The Most Predictable Nationals Flameout Ever
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The Most Predictable Nationals Flameout Ever
“It was just a battle of a team that is playing team defense and a team that is trying to win with their athleticism alone, and well—it’s no contest.”
That was the call on Ultiworld as, to the delight of the division, #1 Davenport Panthers fell in the men’s semifinals of D-III nationals to #5 Middlebury Pranksters 15-11 in a game the Pranksters controlled throughout.
Davenport certainly had a collection of players good enough to win the national championship this season. In some respects, it would be easy to blame the players for failing to do so, but I wholeheartedly reject that sentiment.
Because the seeds of the last two years’ disappointing exits from nationals for the Davenport men’s team (2024’s being a 12-9 blown lead and losing 14-13 in the quarterfinals) were planted a year and a half ago, in the first weeks of the program’s first year.
While I was still there.
Those seeds were planted by a coach and administration blinded by hubris and unwilling to consider that they could ever make suboptimal decisions.
When I arrived at Davenport, I did not join a serious team intent on competing for national championships and going D-I in a few years. I became a part of a directionless group of players led by a man completely out of his depth.
We did not do warm-ups to begin practices and were scheduled to play showcase games at the school on Mondays after tournaments, leading to numerous injuries. We went to a Halloween party tournament using school funds, with our coach, Mike “Frisbee Apostle” Zaagman, where our bid fee covered kegs of beer while most of our team was under-21, and some were minors. We were spoken to and treated like children because our coach’s primary coaching experience was coaching children, and he would disappear mid-game at tournaments to recruit.
Why was this the case?
My hypothesis is hubris. It requires an incredible amount of hubris to start for-profit rec leagues in direct competition with your nonprofit local disc organization. It requires hubris to pitch yourself as the head coach of the men’s team of the program you helped start, when you have no meaningful playing or coaching experience to speak of. And it requires even more hubris to continue to run your organization while working full time as the head coach of one of the only scholarship programs in the sport and think you can even do a halfway decent job with either, and that you can avoid any conflicts of interest with your team and community in doing so.
And on the side of the school administration and athletic department, it requires an otherworldly amount of arrogance and stubbornness to dismiss and disparage serious concerns from the only players on your team who have any experience in the division your brand new team for your brand new sport you know nothing about is playing in, both in terms of the how the team itself is being run, and for the mental health of the students in your care. And, to refuse to do more than a soft verbal reprimand to your guy.
This year, it’s clear that nowhere near enough was changed. Thanks to their collective arrogance, the coach and school created a team worse than the sum of its parts. The team has not been sent to play the highest level of competition in the division for the past two years. Then, just hours before nationals, the head of the program is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that Davenport will go D-I next year because “we want better competition.”
Unbelievable hubris is the only explanation for saying that before your program has won anything of note.
How can that attitude not affect the play on the field on some level? The team has not been put in situations where they face real adversity. They did not go to any big D-III tournaments this year. Their play never evolved past throwing it around to the best players on the field and relying on talent alone. Players who came into the program two years ago, knowing little about ultimate, rarely played and were not developed. They were never coached on how to play against better teams than them, or how to handle being the villains of the division because the person doing the coaching fundamentally doesn’t understand how team sports work. So it is beyond unsurprising that when they played one of the titans of the division in Middlebury, they were outclassed.
Large portions of the Wall Street Journal article about scholarships in D-III focused on a sense of “fairness” to it. And to be clear, the idea of it being “unfair” to recruit people with scholarships doesn’t bother me at all. I think it is an understandable, but pointless feeling, because sports are inherently unfair, and as things stand right now, other schools have plenty of other recruiting advantages over the scholarship programs.
What bothers me is that some people running these programs, and the Davenport men’s team specifically, that are supposed to be on the cutting edge of the sport do not know what they are doing. Thanks to their incompetence, they are playing games with kids’ education, and USA Ultimate is providing no oversight or guidance to these programs that are supposed to be taking the sport further towards legitimacy. How can we take ourselves or the growth of the sport seriously when this is the state of what could be the flagship programs for growth moving forward?
Making the semifinals as a second-year program is a big accomplishment. I hope every player on the team feels proud. However, they were set up for any outcome other than a dominant stroll through the division to be a failure on some level, and they were not prepared to execute that vision. And what bothers me most about the entire situation is that a truly wonderful group of kids I enjoyed getting to know and spending time with in my three months as their teammate, were hung out to dry by the people who should have had their backs.
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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 or Bluesky (@noamgum/@breaksideulti now too!) or email (noamgumerman@gmail.com).
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