Why does ESC offer so much excitement every year?
August 21, 2024 by Edward Stephens in Recap with 0 comments
Ultiworld’s coverage of the 2024 club ultimate season is presented by Spin Ultimate; all opinions are those of the author(s). Find out how Spin can get you, and your team, looking your best this season.
Welcome to Clubhouse Chatter, where the Ultiworld staff keep you caught up on the major events of the club season.
Elite-Select Challenge Is USAU’s Best Idea
Speaking purely as a fan of the club season, I never thought I would reach this conclusion, but here we are.
I’m a (little d) democrat as a player: regionals-level for club, and otherwise happy to play pick-up, local league, one-off tournaments, high-level goalty, low-level goalty, not-dressed-for-sports mini, whatever. If there’s a disc and some space to run around, I’m in, and anyone who wants to join is as welcome as a ray of sun in winter.
But as a reporter for, opinion-haver on, and follower of club ultimate, I’m a total elitist. For better or worse, what I care about most is the pursuit of greatness in this sport of ours. I want to watch the best players from the best teams compete against the other best teams. Give me Fury and Brute Squad. Give me 2020s Truck Stop and 2010s Revolver. Give me all the Molly Brown and Ring of Fire semis appearances over the years. Give me the Drag’n Thrust, AMP, Mixtape decade. Give me the year-in, year-out excellence of Robyn Fennig and Chris Kocher and Khalif El-Salaam. Give me more international superstars summering in North America. Give me serious challenges that fall just short, would-be dynasties, and teams that suddenly put it all together to catch fire for four days in October. In short, give me Saturday and Sunday at Nationals and all the parts of the regular season that lead up to it.
And yet, I can’t help but be drawn to the spectacle and drama that is the Elite-Select Challenge. Every year brings a fresh heap of excitement – from last ditch efforts at strength bids to renewed statements of purpose for the postseason to memorable collapses. Because the juggernaut programs typically sit it out, it’s also the perfect venue for rising stars to shine clear of the brightest lights. Last year saw Fort Collins shame. finish off the nearly perfect regular season as a glimpse into their title future, the ascension of DiG from non-Nationals afterthoughts to contenders, the bid-sapping implosions of Ozone and Condors, and the first glimpses of what high schooler Chloe Hakimi could be capable of at the highest levels. It was popcorn stuff.
The 2024 edition last weekend in Indianapolis met all of those expectations. It featured a smashing performance from Riot as they attempt to regain their former heights, which have been out of reach in recent years, and one from their men’s division counterparts Sockeye who have nearly completed a tremendous bounceback from their poor 2023 finish by drawing heavily on the region’s youth. It featured steely performances from mixed division stalwarts Drag’n Thrust (clearly aiming to get back to a championship game) and Mixtape (charging into strength bid territory after a lackluster early season like Ali surging in the late rounds of the Rumble in the Jungle). It featured a not-ready-for-the-wind Chain Lightning barely pulling out of a tailspin with a bid intact, their Saturday the sort of trainwreck performance that can light up the masses with electric schadenfreude. It featured Doublewide’s emerging hotshot Xavier Fuzat putting the Nationals field on notice, both with his perpetually open cuts and his X-arms celebrations, that he has fully arrived as a force to be reckoned with. And it featured heartbreak: Dark Sky, Vault, Rally, and Blueprint all entered the tournament with strength bids to lose – and lost them. As a result, their Nationals hopes are now in serious jeopardy.
It isn’t always the finest ultimate you’ll ever see – particularly when a crosswind whips up – but it is popcorn stuff. And it all exists because USAU made the brilliant call during the inception of the TCT era not only to require competition between Nationals-level teams and regionals-level teams, but to make that kind of cross-pollination the sole basis for a tournament. Clubs with illustrious histories like Drag’n Thrust, Riot, and Furious George have to prove they’ve still got what it takes to stay ahead of the wider swath of teams historically below them on the pyramid. It’s the ultimate put-up-or-shut-up event.
Nowhere was this demonstrated more than in mixed, chaotic even by the standards of the division. What could have been a ho-hum event until semis given the lack of (expected) top-end competition at the fields was instead a showcase for the depth of ambition in the division. In a field that featured representatives from every region in the country, only one out of 16 teams failed to earn multiple wins on the weekend1. Shocking upsets were frequent. Bidhawks were waiting with bated breath for a frisbee-rankings.com update on both Saturday and Sunday nights because even the direct effect (to say nothing of second- and third-order tomfoolery) of the day’s results on the algorithmic picture was too complicated to hazard a guess.
When a rating system has people on the edge of their seats, you know you’re doing something right. Kudos to the braintrust that came up with Elite-Select Challenge, USAU’s best idea.
Chad Larson Experience somehow emerged winless from the fray ↩
