Ben Taylor
Sports Editor
The men’s and women’s Ultimate teams at Wooster hosted their first tournament in six years this past weekend. College teams from Denison University, Ohio Wesleyan University and John Carroll University joined two teams from Wooster, a team of Wooster alumni and an Akron club team to compete on the men’s side. Wooster’s two women’s teams went up against Oberlin, Akron University, Denison and Ohio Wesleyan teams. The club team from Akron won the men’s tournament while Akron University took home the victory on the women’s side.
Wooster’s Ultimate teams are currently so large that it has been forced to compete in two separate groups, breaking into a Team X and a Team Y. The women’s Team Y did quite well at the Wooster tournament, making it all the way to the semi-finals. The men’s team did not do nearly as well with Team X winning no games and Team Y winning only one match.
These results aligned with how Wooster generally expected to do at the tournament. Adam Shapiro ’14, one of the main organizers of the tournament, acknowledged as much. “When you split up X — Y, you’re pretty much understanding that you’re not going to win,” he said. However, the Wooster teams decided to split the teams evenly talent-wise (as opposed to an A — B format that would have placed the better players on team A and the other players on team B) because the Fall is viewed as more of a teaching period for new players. “The main season is in the spring,” Shapiro noted. “We play both in the fall and in the spring, but the fall ends up becoming really a teaching period where we’re trying to bring as many new guys into the fold as possible.”
That being said, the Wooster team is looking to do well and to continue to bring tournaments to the Wooster area. “Our goal is to have this be something that can happen annually and also to be able to possibly hold a second tournament in the spring that would be sanctioned, so for the real season,” Shapiro said. “It would be at a much higher competition level.”
Winning, though, is not everything. Members of the Ultimate team want to bring what is a rapidly growing sport to as many people as possible. (The World Flying Disk Federation [WFDF], the “international governing body of all flying disc sports” according to its website, was recognized by the International Olympic Committee in May of this year, and ESPN and its affiliates have recently broadcast a number of college and club Ultimate games.)
To that end, the team hosted youth clinics prior to the commencement of the tournament on Saturday, and Shapiro noted his hope to continue to hold free monthly clinics in the future. Ultimate is distinct from many other sports because it is self-officiated, even at the higher levels. As such, instructing children concerning the “spirit of the game” and the need for integrity that self-officiating demands teaches valuable life lessons.
The Ultimate team is still open to new members. Questions about the team should be directed to Shapiro, who can be contacted at AShapiro14@wooster.edu.