Well, first let me say, when it’s like this during the winter time
it makes playing ultimate in the NE very very difficult. From my limited observations and experiences playing Ultimate in the NE and no where else, I think that the three major differences between playing college ultimate in the NE compared to anywhere else is that 1. there is limited time to play outside because of weather, 2. there is limited playing space because it’s densely populated, and 3. compared to other regions, Northeast colleges are smaller and have less of a name in frisbee, so there’s isn’t a large, central pool to grab new ultimate players from nor are people who know about ultimate and good at ultimate hearing about the frisbee programs of those small Northeastern schools. These things are not necessarily bad. They just make NE women’s college ultimate very unique.
So let’s tackle each one of those differences:
- Limited time to play outside: when it’s cold outside, its very hard to play outside. Unlike some warmer places in the country, we really can only play outside in New Haven on a real field and in cleats for less than 4.5 months (September, October, beginning of November and the last week of March, April, and the beginning of May) out of the 9 months of school that we have. This, obviously, is a huge bummer! Who doesn’t like playing on real fields, with real wind, and the elements to fight and learn from?! Our solution for this is to have indoor winter workouts where the focus is not necessarily disc work, but getting super fit – speed, agilities, strength, etc. Because we can do this indoors, we can still be working on our athleticism. We also have something called winter league which is the best thing ever and offsets the boring drudgery of just sprinting and doing push-ups during practice! It’s indoor co-ed league frisbee and all the teams are made up of Yale students who are on the team or are just students/professors at Yale. Sadly, b/c of weather we haven’t been able to start yet this year and are super far behind making it hard to get through the boring winter trainings.
- Limited playing space: This is probably the biggest problem that we encounter at Yale. It’s just so darn difficult as a club sport to find spaces to play in during the winter months. We always move inside and have to practice in the open gym where all students and other club sports go to practice, so it’s basically a battle of “who can get there first and claim the courts right after class?” issue. The way we’ve tried to combat this is first we focus on strength training and agilities during the winter. These types of workouts take less space than full field scrimmages. Also, we’ve been really lucky to have a Club Sports Office that’s been on our side for trying to schedule us into less-frequently used spaces, like the indoor track, so we have LOTS of practice and full field games there.
- Small schools = No large, central pool for talent: So this last issue about the difference between NE college ultimate and everyone else is based off some of my estimates. First, let’s look at the new map for region distribution.
The Northeastern-ish region that Yale is now in is that itsy-bitsy magenta area. New England is that bright green area and is historically the region we’ve played in, though I don’t remember playing any teams from Canada. Anyways, my point is – LOOK HOW SMALL IT IS!!! Especially compared to Southwest and South Central regions (Green and Purple respectively). Crazy! And so many of these schools in the Northeast area are small schools – Yale, for example has an undergraduate student population of 5,279 as of Fall 2010 matriculates (source).
According to the US News College reviews, the largest schools in the NE, meaning the Metro East and New England regions as designated by USAU, are NYU with 43,404 students (21,638 undergrads), Rutgers with 37,364 students (29,905 undergrads), and SUNY Buffalo with 28,881 students (19,368 undergrads). Out of 282 schools in the NE region, only 11 have greater than 20,000 students. Obviously some of these schools don’t have frisbee teams, but the smallest school listed on US News that I know has a frisbee team is Bates with 1,738 undergrad students.
In the category for Midwest from US News, the largest schools are Ohio State University at Columbus (55,014 students total with 41,348 undergrads), University of Minnesota at Twin Cities (51,659 total and 33,236 undergrads), and University of Michigan (47,278 total and 36,489 undergrads) with 35/464 schools having more than 20,000 students in the total population (7.54% of schools compared to the North where only 3.9% of schools had student populations greater than 20,000).
In West, the schools are even larger with Arizona State University having a total student population of 68,064, UT Austin with 50,995, and Texas A&M with 48,703. Some of the major California frisbee schools like UCSB, Cal, and University of Oregon all have more than 20,000 students total. Out of the 342 schools listed, 13.45% of schools have more than 20,000 students total!
So, basic point – schools in the Midwest and West (where college frisbee arguably is more competitive) are bigger. Having more people at a school helps facilitate the creation and upkeep of a frisbee team because there are more people who can get on board to make a team. Also, by having a bigger school, there is arguably a larger pool of athletic people who might join your team.
Now the second point is that schools in the Midwest and West just have a better reputation for Ultimate than schools in the North, so if you are to go to a small school in the Midwest or West and want to play Ultimate, you’ll know which ones to go to (ex: Carleton). There seems to be a strong culture of frisbee out there that the Northeast maybe hasn’t realized quite yet, except at schools like Brown and Dartmouth (these schools are very small yet have women’s A, B, and sometimes C teams!).
So I think the way to address these issues for people who want to support college women’s ultimate in the Northeast is to help either provide resources (places to play at low cost, both indoor and outdoor so they can be used throughout the year), publicity to help develop a positive reputation for women’s ultimate in the Northeast, and also coaches and knowledgeable players would can stick around year round to help develop Northeast college women’s ultimate programs (anyone want to come coach for Yale?)