The Ultimate Snub: On BYU’s Top-Seeded Frisbee Team and the Championship They’re Not Allowed to Win
For the fourth year in a row, Brigham Young Men’s Ultimate Team finished the season ranked among the Top 20 teams in the country. Yet they can’t compete at the USAU D-I College Championships due to one reason: they can’t play on Sundays. Amid a debate that’s become quite fractured, NGL talked to players and coaches from CHI to get their side of the story
Editor’s Note: Both BYU men’s and and women’s teams go by “CHI,” respectively. For the sake of this article, when we refer to CHI, we are referring to the men’s team. For a great look at a similar situation the women’s team has gone through, check out this great piece from 2018 by Ultiworld.
Every year for the last four years, the Brigham Young University Men’s Ultimate Team finished ranked among the Top 20 teams in the country.
In 2019, CHI — their team name (think Kanye’s third kid, except with a hard ‘C’) — ended the season eighth overall. Having completed this indisputably spectacular regular-season campaign, BYU “brought” a bid into their region; while they would still have to place well enough at their regional tournament in order to “earn” the bid, all signs pointed towards an appearance at USA Ultimate (USAU) D-I College Championships for CHI.
Except for one problem: their school doesn’t let them compete on Sundays.
What does this mean? Well, for starters, most ultimate tournaments consist of a number of teams (ranging from four to 30+) travelling to one location and playing about 8–10 games over the course of a weekend. A major reason for this is due to cost; since ultimate isn’t recognized by the NCAA, it’s on the players to pay for the games they participate in. Large tournaments, therefore, are the most affordable solution.
Furthermore, the standard tournament format includes pool play games on Saturdays and then “bracket” (playoff) games on Sundays. For BYU, all too often this means participating on that first day before packing their bags and missing out on a chance to win it. They’ve done everything they could, traversing the country to play in regular-season tourneys and balling out against some of the best teams the men’s division has to offer. At this point, however, CHI has no hardware to show for their efforts. Simultaneously, they cannot qualify for their Regional tournament…because in order to do so, a team has to place well at their Sectional tournament, which BYU cannot do due to the Sunday requirement.
For a while, the team boded their time, working behind-the-scenes to try and make accommodations with USAU. But this year, after their best finish in program history, CHI tried a different approach: an open letter.
Essentially, BYU asked the rest of the teams in their region to decline the bid CHI brought in. In the circumstance that these teams agreed, BYU asked for the rest of the country to similarly not take the bid. Nationals would still work with a 19-team format, they argued, and in declining the bid, USAU would be forced to address the issue once and for all.
The overwhelming response was…well, negative, to say the least. Ultimate Twitter was one thing; r/Ultimate was an entirely different beast altogether, blowing up to the tune of 571 comments.
Part of this is just the nature of social media. This conversation is inherently nuanced and complicated, and this biased writer would go so far as to say that longform is a much more conducive medium in which to foster a dialogue (though I am pleasantly surprised every once in a while).
Part of this is the nature of ultimate. Again, there’s not a lot of money in the sport, so to ask other teams to accommodate your needs is difficult in of itself. USAU is limited in this regard, too — they don’t have the same level of flexibility that the NCAA enjoys to create their own ‘BYU Rule.’
And finally, part of this was BYU’s intentions in posting the letter. Are they all in on this idea, or are they just trying to stir the pot? To learn more, I decided to contact the guy behind CHI’s rise to the top of the rankings.
“I think I’m good…oh, actually, how did you all do at conference championships this past weekend?”
That’s the first thing CHI’s coach Bryce Merrill said when I asked him if there were any questions he had for me before we began our interview. It’s a testament to the respect Merrill has for the sport and culture surrounding ultimate. The entire time I talked to him over the phone in April, his combination of passion and prose reverberated throughout, as if I could feel his energy zooming across both telecommunication wires and time zones.
As we start to dig into the subject at hand, Merrill tells me how he’s a fan of both our coach and program; we’ve played against each other two times in the past three years, after all. He talks about how he understands the difficulty of building an ultimate program to the point where it’s capable of competing at a Nationals-caliber level. When Merrill first played at BYU in the mid-2000s, the team regularly ranked outside of the top 150. The youth pipeline wasn’t there, either, as he described the high school scene as “pretty ragtag” and limited to about six teams.
Things have changed since then. Merrill credits Dave Kroupa’s work coaching Lone Peak High School men’s and women’s teams — two of the top programs in the country, respectively — as a big influence on the explosion of ultimate in Utah before highlighting some of the other people who helped usher in the sport. He points to the 40 boys’ and 12 girls’ local youth club teams as a testament to this growth, too. In all of this, Merrill doesn’t really allude to the impact he’s had on the community, having coached CHI (between the men and women) for almost a decade and running countless clinics and events.
Anyway, Lone Peak grads such as Jordan Kerr have taken the skills he learned in high school with him to the college pitch. “I had thought about attending BYU before I even started playing ultimate,” Kerr told me over email. “But once I got into ultimate…that became the deciding factor in attending BYU…though at the time they still didn’t have a very good program. I don’t even think they had cracked the top 25 at that point when I was deciding where to attend college.”
Kerr said that geographical proximity definitely influenced his decision — Lone Peak is only an hour’s drive from BYU’s campus in Provo. But he also mentioned how learning from Kroupa made him realize the benefits of good coaching. Kerr wanted to improve as a player under Merrill, who at the time had already built a reputation as one of the best college coaches in the nation.
Merrill officially took over as head coach of the men’s team in 2013 after coaching the women’s team for two years. One of the first things he did was bring together their leadership group and set a five-year plan to lay out what they wanted to accomplish as a program. A certain question hung in the air: What about Sundays?
Playing on Sundays, the Christian day of rest, would never be an option for the team. Though some members of the team aren’t opposed — Merrill himself said he both plays and coaches on Sundays during the summer — their school, which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, does not allow it. Theoretically, CHI could detach itself from BYU; in reality, not only would they sacrifice official support, this action would defy the school’s student policies. Members of the team who went behind the university’s back would face repercussions.
Author’s Note: After doing some digging, it turns out CHI doesn’t receive any funding, field space, or trainers from the university. Through camps, clinics, and annual drives, CHI raises about $50,000 each year. The players are expected to pay the rest of the fees through team dues each season.
Anyway, back in 2013, though, leadership decided that their first goal should be to improve as a program. “We knew that at the end of five years, we needed to be nationally competitive before we could ever start talking about changes or accommodation,” Merrill said. “And so for the first few years, we kept our mouth shut because we were just not that great at ultimate. But you know, you look at our ranking. And we steadily went from 85th to 50th to 30th until 2016, when we finally hit that Top 20 ranking.”
At that point, CHI’s leadership knew they had to regroup for Five-Year Plan: Part Two. They had accomplished their first goal, but how were they supposed to approach a topic they knew would be difficult?
BYU approached USAU with suggestions in 2016, though no accommodations came out of it. Every year since, Merrill has allowed the team to decide as a group how they wanted to end the season.
That first season, it meant not participating in Sectionals. Given the geographical size of their section — the Big Sky includes programs from Washington, Utah, Idaho, and Montana, which often means 7–10 hour drives for most teams — the 2016 iteration of CHI opted not to travel all that way given they would only be able to participate on the first day.
By not playing at their section’s tournament, however, the region lost BYU’s bid. So over the next three years, in an effort to keep their bid in the Northwest — alongside other team-wide reasons — BYU decided to make the trip to Sectionals and end each season on a Saturday night in April.
In fostering conversation among their own team as to how they can tackle the problem, players from BYU have discussed many different approaches.
Some of them revolve around starting discussion among the ultimate community; one idea that has been floated was to create a season highlight video that cuts to black at every highlight and ends with the message “Imagine what we could do during the final 30% of the season.”
Some of them revolve around promoting alternative means of competition; this included a National Invitational Tournament that Merrill and Co. organized at the same time and location as this year’s College Championships in Round Rock, TX. Merrill explained the logic behind this idea: if a team isn’t sure whether or not they’ll qualify for Nationals, they can still book flights and hotels knowing that they will have the opportunity to compete against other great teams. “A lot of teams accuse of not doing any legwork,” Merrill said. “Well, what are they saying about this?”
And finally, some of the approaches they’ve discussed address legitimate policy change with USAU. In the past, they’ve gotten creative with how to build a schedule around their limitations. Yet unfortunately, those suggestions always circle back to two inter-related things: money and time.
Reddit user Tripudelops explains it best:
1. The sectionals and regionals tournaments for the big sky conference and the NW region would need to be expanded an extra day in some direction to allow BYU enough games to fairly qualify for subsequent tournaments. These tournaments happen in the midst of finals, and since Ultimate is a club sport, players don’t automatically get to miss their tests to make it to these events.
2. They’d have to find a way to alter the nationals tournament format for any divisions BYU qualifies in on Sundays so that any teams that would’ve played BYU on Sunday don’t play until Monday (or squeeze in an extra game on Saturday). To avoid giving other teams that weren’t going to play BYU a competitive advantage through better-spaced games or extra days of recovery, they might have to expand the tournament to a five-day ordeal, which costs everyone that much more money.
These are the most prevalent themes when exploring the dissenting opinion, of which many — particularly, a very vocal majority on social media — share. Ultimate players already penny pinch enough to support a full season of play. Asking them to compromise for the sake of one team seems quite unfair on the outset; when you throw in all of the stress ultimate already puts on school work, the conversation for many becomes a nonstarter.
I talked to a lot of people both in person and online about this whole situation, and while most had a lot to say, pretty much no one wanted to do so on the record. Nevertheless, the majority of people I spoke with shared the sentiment above.
I also reached out to some folks over at USAU, to which I didn’t get any responses…except for one. Mitch Dengler, Observer Extraordinaire and Generally Beloved Figure in the Ultimate Community, declined to comment in an official capacity. He did voice his opinions in an extensive Twitter thread, though. (Author’s Note: these tweets do not include the full context of the thread. Please view it on Twitter if you want to read the entire exchange.)
Pretty critical stuff coming from Mr. Dengler, but in reality, there seemed to be a lot of truth backing up his statements.
Right?
One of the other things that popped up a lot in talking to people and scouring the interwebs was the institution that sparked this whole conundrum in the first place: religion. And from an objective observer’s standpoint (pun intended), it seems like quite a lot of people injected their own personal beliefs on the matter when it came to commenting on the situation as a whole.
Is this a reflection of the changing times and opinions on religion? Maybe. I’m not here to judge. Personally, I grew up in a pretty Jewish household in New England and decided to stop practicing once I went off to college. And, to be quite frank, I’m pretty uninformed in regards to other religions — I couldn’t even tell you many real, discernible differences between Mormonism, Protestantism, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
To sum: I’m not here to comment on religious practices. I’m also not here to comment on which side is right, and which side is wrong. If there’s one thing you should take away from this whole thing, it’s that this debate isn’t black and white.
Nevertheless, I can comment on the vitriol that’s been spewed on social media at the expense of these student-athletes. And there’s a lot of it.
“I think a lot of this is indicative of current political climate in the United States of America,” Merrill told me. “So if this is just one more thing we can blame on, you know, Donald Trump, let’s chalk up one more to him.
“We’ve lost the ability to have nuanced discussion or to have discussion on policy and procedure when there are ideological differences. It’s tough, too, because even some of the people defending us are doing more harm than good.”
At the end of the day, members of CHI are college students who simply love everything about ultimate and its culture. Kerr mentioned how playing at Nationals is an absolute dream of his, alongside making a positive impact on the ultimate community in some way, shape, or form. A senior on the team told me that playing for CHI made his college experience “a million times better than [he] thought it would ever be.”
One of their captains even cited how he’s battled depression to an extent that his teammates don’t actually realize. Nonetheless, knowing that “every year, 25 guys have [his] back,” has helped him out immensely along the way.
Each season, BYU’s leadership demands a degree of excellence from their program that has led to steady improvement and tangible results, all the while knowing that they likely won’t be able to participate in the post-season.
This is certainly not an easy thing to do. Therefore, I pushed Merrill on the subject. What keeps bringing you back? And how do you motivate your team?
He thought on this one for a little bit before replying. “There’s a lot of unanswered questions for me,” he finally said. “Even though my life is significantly busier now, and it’s significantly harder to keep justifying coaching, if I’m being honest, there’s just so many things left to do.
“You know, we finish the season Top Five, or Top Three in power rankings…and just like, oh, what does it take to become a number, you know, to put together a Number-One-in-the-country-type regular season?”
It’s an interesting thing to think about, especially since that goal is a lot more realistic than it was six years ago. What if CHI finished the season ranked first overall? Would USAU’s hand be forced? Would the governing body of ultimate be required to accommodate BYU?
I’m not sure how this situation would play out. Regardless, for all of the detractors out there, I do have a simple solution that’ll make this whole thing go away: beat ’em.
And if you can’t, at least make an effort to sustain a dialogue as opposed to burning all bridges. Because if the last three years have taught us anything, it’s that memes and mean-spirited tweets aren’t a productive way of getting things done.
NGL is a frisbee nerd and a player for Northwestern Men’s Ultimate Team (NUT). You can check out more of his work here and follow him on Twitter here.
