Ultimate frisbee qualifies for Nationals in Texas and launches campaign for travel funds
By Kevin Ahn
For the first time in many years, the Colby Men’s Ultimate Frisbee team has qualified for the national tournament that is to be hosted in College Station, Texas. The last time the team qualified for the tournament was all the way back in 2011, well before most of the current players had even started high school. But strong play at last weekend’s regional qualifier has pushed the men’s team to move on to the ultimate test in frisbee.
Heading down to Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, the Mules entered into the regional tournament in Pool B to face competition such as Bates, Brandeis, and Bryant University. The first game of the day for the Mules was against our Maine rival: Bates College. The game started out very strong for Colby, scoring almost immediately after junior Scott Batchelder ’20 intercepted a pass from Bates in their own end zone. This gave Colby the momentum to rally two more points right after to give them a 3–0 lead. However, Bates rallied back and tied the game at threes before going on a big run putting them up 8–4 at the end of the first half. Despite having faltered in the latter part of the first half, Colby again turned things around and ended up tying the game 9–9 with little time left on the clock. Unfortunately, Bates scored one final time to beat the Mules 10–9. But it was this close score differential that would eventually help push Colby into a qualifying position.
The second game of the day was against Brandeis University who went 0–3 during pool play. Colby handled the Brandeis team quite easily, beating them 15–8.
“The game was really never close, we were able to break them (score while on defense) twice early on and had the score at 5–3,” said Bennett Allen ’20. “From here they just had no answers for us, and we basically just ran away with the win.”
The final game of pool play was against Bryant University, both the host of the tournament and winners of last year’s national tournament. However, the Mules played strong throughout both halves and won at the end of regulation time 10–6. Of the four teams in the pool, three of them went 2–1 meaning that there needed to be some tie-breaker between Colby, Bryant, and Bates. The metric used to decide this was score differential across these three teams (Brandeis was not included as all three teams beat them). Having played very strong against Bates in Colby’s one loss, the Mules ended up with the second seed behind Bryant University.
Moving onto bracket play, the Mules started off in the 2nd place bracket matched up against another Maine rival: Bowdoin. Sadly, Colby did not have the play to beat the Polar Bears and fell 15–8. With this loss, Colby was relegated to the 4th place bracket and needed one more victory to secure their place in nationals. Their opponent, who had just beat Bates, was Williams college. Despite having a close loss against Bates, Colby easily handled Williams, beating them 15–8 and thus advancing to Nationals.
Due to USAU rules, the Ultimate team had to change its unofficial name of the “Dazzlin’ Asses” to something a bit more appropriate for a national tournament. As a result, the team has been re-founded as CUT (Colby Ultimate Team). However, for several years now, “CUT” has been the team name of one of the top DIII ultimate teams in the nation, Carleton College. This past weekend, halfway across the country, Iowa State beat Carleton in the semi-finals to advance themselves and prevent Carleton from moving on. As a result of this, several reddit pages have been dedicated towards the discussion of Carleton missing out on nationals. More importantly, there are pages about Colby (and their renaming to CUT) trending within the reddit group, specifically in a joking manner to keep CUT in nationals.
Due to the distance of the tournament (1735 miles from Colby) the team is currently looking for funding for travel and housing expenses. The team estimates that the cost of the trip for the 25 players will end up being around $20,000. While still far out from their goal, the team has raised approximately $2,500 in the first 24 hours of releasing their GoFundMe.
The national tournament will take place the Saturday and Sunday of May 18/19.
