The Breakside 2/6 -- A Tale of Two Teams
I get on my soapbox about my Youth Ultimate experience.
Hi y’all and welcome back to another edition of The Breakside. This week: I talked to two really cool people about a really cool team they were on, and they couldn’t remember that much since it all happened a little while ago, but there’s still a lot to take away from what they do remember.
Some Announcements
What’s the point of developing an audience if you can’t use it for things you want to do? Self promotion announcement number one: Coming soon to The Breakside (later this week?) the coverage everyone has been clamoring for. The DIII Open division. My team (Brandeis TRON) headed up to Williamstown MA for a round robin yesterday and played some high quality competition. Brief tournament recap and some DIII thoughts incoming. Second self promotion announcement: I am looking for a job! Journalism is very connection heavy so I figured I’d work some connections. If any of y’all know news organizations that are hiring, I will be finishing undergrad soon and a looking for work so feel free to send something my way.
A Tale of Two Teams
One of the things that have been most eye-opening for me as I have begun to dive deeper into the logistics and structure of Ultimate as a sport nationwide is how things feel held together by a few people, $10, and a dream. Whether it is understaffed local disc organizations, one coach pioneering scholarship programs within the sport, or even the way our “professional” leagues operate, placing the majority of the financial risk onto its teams, these things do hot happen in more established sports, and communities.
It’s also easy to get distracted by some of the production value we see in the streams of higher-level games and the talent of the people we want to emulate. We can fool ourselves into not fully considering the implications of the way Ultimate works at this time. In my conversation with Colton Green, I was surprised to realize how far we lag behind even pickup basketball communities in terms of accessible competitiveness, most notably through a lack of observers/referees. And while that has been at the forefront of my mind for the past couple of months, it has only further brought my attention to what I consider to be one of the most important aspects of Ultimate’s future: youth teams.
If you follow me on Twitter or engage with me in conversation, I will bring up my high school Ultimate playing experience for CHUF (Chapel Hill Ultimate Frisbee). I do that because it was an incredibly formative experience involving all sorts of crazy dynamics, horrible coaching experiences, and a lot of hard lessons my friends and I had to learn together. The result of that experience involved a group of 16-18 year-olds coming together to let an adult know they were no longer welcome as their coach, things escalating to the adult in question attempting to show up the next day anyway, necessitating the involvement of the school and local Ultimate administrators in our drama.
However, there was another team present at Chapel Hill High School. One that played in a different division, one blessed with a great coach, and arguably the most talent-soaked roster any high school ultimate team has ever had.
I had the opportunity to speak with Grace Conerly and Clil Phillips recently. Conerly and Phillips are two supremely talented and skilled players I’ve looked up to for a long time, holding numerous YCC championships and youth worlds selections, with Conerly holding multiple College Championships and Phillips the most recent USAU Women’s Club Division title. They also happen to be the inaugural captains of Chapel Hill Ember, a team playing in the Girls’ Division founded in my Junior year of high school, fall of 2017. I asked them both about their experiences leading the creation and development of a brand new team, one that, to me, always felt like it embodied the same positive vibes CHUF was lacking.
“I was a junior when I knew that the team was going to happen. I think [the team] came together during YCC that summer. I don’t quite recall. Maybe Clil knows more specifics because she went to Chapel Hill, so obviously, she was the primary person,” Conerly said.
“Honestly, I don’t remember where the idea came from,” Phillips also said when I asked her about the beginning of Ember.
Okay, maybe they both don’t totally remember exactly how it all came together, but was there anything that stood out?
“I think it was during YCCs, and JWei was one of my coaches, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I want this person to keep coaching us,’” Phillips recalled. Jwei being Jenny Wei, 2018 UNC Pleiades Callahan nominee, U24 world champion, and of course, one of my first Ultimate coaches ever back in my U13 summer league days.
When discussing the timing of when she signed on to play, Conerly, playing as a pickup for Chapel Hill, also noted the importance of having a familiar coach people believed in leading the project. “I know JWei committed to coaching early, so that was really helpful because we knew we had a really good coach, and we knew that she would get some UNC people to come coach as well.”
Clearly, having coach people were familiar with and believed in, coming from a strong college program like UNC, was something that helped motivate both experienced and inexperienced players to give the team a shot. However, familiarity and coming from a strong college program couldn’t have been the only successful factors, though, because my long-time coach had both of those things, too, being a CHUF alum and member of the UNC ultimate community. So what did Wei do to help this team get off the ground and foster a good environment?
Well, something important to know is that Ember had a core of players who were very talented and very experienced. The first five or six players they had committed to the team all had YCC experience and came from both Chapel Hill High School, but also students that were homeschooled, went to smaller high schools that didn’t have a team yet, and even one middle schooler who went to the school next to ours. And so a familiar challenge presented itself: incorporating a talented, experienced group of players with those who had never touched a frisbee in a competitive setting. In this situation, Wei and the rest of Ember did not have any institutional team structure or history to fall back on, contrasting with how all teams handle that challenge at the beginning of each year.
“I don’t know. I don’t really remember how we created team culture in high school because it was kind of just vibes. Clil would drag her friends out…she had a friend from volleyball. She had Sarah [Combs] (current Pleiades player) who was a tennis player, and a couple of other people as well,” Conerly recalled.
But despite the hard work of captains and other veterans to come together and bring more people into the team, Conerly and Phillips put the majority of the credit for their success on having a coach deeply invested in the team’s growth and success.
“JWei was a super present coach, which was helpful because she would be positive and nice and obviously a good coach. To teach things well, give this team a sense of legitimacy, all because we had this person we could look up to and keep us in check.”
And the process and coaching worked. When the first generation of Ember players was in high school, they were incredibly successful. They won tournament after tournament, multiple state championships, and most memorable to me at least, an incredible comeback in the rain against the Utah Lone Peak team that traveled to North Carolina and had found impressive success against every other team they played. And f that whole run only featured one minor sideline incident started by me, complaining about a call made by our rival school East Chapel Hill while watching Ember play.
Compared with CHUF, their counterparts, the success is even more apparent. The team I played on my senior year had players nearly as talented as Ember, with roughly a full line of players who would go on to College Nationals or Youth Worlds. And while that team accomplished a lot, winning a tournament and beating Carolina Friends School for the first time in my high school career, as the year progressed, things got worse. We had a coach who was there because we knew we needed someone to coach us but had no idea what that person should actually be doing. He fought with us as players, showed up to practices and games high, and ignored us when we gave feedback. We got worse as players, team, and people for most of that year until we finally decided to cut ties roughly a week and a half before our last regular season tournament. We didn’t do so well. At that tournament or our postseason state championship, finishing a disappointing fourth behind three teams we’d already beaten that year. Part of that certainly had to do with what happened after the decision to cut ties with our coach, which included him reaching out directly to individual players behind leadership’s back, trying to show up to practice the next day, necessitating the involvement of team parents and school administration, and conversations with his former college coach and heads of Triangle Ultimate.
Not a great way to go out of high school, if I’m being honest. However, I will say that I probably learned more about leadership, the community within a team, and why I play this silly little sport throughout that experience than any other experience I’ve had playing Ultimate. It wasn’t easy, though. I considered walking away from the sport during that ordeal and settled on taking a break, forgoing my last year of YCC eligibility to work for the summer. Certain other friends on that team came even closer to quitting than I did. I also started to understand just how vital youth Ultimate and youth coaching are for our sport and community.
What is more concerning is that kids are being driven away from the sport right now by coaches and team support systems that are either not equipped to handle the complexities of running a youth team or just being run by someone who should not be around minors (see here for additional context). I feel very passionately about the need for good youth coaches all around the country, whether through experiencing a lack of them myself or seeing friends on different teams put in positions to succeed and thrive. I know my experience is not unique, and I’ve talked a fair amount about ways to grow the game and sport into an ecosystem that resembles its well-established counterparts more closely. But to me, any change needs to start at the youth level to make sure kids are brought into this community in a fun and safe way and in a way that is inclusive of all that want to join.
Roll Ember, Roll CHUF.
Non-Story Interview Highlights
As happens when reminiscing sometimes, I got a little off topic with Conerly and Phillips and our conversations veered all over the place. As a result there were a bunch of things we talked about I couldn’t fit into one piece/theme. Two things I want to highlight from my conversations is some of the amazing advocacy and equity work they are both doing. Alongside Colorado Quandary, Phillips helped lead an Information Session on Action Against Anti-Trans Legislation at last DI Nationals and is hoping to expand that same work to a wider group of teams this coming season. While Conerly is also a consistent advocate for equity in Ultimate, working to hold disc orgs accountable, and working together to create a POC All-American List for the DI Women’s Division last season alongside teammate Theresa Yu.
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 and perspectives 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. Contact me for discussions, feedback, story suggestions and more on Twitter at @noamgum, or via email at ngumerman@brandeis.edu.