National teams, top club teams, and a SuperTeam. Who comes out on top?
June 12, 2024 by Maya Israel in Preview with 0 comments
One of Europe’s most popular tournaments returns in style this coming weekend. Windmill, in Amsterdam, perhaps best known for its mixture of wild parties and top-class competition, will see a whopping 80 teams battle it out for trophies across three divisions in its 18th instalment. This year, the tournament will feature 40 teams in the Mixed division, 22 in the Open division, and 18 in the Women’s division. And, to add a little spice this year, in the run up to the World Ultimate Championships taking place on Australia’s Gold Coast this summer, we’ll see an epic number of national teams who have travelled from far and wide to test out their rosters before the tournament. We’ll preview the teams in the same way the schedule is set up – we’ll start with a combined women’s and open and finish with mixed.
Tournament Profile
- Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Dates: June 14-16
- Weather: Cloudy but warm with moments of sunshine and a chance of showers all weekend. Highs of 19C/66F. Low to moderate breeze
- How to Watch
- Games between 8:00 and 19:40 on Friday, 09:00 to 17:45 on Saturday and 09:00 to 17:00 on Sunday (times all CET, -6 ET)
Note: Windmill uses a Swiss draw so the initial seedings aren’t too key here. We’ll likely see teams move seeding quite a lot throughout the weekend.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: that the national teams are likely to dominate Windmill’s largest division this year in one of the last test runs before WUC in August.
The European teams will be contenders for quarters. France is the reigning European champion and will be looking to keep up their excellent reputation. Germany has experienced a number of squad changes since EUC but have bona fide legend Alex Snyder coaching and will be ready to compete. Italy has stacked the mixed team with talent and will be using Windmill as a continued opportunity to build chemistry around this talent. The Swiss upset the French at an invitational tournament in Germany last month where Austria competed hard against the best teams too. Great Britain has also made some changes after last season and saw some progress in wins over Italy and Germany at the German invitational. Poland, which is not going to WUC, pushed France to sudden death at Euros last summer so will definitely provide some good entertainment as well, although some players from last year’s team are missing.
The Australians finished second at AOUGC 2023 to neighbors New Zealand but have also reworked the team sheet slightly and look strong. Australian mixed has a well-earned reputation on the world stage with silver medals at the last WUGC in London1 and the last World Games in Birmingham, Alabama. The Barramundis will be a stern test for any opponent.
From one exciting topic to the next; this year’s tournament will also feature the Tokay SuperTeam, with experienced players joining together from a range of nations to create a fantasy team. The aim, it seems2, is to prove that a pick-up team is still able to win Windmill. The team is stacked with the likes of tenured, world class handlers like Valeria Cardenas, Tom Tullet, and Jimmy Mickle. They’re sending the disc downfield to Levke Walczak, Tobe Decraene, and Joe White. Each and every one of the 20 players and coach3 could get a call out, and that’s exactly why they’ve been selected. The question for this team is: are their individual strengths enough to stand against the chemistry of long-standing club or national teams? It’s likely that this team will grow together over the weekend and, if they don’t go too heavy on the beers, we’re sure to see them make the quarters at least.
Shifting over to teams from the States, we’ve got 90’s Babies (Washington DC) coming to town. There are some Scandal and Truck Stop players on this squad, including seemingly the whole Norrbom clan, and they’ll turn some soil. We are also going to see XIST (New York City). This team boasts star players including Oliver Chartock, Ella Juengst, Jolie Krebs, Abby Cheng and Ryan Drost. They’ve also got Leila Denniston, who has played a US season with XIST, from Deep Space who won Euros with Deep Space and silver with Great Britain Women in the 2023 season. They’ve got a shot at a pretty high ranking. EuroTrash also have some particularly strong female matching players, including Helen Tera, Olya Kochenova, and Abby Thorpe. They finished sixth at Windmill in 2022 but faltered last year after allegedly hitting the party a little hard on Friday. Let’s see if they can return to this high standing finish. Finally, Asian-American team The Legends are expected to do pretty well too. They finished ninth at Windmill last year, have some extremely talented players, and are captained by Stephen Chang, who played for Netherlands at Euros last year. Yellowstone Saloon, a team stocked with players who have played Moondog, are a more outside bet, and the two Canadian entrants Montrey’all and the Canada Mixed Masters squad are slight unknowns but, given the depth of talent they’re pulling from, will doubtless harbor ambitions of pushing for the quarterfinals.
Outside of the states, European teams Deep Space and Nullacht! Ultimate will give us a good show. As mentioned above, Deep Space won Euros in 2023 and will be wanting to continue building on their growing reputation. They will, though be without players on the GB Women’s squad so their depth will have taken a hit. Nullacht! Ultimate finished an impressive seventh at their debut Euros in 2023 and will have high aims at Windmill. That said, with the field steeped in national squads and teams from across the pond, we might see these teams finding it tougher than usual to make the quarters. Guayota from Spain, who tend to thrive on sand but have had some recent successes on grass too, are an outside bet for us; they’ve got the Navasa sisters who have performed at a high level for Spain and Sebastian Spiegel from Germany’s World Games squad.
Predictions are always tough to make and are more often than not wrong, but one thing’s for certain: we are going to see some absolutely spectacular mixed ultimate over the coming weekend. With WUC in sight, and with talent joining us from all corners of the map, we are set to see an even more competitive Windmill than usual. Bring it on.
Following the 2020 tournament in the Netherlands being cancelled, 2016 remains the last time we saw national teams compete on the world stage. ↩
Aside from some quality marketing for Tokay and other sponsors Greatest and VC. ↩
Ine Lanckriet led the Belgian open team to the final of the Under-24s world championship last season. ↩
