Top Eastern HS Open Team for 2008

Taking from at least one comment, the discussion would like to be started. So, here is maybe a nice way of beginning that discussion... Voting more than once, though possible, skews the results, so just vote once. And, you may wonder why some teams are not on here and others are. I simply took the standings from this last year's Easterns and then added the only other teams listed on Score Reporter with an RRI in the top 20 on the east coast (I didn't include any teams with less than 10 games)

Youth Club Championships 2007: Flood HL Video

The 2007 Youth Club Championship Oregon: Flood Girls Team video is now available. This unique tournament experience pitted the top 100 some U-19 girls in a 7 team round-robin format. Everything took place in Blaine, MN on August 11th & 12th. And though this is our video, highlights from each game are shown (not just ours).

ipod video - mp4 - (640x360) - 199MB
stage6 divx stream - divx - (1280x720) - stream

googlevideo - (320x240) - stream

(use this as a last resort, because the quality puts the video to shame)


(Though I did not want to put out a lower quality version, there have been requests made.  I cannot upload this video to youtube as they have restrictions over 100MB, but this is now available on googlevideo to see.  The quicktime stream that I normally do was not getting much use at all in previous videos and its' a headache to get to work right now.  So, I leave you with these three sources)

DEVYL Registration and Google Group

The Delaware Valley Youth League (DEVYL) league website and registration page are located at: http://ryan-thompson.home.comcast.net/join.html

There is a Google Group for the league with important league information and forms at http://groups.google.com/group/devyl-fall

Registration has begun! Everyone must register online.

Rutger's University High School Invitational

I always think it's fantastic when non-Youth programs reach out in a big way. I would love to see more college programs put on events like this.

Rutgers University is proud to present its first High School invitational tournament on October 13-14, 2007.

We will host 12 juniors teams for pool play on Saturday and bracket play on Sunday. All teams are guarenteed 7 games. Food and water will be provided. The tournament will include quality competition against other juniors teams, plus the chance to learn about Rutgers and the Rutgers men's Ultimate team.

Bids are due by Friday, September 21st. Teams will be notified of acceptance by Friday, September 28th. The tournament fee is due on Friday, October 5th. Checks should be made out to "Rutgers, the State University".

Please email bids to ru.tournament AT gmail.com with the subject line "ARJI 07". Please include the name of your team's high school, your team's name, spring '07 results, expected team strength in spring '08, and a brief team bio. Housing may be available to teams coming from considerable distances; if your team will need housing, please indicate the number of people (players, parents, and coaches) and for which nights (Friday, Saturday, or both) you will need it. Please bear in mind that we cannot commit to providing housing for teams, but will try to accomodate you if we can.

From Exit 9 with love,
Machine Ultimate

Oregon Flood YCC Girls Video Preview (extended)

I would like to give a preview to our YCC film coming soon...

Announcing New Youth Fall League

Captains and Players,

I'm excited to announce the formation of a new youth league in the New Jersey and Philadelphia area. In order to strengthen the region's representation on a national scale (at the summer Youth Club Championships) and provide more opportunities for players and teams to play and recruit in the fall, this league is open to anyone born in 1989 or later. Any league participant is eligible to represent the region in either the Open, Girls, or Mixed divisions at the 2008 YCC's, provided they are born after May 31st, 1989. Also, the league is open to several categories of players and teams, combining aspects of both preselected and hat/draft leagues. Depending on interest, we are trying to develop both a Division I and Division II, as well as a Girls league. Registration will be open to any of the following:


Full Teams: Any group of 12 or more players may register in the league as a full team. This team will not pick up other registered players, and is a way for high school teams or groups of friends to play together in the fall. Roster additions will be permitted until late in the season, in order to accommodate any new recruits a team may be able to muster. In rare cases, if teams of 10 or 11 can guarantee attendance, they may petition to enter as full teams.

Partial Teams: Groups of 5 to 11 players that want to play together but can't field a full team. Or parts of high school teams that are splitting in order to get people more experience. Partial teams will combine with other partial teams, packages, and individuals in order to form teams large enough to compete.

Packages: 2 to 4 players who want to play together. Packages will be added to the rosters of partial teams, or combined in order to form teams of their own. These can be a couple of friends, the nucleus of a high school team, etc.

Individuals: Players signing up on their own. This is ideal for someone who has never played organized youth ultimate before and wants to get a taste of it before starting their own high school team, or someone out of high school who is still young enough to play, and so on. All girls must register as individuals.

Currently, we are trying to get each team to play two games per weekend, both on the same day. Depending on the number of teams and field availability, this may change. Right now our possible field locations are Edgely in Philadelphia, MCUDL in Trenton, and Washington Road in Princeton. Our tentative fall schedule starts play on September 22nd and ends with a league championship on November 10th and 11th. This will be (pending acceptance of our application) a UPA-sanctioned league.

If you are interested or able to play, please send me an email at thompsor@stanford.edu with your name and how many people you think you or your team will be able to send. More information will be released in the next two weeks.

Kleinman Eruption Highlight Video

Kleinman Eruption
August 4th & 5th 2007
Portland, OR
Club Mixed Tournament
Churchill HS Ultimate HL

Another highlight video from us that I forgot to get up and online. You can see higher quality versions on our website here:
itunes
quicktime stream

Luke Johnson moves to the Midwest

It is a little late notice, but I wanted to let those who may care that I've moved from Eugene, OR and my coaching position with Churchill High School (and the middle schools) to pursue a seminary degree in Chicago, IL. I am now here in Chicago, slowly getting settled with classes that started two days ago. I have been honored to be the coach at CHS for the last 4 years and been part of the amazing ride our boys and girls have let me share with them on. Saying goodbye to them was the hardest thing I've done, and I will miss them more than they will ever know.

I also will no longer be the Oregon contributor and the one who will spew forth high light videos many considered beautiful, while others considered obnoxious.

I hope to get involved in the ultimate scene here in Chicago, but for now have made connections with the college teams here on campus that I helped start 5 years ago. With another year of college elligibility, I plan on playing a little more disc than I coached. I even plan on continuing to play with Oregon's Rhino team this club season and plane tickets are already bought for the Northwest Regionals (and hope to buy ones for Nationals).

I know that I'll be getting back into juniors ultimate some day, but for the time being I hope to follow Churchill and others through this blog and through hopefully more than a few highlight videos.


-luke johnson
former churchill high school open & girls coach


(ps - there will be a YCC Oregon Girls Highlight video coming as soon as I can finish it up)

Preparing for the fall

(consider this an open thread)

Today is the first day of classes for many college students (and some high schools id wager), which alludes to the fact that fall ultimate is right around the corner.

This begs the questions

• What are you doing to prepare? In terms of recruiting, training, captains, organization, planning, schedule setting etc....
• What have you done to prepare?
• When does your season start?
• Will you be playing as a high school or as a local youth club team?

Or you can talk about whatever you'd like.

Happy Birthday to PlayUltimate (2 years and counting!!)

Well, we shamefully neglected to recognize our own birthday... again. Two years ago on August 2nd this site was started with a shoddy blogger template and a dream. Yada yada nostalgia.

A huge thank you though to all of you who come and read, and post feedback, and email the site and play in the tournaments and give us fodder for discussion. I truly enjoy doing this as do the other contributors, and we appreciate you stopping by to read every once and a while.

Over the past two years more than 120,000 of you have come to interact at rates between 300 and 500 a day, pouring over the almost 400 posts to date.

A little recap of where we've been....

A few months ago we released PlayUltimate.us a place where anyone can submit ultimate-related news, content, links, videos, pictures. Then the community of readers decide what is cool, there is the possibility to comment on everything thats added (with nested comments, so beautiful). It has been a huge success, and without much publicity at all has grown to 70 registered users and more than 100 submitted entries in just a few months. I strongly encourage you to check it out, register and submit a few stories and comment on the ones other people submit. The more who use it the more useful it will become to everyone.

Now, you can also drag a link onto your toolbar which will allow you to submit whatever site you are currently viewing with just a simple click - making it even easier to submit things to the site.

As a result of the scope of PlayUltimate expanding I decided to give a name to all the enterprises as a whole - PlayUltimateMedia, which you can check out at http://playultimatemedia.com. In addition to eventually holding information about the "company" you can also see the latest updates from all the different sites in one place.

And a look at where we are headed...

Since the beginning ive had no intention of keeping things small. As ultimate grows, so will we. We've added wonderful contributors over the years to the blog and now everyone can contribute on PlayUltimate.us. But stlil we remained primarily focused on the United States.

Well today, in honor of our second year at this gig we are proud to announce PlayUltimateCanada. The latest in what will hopefully become an ever expanding network of quality sources for ultimate-related news and commentary.

We are still searching for a few contributors for the site, so if you live in Canada or follow high school ultimate there please email the site. We are hoping for PlayUltimateCanada to be just as successful as the flagship site so that leading up to worlds next year we will have a ton of international content and information about more of the teams.

So again, thank you for visiting, tell your friends about the site, join the Facebook group, link to the site, you can add the headlines by clicking the link on the lower right hand side, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Happy birthday to us, two years and counting - we couldn't do it without you.

More americans play ultimate than Rugby, Lacrosse

From the 2007 SGMA (sports goods manufacturer's association) survey, ultimate has more "frequent participants" than field hockey, lacrosse, fast-pitch softball, roller hockey.

Via the UPA newsletter...

The Sporting Goods Manufacturer's Association (SGMA), the trade association of leading industry and fitness brands, included Ultimate in their 2007 Sports & Fitness Participation Report and the numbers are impressive.

This year's SGMA Sports & Fitness Participation Report has overall participation figures for 86 sports in eight different categories (aerobic activities, conditioning activities, strength activities, individual sports, racquet sports, team sports, outdoor sports, and water sports). Ultimate was included for the first time and ranked higher than Rugby and Lacrosse, two comparable field sports. To request a full complimentary report from the SGMA, please click here.

Participation Type (x's per Year)	Casual (1-12)	Regular (12-24)	Frequent (25+)
Soccer	6,214,000	4,770,000	3,381,000
Ultimate	2,211,000	1,038,000	824,000
Lacrosse	804,000	45,000	305,000
Rugby	275,000	29,000	379,000

so consider bringing out that statistic next time someone decides to spout the participatory inadequacies of ultimate.

(a side note, we know that much of the growth has come for ultimate in the youth division... aka you. congratulations, and lets continue to grow!)

What do you want from the UPA?

As mentioned previously, PlayUltimate will be conducting a series of polls / surveys to figure out what this community (high school ultimate players and fans) would like from the UPA.

Consider this the first exploratory round. Post anything you think you would like, as someone who is involved with high school ultimate, from the UPA.

The most heralded comments will be combined into a poll (or series of polls) and the UPA will be contacted with our findings.

The lists/surveys/polls will be put up on Thursday, so for the next few days consider this your open forum.

You do not need to be a UPA member to comment, nor do you have to sign in to Blogger. Anyone can voice their opinion, keep in mind though that you will be respected much more if you attach a name to your opinion, and it will make it much easier for people to respond to you.

Try to keep it focused on the high school scene, lets get it started...

UPA releases poll on age requirements for YCCs

Fresh off the discussion and debate in the comments here on PlayUltimate regarding YCCs and player age requirements, the UPA has put a poll up on their website asking for member input... Except you dont have to be a UPA member to vote.

Check out the poll by clicking here.

What do you think of their question?

The current age restriction for the UPA Youth Club Championships is under 19 as of June 1st. This allows players with college experience to participate. Should the age restriction be revised so that players must be under 19 and cannot have played on a college roster?

feel free to answer in the comments

reminder: as mentioned previously, PlayUltimate will be holding an open discussion in the coming days as to what you would like the UPA to do for high school ultimate in the united states. specific ideas, specific questions, which will be tallied and put into polls where you can rank their importance, the site will contact the UPA with our findings. Look for those threads to be posted sometime early next week.

Non-YCC stuff: USN Spring Season highlight reel

cool stuff out of Nashville, Tennessee

a reminder that you can always submit things to PlayUltimate - just send us an email, the address is PlayUltimateBlog@gmail.com - if you forget its in the pink square on the right hand side of the page.

YCC reaction from the Pulse

Ryan has posted on his personal blog a quite detailed account of his experience at the YCC tournament this year. Check it out by clicking here.

some excerpts -

Denver was a team that relied a lot on their handlers and big receivers going away from the disc. We were able to limit the damage their handlers could do with give and gos and upfield resets, while taking away the deep options with our marks and shutting down in-cuts with our legs. Standout players on Denver were handlers #8 and #12, along with #10 who was their go-to guy downfield. He came up huge on a lot of early grabs, although we thankfully managed to limit his damage later on. We did have two ridiculous plays of our own - Jesse hucked backhand around a forehand forcing mark, throwing a bullet to the breakside of the endzone, which Stephen tracked down, utterly roasting his defender. And earlier, Jake Rainwater annihilated his defender on a jump ball just outside the endzone, for his first real sky of the weekend. We called the play "Make it Rain."

[...] (<< this means a lot of text was in between these two quotes and they have nothing to do with each other, other than both regarding the YCC tournament.)

During that point, incidentally, I saw/heard some of the nastiest and really uncalled for comments by some Paideia parents. When Noah made a clean bid on Michael Terry (nearly getting the D), his momentum caused him to roll on the ground afterwards, coming up on Terry's ankle/achilles from behind. Mike Terry crumpled to the ground and had to take an injury after this accidental and freak injury. But the Paideia parents accused Noah of trying to injure him, saying that he'd been making reckless and unspirited bids all game, which was just a ridiculous claim. First of all, Michael Terry had taken injury subs earlier in the game after no contact with Philly players, meaning he was nowhere near 100%, and also, Noah's bid was completely clean, as were all of his during that game. It wasn't a no-chance bid where he landed in his knees from behind, it was a legitimate bid where he bumped him from behind after rolling on the ground. Rob Olson and I got loud and obstinate defending Noah at that point.

read the whole account of the weekend cover to cover by clicking here.