As promised about a million weeks ago, a quick look back at my questions for the 2011 college season:
1. Can Oregon repeat?
While Oregon did not repeat as National Champions, they did still have an extremely enviable season. They were championship bracket regulars in every tournament they played this season, won a perennially tough Northwest Region, and made it as far as semifinals of Nationals. On top of that, all their losses during the season came against Nationals qualifying teams. Like I said, still pretty enviable. I can’t help but imagine, though, that losing two big handlers in Shannon McDowell and Molly Suver could have been a pretty significant blower. Not saying that Fugue would ever use this as an excuse for not repeating, I’m just saying that as a casual spectator, I missed seeing those two players out there. I really liked watching them play in Madison last year. Both of them were just all over the place, none of the stagnant handler sets that yours truly is a master of, and what was really impressive to me was how rarely I saw them turn it for how much they were touching the disc. My biggest disappointment is that I never got to really see Sophie Darch play after all the mad hype I’ve read about her. Oh well, good thing I have another 3-4 years to catch her in action in an Oregon jersey!
2. Will Santa Barbara’s finals reign continue?
I think we can answer this one with a resounding yes. Five finals in five years, and two National Championships in the last three years. Just wow. Even without Kaela Jorgenson and Briana Cahn (? Didn’t see her out there this year), the Skirts found themselves in a very familiar position. You want to talk about enviable? That’s enviable.
I’m not done watching the women’s final yet (Why were the finals games broken up like that for the broadcast?), but from what I saw of the first half, Finney was just balling out. I’m curious as to how the Skirts get along next year without her. To be sure, Marie Madaras is just a phenomenal athlete and can do so many dangerous things on the field, and the kid is just a flat out gamer. With Madaras back I can’t imagine that the Skirts would fall too far from the top, but you know they’re gonna miss that Madaras/Finney connection. Talk about a 1-2 punch. Actually, sometimes I think Finney throwing to anybody is a pretty decent connection…
3. How will the Southwest region play out?
As mentioned, I found this region the most compelling because of how many Nationals qualifiers the state of California regularly churns out. Unsurprisingly, the state of California dominated the discussion yet again, and teams we’ve now grown accustomed to seeing at Nationals, UCLA and USC, were left out of the mix this time around. It’s tough to say whether or not this region could have used a fourth bid (i.e., “Would USC or UCLA have performed better at Nationals than Team X from another region?”), especially since that means a bid gets taken away from another region, and that’s never a happy thing to even talk about, so I’ll just keep my mouth shut on this one. It’s like, the men’s NCAA Tournament bubble team situation this year, right? Those play-in teams could have been absolute shit and have been dismantled in the very next round, leaving us to relegate them to the basements of our March Madness memories, or they could provide us with one of the best stories of the entire tournament. VCU was a play-in team. A play-in team. They were a “maybe” even on Selection Sunday, and they played their way into the Final Four. So. You never know, y’know?
4. What new and intriguing conference match-ups will arise with the new boundaries?
Heck, y’all tell me. I was really hoping that they would keep the original regional redraw, because I liked the idea of adding Wisconsin to our region. I thought it made both divisions in our region so much more competitive. But what do I know.
Erm, I know how this is going to come off and please let me assure you that I don’t mean this as any slight to Ohio State, but: What happened to teams like UPenn and Pitt, both teams that have become familiar faces at Nationals, or at least familiar names in the Nationals discussion? Was it a down year for both teams, or did the redraw bring more competitive teams into the picture?
5. How will the women’s division continue to develop?
I feel like the women’s division is coming along quite nicely. I felt that this year more than others there was so much more parity in the women’s field — I never quite felt like there was an overwhelming favorite, and there were a good number of teams that could have played themselves into the final game.
I don’t know if it really has anything to do with the development of women’s college ultimate but I’ll say it does: I’m seeing so many more college ultimate players getting involved with ultimate in their communities. I think that kind of excitement and that kind of eagerness to play more and more comes from great excitement and competition on the college level. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m seeing a spike in competitiveness from summer league teams because of the greater influx of women’s college players. Not to mention, there were sooooo many college players representing a number of different college teams at the Chicago women’s combine, and it was unbelievably exciting. And I keep seeing mad girls in Without Limits tournament gear. Love how big this movement is getting.
6. Will USAUltimate take a serious look at UOA’s model?
Judging from the amount of bickering still going on on RSD (I check in now and again, and then quickly check back out cause I’m not about all that ratchet noise and foolishness), I’m going to guess that no, the greatest model ever in the history of models for ultimate frisbee playing has not been seriously considered by the governing body.
7. Will this spring witness an even bigger upswing in interest in ultimate frisbee?
Again, y’all tell me.
8. On a related note, how will the media coverage of ultimate grow in 2011?
I’ve been seeing so many links to local newspapers covering their area ultimate teams playing at Nationals, and that’s really, really awesome. I generally enjoyed the CBS Sports broadcast of the semifinals (did anyone get to see the Stanford/UCSB and Iowa/Carleton semis?) and finals, although I wasn’t quite sure why they broke up the finals games like that. Even though I wasn’t present in Boulder for the finals and I wasn’t able to watch via webcast, that disjointing of the game threw me off sufficiently that I wasn’t compelled to sit through wakeboarding or flowboarding or whatever to watch the second halves of the games. *shrug* I’m impatient, though. Also it was kind of a bummer that we had to wait a few weeks before we got to see it. All in all though, I thought the commentators did a pretty good job of calling the game and giving a little bit of background and insight to the games, players, and teams. I found the random cutaways to the sideline reporter kind of distracting and odd, like, why’d they cut there in the middle of the action like that? Usually when you watch a basketball game or something, those kind of bits happen right before or right after a stoppage in play, i.e. a media or team timeout or something of that nature, but not like, between a pull and the person walking to get the pull. At that point maybe I’d go to an inset shot of the commentators talking about something or the other. But I do get that it is boring to watch someone just walk to a disc and walk it to the brick mark. I’m sure the UOA has some clever way to make that shorter and more entertaining and more intense and more ultimate, though. Again, *le shrug*.
Sidenote: While watching the Nationals broadcasts, I almost peed myself cause I totally know who Brent Stover, the guy who commentated with Kyle Weisbrod, is. He does play-by-play for the Big Ten Network!
9. On ANOTHER related note, how much closer to “legitimacy” will ultimate move? And perhaps also as important, do ultimate players want so-called “legitimacy”?
From a college ultimate outsider, it certainly seems like gradual steps are being taken towards more legitimacy for ultimate. Obviously there was the CBS Sports broadcast. There was the webcast, which I’ve heard was pretty good. Then there was all the hype leading up to the event, not just generated from USA Ultimate, but by other groups like Skyd and Without Limits doing features on teams and players. With more readily accessible information about the game and about the teams and players, I think it’s easier for people to get a. informed and b. amped about ultimate. It’s like, what’s the first thing you do when you want to know about something? You Google it, right? You can google “Seattle Sockeye” (one of the tightest websites in the game right now) or “Illinois Menace assholes” (but srsly google it without the quotation marks… seriously one of the funniest search terms ever) and you’ll get informative, legit-looking sites. You can get to clicking around or looking at photos and videos and really get excited about what you’re looking at. No longer do you have to tell someone, “Ah, you just have to see ultimate in person for you to get what I’m explaining to you.” They can just go online and look at a clip on YouTube or go to a team’s site and watch their highlight reel from a given tournament. In a world where people are increasingly dependent on the internet for information, I think it’s awesome how much of a presence ultimate has on the interwebz.
Back to the TV bit though: As cool as it was seeing ultimate on my television, there were still some gripes. I watched with my parents in the room, and my parents have only ever seen four ultimate tournaments ever in their lives, and not even full tournaments at that, probably like thirty points total over the course of the last five years — but they had some things to say about it. I don’t know if it was the game itself or the editing, but they sometimes found the game to be disjointed and slow. But I’m gonna blame it on the fact that they were in the room when I was watching the men’s final with all that wind and punting. But I mean certainly, some changes need to be made in order to increase the “watchability” of ultimate. Doing something about the time between pulls, figuring out what to do about fouls/observers, etc. etc. Also, as someone mentioned somewhere or the other, I think the Nationals format should be changed so that teams are discouraged from losing games when they have their pool wrapped up. Coming from a basketball standpoint, it’s so much more compelling to see tournament teams fighting for every last game, because one loss means your season is over. *Shrug* I guess I just don’t like the idea of throwing a game or “letting one go” on purpose.
10. What new personalities will we see in the college game?
Again quite sorry to say that I really wouldn’t know, and that I need y’all to take a girl to school.
11. Most importantly, who will pick up the slack for College Ultimate’s Least Athletic Player, now that yours truly isn’t around to defend the title?
Now that I’ve taken my “talents” to club ultimate, I’ve left the field pretty wild open. There are passes to be dropped, throws to be turfed, and deep goals to be burned for. After watching the CBS Sports replays of the semifinals and finals games, I can safely say that it was no one on Oregon, Michigan, UCSB, Stanford, Carleton, Iowa, Wisconsin, or Colorado. So. Yeah.
Bonus 12. Iowa did indeed take women’s ultimate by storm, and Robyn Fennig went hard, finishing as a Callahan finalist.
