Name: Mike Mullen (Bald Guy in picture)
Currently Lives: Seattle (Born and Raised)
Currently Coach: The Northwest School Varsity Boys Ultimate Team (Seattle), The Northwest School Girls Varsity Soccer, and middle school soccer, basketball, and ultimate. (Coached some HS basketball, track, and softball too back in the day)
Current DiscNW Organizational Stuff: Board Member, Youth Committee, Co-director of Seattle Youth Ultimate Camps, Boys HS League Coordinator.
UPA Organizational Stuff: As a member of the youth advisory council, helped spearhead the formation of YCC and the splitting of HS Nationals into Westerns/Easterns.
Why My HS Program has been successful: 1. Great feeder program with great middle school coaches at my school. 2. I coach soccer and basketball, so I can get the best athletes at my small school to play ultimate. 3. I don't get in the way of my team.
Best Ultimate Moments: (In no particular order) 1. Winning Westerns with a group of senior guys that I had been with since they were 6th grade basketball and ultimate players. 2. Watching former players play at the highest level of the game while playing with great intelligence, integrity, and intensity. 3. Watching a former player winning a college national championship and realizing that my program wasn't a dead end.
Favorite Quote: "I have learned much from my teachers, even more from my colleagues, but I have learned the most from my students." -Talmud
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
PlayUltimate Contributor - Mike Mullen
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7 comments:
he split it up into East/West so that his team could win the Championships without having to play Amherst.
sweet! I'm getting ragged on by some anonymous poster concerning ultimate Frisbee. That is a sign I'm doing something right with my program.
By the way, is there a way to find out IP addresses of "anonymous" posters?
-Mike
I hate/very much dislike anonymous posters. Especially when they use it to hide comments like that. Stop doing it!
That's all...
Daniel
Anonymous,
Do you really think the split was done because of this? After seeing both Northwest in the finals of Westerns and the Amherst program latter that summer, I am confident in my assesment that Northwest would have prevailed as the top team in the nation if both teams were to have matched up. This will never be known, and unless the winners this year decide to duke it out somewhere in the middle, I'm sure we'll never really know what coast is better... but to be honest, who really cares? do we really need a national champion? last year I would have said yes, but i'm not sure i feel that way any more. the goal right now should be growth of the sport. we're still too small and there are too many places still without teams and organization. maybe someday we'll return to a national championship, but for now it doesn't seem to serve the purposes of growing the support. to my knowledge, this is the justification that the upa has had, and not for the reason's you've stated.
I hate to even dignify the first comment with a response, but I don't want anyone to think that it came from an Amherst player or coach. I was also involved with lobbying for an East/West split and I still think it was a good idea.
Theorizing about teams avoiding competition or who would have won what when is just plain silly. And how about we decide as a community that we don't post anonymously anymore? Take responsiblity for your opinions and take this blog to a higher level.
I think the East/West split was an a great option as far as sport (though a somewhat less entertaining sport). The split certainly allowed new teams to enter the mix. Had it not been for the split I would never have gotten an opportunity to play at such a high level (while still competing with junior players). Good choice there. To Lukester: That's a very tough decision to make. Looking at YCC... Amherst barely lost to Drizzle, an all star team from Seattle, consisting of a large number of NWS players. They had less chemistry, but arguably more talent. It certainly would have been an interesting match up, but one can't really be certain. I still have not had the pleasure of seeing Amherst play (I will this fall at YCC), but I have seen NWS play, and Mike, you've done an amazing job.
bummer, well then, I will just have to make a trip to easterns some time in the future
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