The Breakside 11/17 - Garrett Taylor

Oklahoma Christian Coach Garrett Taylor opens up on scholarships in Ultimate, the hottest topic in the DIII scene

Nov 17, 2022

Welcome back for the third edition of The Breakside! Life goes on, I fall further behind on my schoolwork, yet still work to provide insightful Ultimate content for you all (even if it also comes out behind schedule). This week, we have my conversation with Coach Garrett Taylor, head coach for the back-to-back DIII College Men’s Division Champion Oklahoma Christian Eagles chatting about the growth and development of the OC program.

Building a New Kind of Program, and New Ways to Grow the Sport

A conversation with Coach Garrett Taylor

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity

Tell me a little bit about your background in Ultimate, and how you got involved in the sport.

I started playing a little bit in high school in Oklahoma. There's not organized High School Ultimate, we just had a group of six people that threw around after classes waiting for buses. That was my introduction to the Ultimate Frisbee disc. Then I went to school at the University of Oklahoma, played on the club team there, played for four years, and I've been playing club since, while starting coaching two or three years ago.

How did you get involved in coaching and why do you like it?

It’s kind of a funny story. It was the middle of COVID, the previous coach [for OC], moved back home. The semester was going to start in a week or two. They realized they needed to get somebody in to coach quickly. I knew a couple of guys on the team, we communicated a little bit. I figured I might as well do this, at least on an interim basis, see if I like it and see if it's fun. And now this is just what I do. I have a full time job, but I spend a lot of my time actively working on Frisbee and the team. It has kind of overtaken a lot of what I do on a day to day basis. But it's fun. I wouldn't have it any other way.

What's important about being a part of the OC program specifically?

I wouldn't say I was necessarily drawn to the program at the beginning; they're just 15 minutes down the road. But the scholarship program as a whole creates an opportunity for players that may not otherwise have that opportunity to be able to afford a college degree that continues to get more and more expensive. It offers the opportunity to players like Emmanuel and Alex, who are from Kenya, and otherwise would not have anything close to this kind of opportunity without Ultimate. The cool part to me is that through this program, those guys get to experience something that they otherwise may not have been able to experience, while also setting themselves up for the future. It’s a win-win in that regard. Winning is fun, but the opportunity to set those kids up for success for the rest of their lives, and build memories for the rest of their lives, that's the important part.

Something that interests me as a member of leadership for a DIII team is commitment level. We are always trying to balance how much we can ask guys to sacrifice for something that is ultimately just a club sport. Is there a sense of higher expectations on the team given that some people are on scholarship to play Ultimate?

I think it is heightened a little bit. We've got two practices per week and the expectation is to work out outside of practice and do some additional throwing. Like a traditional college campus, you've got to get the freshmen out here. And you can't go too hard too quickly, because if you do, you may scare them off. There is a little bit of a nuance there. We don't have that much of an issue with [getting people to keep coming back] to a certain degree, because everybody's coming in to play Ultimate. They're probably Ultimate players for life, playing since they were in middle school or high school. They are 100% bought in. Sometimes I do have to remind them that they do need to prioritize school so that they can continue to play Ultimate. But I think as far as their commitment and work ethic when it comes to Ultimate, I don't have to worry about that too much.

The OC program launched and almost immediately after that we were sent into the pandemic, and things went dark for two years. How were you able to keep the momentum going for the team during that time?

Yeah, it was a unique challenge. People think that we sprung out of nowhere, but the team has been around since I think late 2018, early 2019. There was a team that wasn't very good, but that's how teams start. Obviously we went through some growing pains that were not in the spotlight that people didn’t see. When I took over the program, it was in the middle of COVID. I think we had seven kids that were on the team at that point. Those kids were very committed, most of them were not scholarship athletes. A lot of progress was made towards the end where people saw the light at the end of the tunnel and realized they were going to be able to play Ultimate again. And kudos to the kids. They grew the team. We grew internally during that time, which allowed us to get better. It can't be ignored that there were restrictions at a lot of universities, about practices and things that you could and couldn't do that we didn't really experience at OC. We were able to practice during that time and still hold fairly normal stuff. Obviously no competitions or anything like that. But internally, because of the campus size, we were allowed to do some of those things.

And I think that light at the end of the tunnel, being able to see that we were going to be able to play Ultimate again, helped recruiting around that time as well. We were able to get some guys that were unable to play elsewhere at their other colleges and weren't going to be able to finish out their college playing experience, and give them an opportunity to experience that one last time. I think we got a little lucky in that regard. But they all combined at the right time in order for us to experience success.

I am also super interested in recruitment because of how OC is able to offer college Ultimate players something so unique. Is there any strategy or planning that goes into recruiting? How does that process work?

I think a lot of it early on was just me sending hundreds of messages to kids through Instagram, and hoping that one of them would talk to me. There's a lot of value and going to OC on an Ultimate scholarship, because the cost is very low. People are almost always surprised to hear how low it actually is. If I can open a conversation and have a dialogue with somebody, and eventually get into some numbers, then it becomes very real for them. It becomes something legitimate, that may be cheaper than a local state school. They may get the opportunity to go somewhere cheaper, play Ultimate, and do the things that they want to do.

A lot of it at the beginning was mass messages. But recently, it's been nice to get to a point where word of mouth has gotten around. People realize it's not smoke and mirrors, I actually exist. You found me, you know what I mean? It's established now. A lot of where we're experiencing success is we had one kid come from Connecticut, and then I now I have two. I've got one from Colorado, and now he's bringing his buddy. Now, after they have experienced the program, players are saying to their friends, ‘Hey, you should come here, too.’ It's been a lot easier recently, so I don't have to spend as much time on Instagram, randomly DMing people. It's changed over time. But I think it's changed for the better.

Are scholarship programs a sustainable path forward for growing the sport?

I think it will probably always be a challenge at the larger state schools to convince administrations to invest time, resources, money, and scholarships into Ultimate, because they're so large they don't need those types of programs in order to attract students. I think scholarships for Ultimate will be most effective at DIII universities, where if they can bring in an additional 15, 20 students to be on an Ultimate team, then that's, that's changing how they can budget. OC adding 25 Kids is 1% of our student population. That's a big deal. If Texas or Michigan or any other big university adds 20 kids, it's a drop in the bucket to them. Nothing against those schools, but for large state schools in general, it's not going to have a big impact. Where you can have the impact is the smaller schools that think, ‘Hey, let's start offering this scholarship program. We can attract kids to come here, maybe they're paying half [as much as full tuition]. If we bring in 20 kids that's just like bringing in 10 additional kids [financially] that we didn't have per year.’

For those 20 kids, they're on campus, they're learning, they're graduating, they're telling their friends. It makes sense for [OC] to initiate that process. Now, does that mean that kids at the larger universities don't deserve scholarships? Absolutely not. I think those kids 100% deserve it. In Norco [California], they had DI nationals at the same time at DIII. And obviously there are some crazy athletes that deserve to be compensated for what they do. We're not the only ones that are having grueling practices, that have expectations of throwing outside of practice and working out. We're not unique in that regard. The scholarship thing is what makes us unique. So there are kids across the country that deserve the same things that we are able to provide. And I hope that eventually the sport continues to progress that way. I think Davenport1 has started something. I have heard inlinkings that other universities have started small scholarships for Ultimate. Things are progressing the way that I would hope for them to progress. 10 years from now I don’t want us to be unique. I don't want us to be the only ones doing it. It should provide as many people as possible, as many opportunities as possible. That’s my perspective on it.

From a University perspective, what is the incentive to start a scholarship program for Ultimate?

Well, fortunately or unfortunately, I think like all things in this world, the answer is pretty much always money. Back to my example, if you bring in 20 Kids and those 20 kids are playing half as much as what would be considered normal. That's like bringing in 10 kids. OC has been able to use the program to grow the school, because they're not just doing this for Ultimate. They've got Ultimate, eSports, Bowling, Disc Golf. What people would consider fringe sports, the school is investing in. And it has increased enrollment. I think the bowling team has 40 or 50 students that are participating, eSports has 30 or so. If they have been able to bring in 100 students through the scholarships for these sports that other universities are not, that's a 5-10% increase in our enrollment. It’s a big deal. It adjusts what we're able to provide, it adjusts the experience that we're able to give those kids. For OC specifically, it's an enrollment and tuition paid thing. It's a money thing. But that doesn't mean that the players and the participants can’t get something out of it as well. That's where the value comes from. It's a mutually beneficial relationship. Where it's tough for the larger state school, is trying to convince those administrations to spend their money and time on something where it doesn't necessarily make a difference in their bottom line. It's just an expense for them.

Have you been involved in any conversations around starting a scholarship program for a team in the Women’s Division? Are there plans to start one soon?

I hope so. I can't do both, but there has been communication with the administration, and it is something that they want to do. I keep trying to convince my wife to start the team. She knows six things about Ultimate, but I really think that she would be very good at it. I do hope and think that it could be a real possibility, hopefully sooner rather than later. We need to have a women's team, you know what I mean? We need to have it. The longer the time goes on, the more reasons for why it can't exist fade away. I am excited. I haven't talked to anybody recently about it. But they're at least aware that the expectation is growing, that we do need to have a women's team sooner rather than later.

Next Edition…

Something I would love to do for the next edition of The Breakside is a reported out piece on the Youth League situation going on in Austin. I think a weakness of the Ultimate community is a lack of journalism that tackles current issues like this. If anyone from Austin Ultimate, Austin Sol, Austin Torch, or Texas Ultimate Summer Camp would like to be interviewed for the story, or if you know someone who would, please leave a comment, DM me on Twitter, or email me at ngumerman@brandeis.edu.

About The Breakside

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 important, yet overlooked people and stories to receive the coverage they deserve.

About the Author

My name is Noam Gumerman (he/him), and I am a senior at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. I am from Chapel Hill, NC, and am currently studying Journalism and American Studies at Brandeis University. I 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