
Why is sort of doing this kind of work important to you?
It's really important to me because I grew up in the last generation where Ultimate wasn't as accessible as it currently is. For me, I want to make sure it remains accessible and I want to start to fill some of those opportunity gaps that still exist.
More games are out there, but that doesn't mean the opportunity to play the game exists holistically for every population. Ultimate, despite what the grassroots organizers want to believe, is expensive. Finding ways to organize and create those opportunities is what I want to see happen now. When I look at the opportunities that existed when I was younger and the expansion we've made now, I want to make sure that people who are at my point when I was a kid going, ‘Man, I wish there was more ultimate to play’ or ‘Wow, that looks like a cool thing, but it's hard to play,’ can say when they're older, ‘Wow, look how easy it is to actually play this sport.’ That's why I really want to keep organizing.
What do you see as the role for local disc organizations like BUDA in their communities?
From a youth perspective, our youth program often says it's about getting more discs in more kids' hands. The most important thing we can be doing for the growth of the sport is not worrying about kids learning Ultimate Frisbee, but about making holding a Frisbee and creating games with Frisbees fun for kids, and more widely seen.
If we can get more discs into more kids' hands, eventually they will stumble on the sport and play it. If they can learn some of the sport along the way, awesome. But if the only thing we do is get kids to take a Frisbee home with them and, and sometimes go out and play with it, that's going to grow the sport down the road that is cheap and easy. We can go and buy a few hundred discs per season and hand them out to kids, and that does an amazing amount of work.
As we look at the adult generations, I think organizations' goals should be getting their different populations of Ultimate speaking to each other and working together. A lot of people view their club season, their recreational season, and their college season as three separate entities, but they really don't have to be. You can be thinking about having a college team be the feeding ground to a club team, that can be the feeding ground into a recreational team. It's part of our job to create those opportunities. That means from our perspective, we need to get more hands-on with the colleges. We can find places where the USAU club and the local hat and club leagues can overlap. We can make some clinics happen. That also coincides with the AUDL and PUL teams. How can we support their clinics and how can their clinics feed back into our programming?
If we operate separately from each other, we become competing markets. And that doesn't help either of us. But if we work together, we both get to grow the sport at a faster rate.
What is your favorite thing that BUDA does?
My favorite thing that we do is our hat leagues. I really like the community aspect of Ultimate. I love that it can be a ground where you can meet new people and make new friends. You don't get that with a club team or a clique league where you probably know a lot of the people ahead of time. With hat leagues it's so much fun to go out and meet 20 new people for a season. Hopefully, you become friends with them, and go out and do things socially with them throughout that season.
Specifically, I love when we run draft leagues. Draft leagues are a really cool way to get people to invest in learning who the community members are, and building friendly rivalries between teams. It's a great way to get people out of their bubbles. Generally, people structure teams that they know will be fun together. Captains are generally roped into the community enough that drafts are fun to attend, and, the teams that people put together are more even than an algorithm could ever give us.
What is one thing you want to be doing differently?
I want us to be more involved with our local parks and rec departments. I think getting more involved is a really good way for us to become more than just those weirdos throwing a Frisbee around at JP English at 11:00 PM. That's when we become the weirdos that really care about the fields and the community being able to use those fields at their prime at 11:00 PM at night.
A lot of these departments are doing things to try and help the capital “E” Environment thrive, and if we can give back in that little way, more Ultimate gets to be played if the earth is around and habitable way longer. I can get enough bodies to go out and volunteer for one day for a park cleanup. And that puts us on good terms with the local parks and rec departments in a way that I don't know that we historically have been.
Volunteering and giving back to the community seems like something much of the community would agree is in line with their values. Why do you think there seems to be a bit of a shortage for Ultimate-related volunteers?
A lot of people say, ‘Wow, yeah, I would love to go help’ and the second you ask for them to do it, they don't. What it comes down to is people are tired. We don't exactly live in a hospitable world for volunteer time. When people get home they're tired, and the last thing they want to do is more work. The way that gets slightly ameliorated is throwing money at the problem and paying people for their time. It doesn't need to be a lot of money, but if your volunteer gig suddenly becomes a side hustle, people tend to be a little bit more willing to do it.
I wish that wasn't the case. Not that I wish I could not pay people, I wish that we lived in a world where you didn't need a profit motive to do things. But life is so fatiguing, you kind of need that. I didn't do a ton of work helping the Ultimate Frisbee community grow outside of coaching before I was paid full time to do it.
The way we get there without infinite funds is that many hands make light a heavy load. If you are excited about something happening, find a couple friends and volunteer at the same time. That's the way I want to see volunteers coming in. It can be, ‘Hey, we have this weekend free, let's reach out and see if BUDA's running any youth programming’ or whatever your local disc organization is. I would even go as far as to say don't even make it about Frisbee directly. See if there are Frisbee adjacent things that can help like park cleanups, like helping with building out fields. See if there are places where the field needs relining and they're looking for volunteers. If you go out there and you help with the relining and then ask, ‘Hey, my college team wants to use this field. Is there any way to do that?’ They're going to be way more amenable to listening to you. And if you get a few friends, you can get that work done in an afternoon and have a fun time doing it. Those things can make volunteering easier if we don't view it as a thing we have to do alone, but a thing that we can do with a few other people.
How do you handle and prioritize different types of feedback from the BUDA Community?
My first thing is that the leagues that historically run continue to run. Once those are all on their feet, I have ground to think about other things. I also think historically where things have happened is where they should remain unless there is a huge reason we should be moving them.
Then I look at how we're going to be able to continue to grow as an organization and include more people. Most recently, that is in how we now do a tiered payment method through BUDA. There's still a lot of room for us to grow on this, but generally speaking, we needed to increase the price point on all of our leagues. We hadn't done it in 10 years. The economy's changed a lot in 10 years. Things are way more expensive and the fact that we were charging $20 to play Ultimate was really wishful in the idea that we would have a full-time employee running everything, have full youth organizing, and be able to afford our field space.
We had a really substantial price increase this year and that was one of the first things I had to face coming into my job. However, along with that we created subsidized payments across the board. One of my major goals is making sure when people ask about the price increase, they understand and can walk away not feeling frustrated that we're asking them now to pay more money.
I prioritize the ability for access to this sport, and I prioritize communicating why it's important that I charge a person who's making $100,000 per year a lot more money to play Ultimate Frisbee than a college kid who makes $0, or even more like negative $100,000 per year.
In terms of change, I'm always going to prioritize what creates a better sense of community. That's been throwing money at season ending parties recently. It’s about hosting equitable pickup games that people can go to where we practice gender expansive matchup rules. It's about changing gender matchups in a way that's not strictly on a binary, because that's something I think can only happen at a local organization level right now.
USAU is not there, I don't think you're going to see them add an “X” matchup. It's always going to have “MMP” or “WMP” matchups on the field. There's never going to be something in between, and a lot of us that play the sport are in between in some way. And while some people like myself who are non-binary feel comfortable saying, ‘Oh, I will always be an MMP,’ not everybody feels that way. How do we create space for those people?
Those are the places that I see the priorities. Financial inclusion, gender inclusion, and racial inclusion, but Ultimate struggles with that because we're a super white sport.
For [racial inclusion] to happen, we need to go and work with communities where they don't have Ultimate on their radar in a way that has nothing to do with Ultimate. I can tell a story about that if you want, because I ran a clinic this past summer that became almost nothing about Ultimate, but it followed the principle of discs in hands of kids.
I would love that.
I ran a youth program this summer for a school out in the Brighton, Roxbury area. It was a predominantly BIPOC community. When we showed up, we were told, ‘Oh, they're really excited to play Ultimate Frisbee.’ But when we showed up, there were kids in crocs and none of them knew what a Frisbee was.They were literally saying, ‘Fuck you, you're white.’ One of the first interactions was, ‘Why should I care?’ And I said, ‘That's so valid.’
I wish I had been set up to know that this is what I was walking into because I still would've come. I still would've come to do this, but I would've planned a very different day.
The first thing we did was try and figure out what it is that these kids actually want. Did they even want to be outside? And the answer was, yeah, they want to get outside and they want to run around. But, they want to play football, and they want to run routes. So, the first activity we did was we said, ‘Hey, we're going to throw a Frisbee for just a little bit and talk a little bit about it, and then we're going to do a one v. one route drill.’
So we ran football drills for the beginning of this thing and ran routes and had one v. ones and it was kind of like cutting deep and cutting under. They got excited about that because it was like they were playing football. It was a chance for them to moss their friends, but they were doing it with a Frisbee instead. That was the only thing that changed.
And while the teacher was trying to get them to stop shit talking, I tried to say, ‘Hey, I get that, but consider the following: shit talking is a love language. And what if we find a productive way to shit talk?’ What if we make it something where they're not getting into fights, but it's about encouraging each other to play harder.
Then I hopped in and I mossed the two biggest kids there. It's not that hard. They were fifth graders, sixth graders, right? This isn't an impressive play. I'm a 28 year old broken guy. But people are like, ‘Wow, they got up?’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ I wiped it on one and said, ‘so you're going to keep shit talking me?’ And they get fired up about it. My choice was to go in, listen to how these kids wanted to engage with me, wanted to engage with our sport and make a day that was fun.
By the end, we were playing Hot Box and they're getting excited about playing Hot Box with a Frisbee. All of them are out there running around having a good time, wanting to win their games. Hot Box is one step away from Ultimate Frisbee at this point. They're throwing swings, they're not just throwing at the box because they want to win. They're boxing each other out, they're running, they're making cuts. And all of them, outside of two kids, took Frisbees home excitedly. And that happened because we didn't try and teach the Ultimate Frisbee on the day. Instead we went in and we asked ourselves ‘what do these kids want to do to have a fun day?’
They were clearly pissed off at their teacher that they brought these white people from Cambridge over to try and teach them white person sport. So how do we make it fun and say, ‘Yeah, the population that plays this sport is super white in a really discouraging way, but also you can have fun throwing a Frisbee and like, I'm not going to make you try and play my white person sport.’
If none of them had walked away with a Frisbee, but they had had a fun day and in the future saw me and they said, ‘hey, you're that weird person that came in and threw Frisbees, that would be enough for me.
What drew you to coaching?
At BU you had a culture of players coming back and coaching if you lived in the area. So for me it was just the natural progression I was taught. You got out of college and you coached, and you did it because that's how you made sure the college team had coaches. And while I think that principle is a little flawed because it may lead to you getting coaches that don't know what they're doing, it's probably better than no coach.
I also like the principle idea that it taught that coaching is a way to stay involved in Ultimate, which people forget. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, well my body broke so I can't do Ultimate anymore.’ You actually can do this super rewarding form of Ultimate. What got me to stay coaching is that it's so rewarding and you learn so much about the sport by being out and watching people at huge skill gaps, playing constantly.
It should become more normalized that when you finish, when, when you're not playing, you should be looking for coaching opportunities, because it makes you a better player.
It's incredibly rewarding to go and watch people improve from year to year. Last year was my fourth year coaching, so there were people that were graduating that I taught how to play Ultimate, and that's such a cool experience to realize, ‘Oh, your touchstone to playing ultimate Frisbee was myself and my co-coach, and now you’re the captain of our A team.’ That's nuts. I want to keep doing that. I see people walk in that can't throw a Frisbee and my thought is, ‘Wow, that's the next nationals player.’ I think that's also a healthy reframe for people. We see it a lot on Twitter where people are like, ‘I don't want to go play at the local pickup because the game's going to be bad and I'm going to get hurt.’ My job is literally playing with the people that are bad, that don't know how to throw, that don't know how to cut ,that blindside you when you're running upline. Do you know how you make them so they're not scary to play with? You work with them and you coach them. You learn how to be a good coach and a good communicator because then you show up to those pickups and when somebody does something weird, you can talk to them.
How do you prepare yourself for people in the community holding more self centered perspectives rather than community oriented ones?
You need to be emotionally prepared for privileged people to be mad at you. You listen to them and go, ‘That's nice. We're not going to do that.’ Privilege can mean a lot of different things, in terms of changing perspective and how we approach playing and growing internally in teams.
That's telling the best players on the team, ‘You are a great player, if we want more great players, we have to do things differently.’ That means you don't get to be on the field every point. It means that we lose games. You have to be willing to have those people get angry at you and maybe leave. If somebody is so pissed off that you're trying to grow the community and overall health of your team or organization, you're better without that person. It’s not a zero sum game. There are ways to work around getting those people to not be entirely shut out. I don't think there's a benefit in constantly losing, in Ultimate, but I don't think there's a benefit in never playing half your roster on any team in order to win games.
Candidly, at the beginning of the summer, the team we played on played through about 13 people and our team played like shit. We acknowledged we played like shit. The person that was coaching us acknowledged we played like shit. And when we hit our next tournament and played through our roster, played through the 23 people we brought, we played really, really well.
It's the knee jerk reaction of everybody in a sport to fall back on your key players. I don't think that's ever going to work. As a community of athletes in sports in general, we need to recognize that play makers are only play makers if they're making the plays. Instead, if you let those people rest and put their heads back on straight once in a while, they might come out and actually become the playmaker again. We have to be okay with saying things like, ‘Yeah, I know you want to play, but you can sit down for three points.’
This is something that we had to do when I was coaching at nationals. We had to talk to the team and say, ‘Hey, I'm okay with us losing every game here. I'd rather us become a better team.’ Ultimately, we did lose every game at nationals, but we did become a better team.
Final Notes
Thank you so much for reading this edition of The Breakside. If you have any thoughts or feedback you’d like to share, please leave a comment below. If you know someone who might enjoy reading this, please share it with them. Things will likely continue to grow and change throughout the project, so any feedback is greatly appreciated. Happy Nationals week, and see you in the next issue.
Congrats on the launch! Love to see this is out in the world. Looking forward to seeing more.