People’s Choice Awards: Reddit’s Picks for Team USA

January 27, 2016 by Ravi Vasudevan in Opinion with 10 comments

Tryouts for the US national team are underway. Last weekend, the west coast tryouts took place and have been called the toughest weekend of ultimate ever by many of the top talents in the US.

It seems like one of the toughest aspects of this process will be who to cut and who to put on the final squad. A few days before the tryouts, I put out a poll on r/ultimate on Reddit and asked users to predict who will make the final team, allowing entries up until tryouts started. The rules were fairly simple: Look at the tryout list and select 28 men for Open, 28 women for Women’s, and 14 men and women for Mixed. 56 people submitted picks; here is a breakdown of who was selected, as well as a crowd-sourced shot at the final selection based on everyone’s picks.

Open

100% of voters chose Kurt Gibson. Sorry Beau, one person didn’t choose you for the squad; Kurt gets some props here. Aside from that, there aren’t too many surprises down the line. It is a fairly diverse group of players from many different parts of the country.

Women’s

The out and out winner of Women’s is Octavia ‘Opi’ Payne with 95% of voters choosing her for the team. The next step down is Riot’s Rohre Titcomb with 88% of voters choosing her. No surprise here with a majority makeup of Riot, Fury, Brute Squad, and Scandal with a few members of the All Star Tour like Jesse Shofner peppered in as well. Another interesting note is that there was not a single woman with 0 votes.

Mixed

Things get tricky here as people are picking from the same pool as the single gender teams.¹ Some big players get top votes on the single gender teams but things are much less clear here. Khalif El-Salaam destroyed the men’s side of mixed getting 70% of the vote; the next in line was Bob Liu with 48%. The women’s side of this was even more flat with the winner here being Lisa Pitcaithley with a mere 50% of voters choosing her and Sarah Meckstroth getting second place with 36% of voters.

Your People’s Choice Teams

So the raw data is all up above, but I decided to take it a step further. Mixed people may get slightly offended but I had to choose something to do and I basically gave the top 28 Open and Women’s players spots on the team and then the top 14 Men and top 14 Women that were not selected for open and Women’s spots on the Mixed team. There were only a handful of people who made both the top 28 in their single gender team and the top 14 of their gender on the Mixed team.

Open Team

1. Kurt Gibson
2. Beau Kittredge
3. Cassidy Rasmussen
4. Ashlin Joye
5. Jimmy Mickle
6. Jonathan Helton
7. Tyler DeGirolamo
8. Matthew Rehder
9. Dylan Freechild
10. Brett Matzuka
11. Peter Prial
12. Will Driscoll
13. Alan Kolick
14. Daniel Karlinsky
15. Nicholas Spiva
16. Robbie Cahill
17. Ryan Farrell
18. Simon Higgins
19. Jonathan Nethercutt
20. Josh Markette
21. Lucas Dallmann
22. Justin Allen
23. Reid Koss
24. Jack Hatchett
25. Simon Montague
26. Hylke Snieder
27. Mac Taylor
28. Russell Wynne*

Women’s Team

1. Octavia Payne
2. Rohre Titcomb
3. Claire Desmond
4. Sandy Jorgensen
5. Alex Snyder
6. Leila Tunnell
7. Kelly Johnson
8. Anna Nazarov
9. Claire Chastain
10. Jaclyn Verzuh
11. Qxhna Titcomb
12. Sarah Griffith
13. Georgia Bosscher
14. Kaela Jorgenson
15. Robyn Wiseman
16. Emily Baecher
17. Jesse Shofner
18. Cree Howard
19. Lisa Pitcaithley
20. Jenny Fey
21. Lien Hoffmann
22. Becky Malinowski
23. Hannah Leathers
24. Kami Groom
25. Shira Stern
26. Hana Kawai
27. Sarah Itoh
28. Lauren Sadler

Mixed Team

Men

1. Khalif El-Salaam
2. Bob Liu²
3. Eli Kerns
4. Alex Thorne
5. Brian Schoenrock
6. Jay Drescher
7. Austin Lien
8. Chris LaRocque
9. Asa Wilson
10. Colin Camp
11. Jay Froude
12. Nathan White
13. Elliott Erickson
14. Markham Shofner³

Women

1. Sarah Meckstroth
2. India Stubbs
3. Magon Liu
4. Claire Revere
5. Leah Farris
6. Sarah Anciaux
7. Raha Mozaffari
8. Cassandra Wong
9. Erynn Schroeder
10. Megan Cousins
11. Sarah Davis
12. Carolyn Finney
13. Laura Bitterman
14. Caitlyn Fitzgerald

1. There was no rule in the contest saying that you couldn’t put people on both the mixed and single gender teams. ↩

2. Bob Liu and Russell Wynne tied for 28th in Open but Bob Liu was the second pick for mixed, so I put him on the mixed squad. ↩

3. Jacob Janin had the same amount of votes as the bottom four guys on the mixed team. I used their Open Division votes as a tie breaker and Janin had the lowest among Froude, White, Erickson, and Shofner. ↩