A Retrospective

Chicago club co-ed Ultimate is one of the most volatile and dramatic scenes I would ever care to imagine. It certainly stands to reason that, in a sport where the elite athletes and casual BBQ crowd do not have the velvet rope and bouncer of a commercial league, salaires and scouting to seperate them, every player trying out for a team has to make every ounce of their impression on a team in 1-3 days of drills and scrimmages.

This year offered an especially brutal tryout season. Briefcase, rebuilt by hand by Rob Berg and company, saw some player poaches and one set of tryouts. Gambit, returning from their initial season of cuts, had some holes to fill. And Food and Liquor decided to hold cuts for the first time. Some players declared their allegiance to one squad. Many tried out for all.

When the dust cleared, three teams were formed, and another one was asked to. Whitey told me I would not be returning to the roster this year – they had the handlers they wanted, and I was up against my own favorite deep threat, Zarin, for his position. I gave it my best shot in tryouts, but the man knows how to jump, and clearly looks better than me in Under Armor, so that was that. Whitey did, however, ask me to captain a secondary squad for the team, in the hopes than no one would have to really be “cut” from the squad, and that there could even be movement up from the secondary team to the primary. In the process of discussing this scenario, this point caused disagreements that ultimately led to the departure of the other possible captain who had shown up to the first practice. At day one, I was left soley in charge of a ship I wasn’t even sure I wanted to stay on.

But I made some calls, and got in touch with some people I didn’t think I could do this without. Some didn’t answer, and I’m sad they couldn’t. Others did, and proved to be as pivotal as I’d hoped and maybe more. We put together a list of all those who hadn’t made Food, and I added a few contacts as we went. Since we practiced seperately but at the same fields, it wasn’t too hard to bring people in, especially with the carrot on a stick of eventually making the roster they’d been cut from.

At our first tournament, we had a loose hierarchy, and a feeling that we might have ourselves a lil’ team here. We were promptly beaten by Gambit 1-13. The next game agaist the Abusement Park showed us improving to a whopping 3-13. Yet we went on to win three of the next five for the weekend, including the last two, and on that lovely note, suddenly things didn’t seem so bad.

Motown Throwdown saw us play Food and Liquor in a tournament for the first time. We were pumped up, we were ready to avenge many practice scrimmage losses, and we took to the field – to immediately go down 4-0. As we eventually lost by three, it was a sad means to start the game, but it showed a hidden potential in the team when they really wanted to put their backs into it. We licked our wounds and waited through Mad-Disc-On – the tournament where Food would ask some of our players to join them. While two players joined them for the weekend, only one player switched rosters in the end. The rest of Just Liquor was there to stay. There was no spectre of our team’s core being plucked out from inside of us – and that certainly helped me breathe easier.

Cooler and Heavyweights spilt cleanly into a triumph and a tragedy, respectively. Stats kept at Heavyweights painted an ugly offensive picture, and we were running turnover-punishing drills like mad, hoping to get our offense to rise mentally again to flashes of brilliance (or at least, vague coherence) that we had seen it reach before. Injuries, travel plans, and other obligations found us preparing a smaller roster than usual, with some players thrust into new positions mere days before our first step into the series. To make things even wilder, the seedings were set – five teams were set to go to Regionals, and our first game was against the slotted number five – our very own Food and Liquor.

To be honest, the game was something of a blur – I was running up and down the sidelines, yelling loudly and occasionally even playing. The score was rising, and I remember looking at my co-captain with a look of raised eyebrows and braced smile – Are we actually doing this? Turned out, we were – after we took half, spirits definitely seemed broken across the aisle – and the final score was 11-4. We quietly shook hands, and regrouped without so much as a whoop – whether out of shock or a feeling a bit bad for a team who were our strongest rivals and yet also our sibling team. (Hell, at least three of our players were dating or even married to someone on their team).

The rest of the weekend was exalting, but the high note was already hit. We did beat three other teams to ensure our spot to regionals, and recieved many congratulations, from other teams and Food players as well. We were on our way to Regionals in our first year with a team that was told they didn’t fit the bill anywhere else.

Now granted, the coda to the song isn’t quite so sweet – in the movies, when the kids from the camp that’s threatening to be closed down for a mall beat the rich kids from across the lake, they usally don’t have to then row against the U.S. Olympic team two weekends after that. But thus enters the only real way the elite division of Ultimate distances itself from the part-timers – they kick the crap out of them at regionals. And so we held seed at 16th. I even sprained my ankle in my second point of the first damn game, thus robbing me of the chance to have my butt personally beat by the best of the Central region.However, I can only look back with pride at the fact that we made it there, and got to have our own cinderella story. It’s something inspiring to chew on until the next tumultuous chapter of Chicago club mixed unfolds…

About the Author

Dan Morgridge played college ultimate at Knox College, where he was quite literally a giant among dwarves. A fixture in the CUSL circuit, he is also a veteran of a number of co-ed club teams, including Food and Liquor. Most recently he captained Just Liquor in their inaugural, regionals-qualifying season.