A near-brawl at Southeast Men's Regionals highlights the need for more of our sport's greatest tenet - spirit
September 30, 2024 by Guest Author in Opinion with 0 comments
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This post was submitted by Mitch Dengler. All opinions are those of the author.
I stood atop a small hill after finishing my lunch during my bye round at Southeastern Regionals. The game in front of me was a prequarter between Atlanta Hooch and Alabama Alliance. Perhaps you have heard or read something about what happened next. In my opinion, the specific facts of the people involved are not as important as the lessons we can draw from it in general, so I will not identify them here.1 A throw went up. It floated along the sideline toward the front cone, and the receiver milked it to the goal line. The trailing defender jumped, reached around his shoulder and hit the disc, but also came crashing down on the receiver. A textbook backpack. I would expect even the greenest of observers to pull a card out of their pocket, but none were working this game.
The receiver called foul. The defender adamantly contested. A long, heated argument followed and the disc was sent back to the thrower. When you have observed as many games as I have, you develop a sense of when to keep an eye out for trouble. On the restart, my eyes were glued to this matchup. There’s a lot of contact between the two as the cutter reset back to the stack. I thought to myself, “Here we go, this isn’t going to end well.” Sure enough, a few seconds later the defender wrapped up the cutter in a bear hug, picked him up, and threw him to the ground.
It goes without saying that plays like that have no place on an ultimate field. Somehow, though, everything that happened afterward was near perfect.
The sidelines emptied as I ditched my backpack and ran down the hill to the field. I expected craziness, but by the time my old, tired legs got me to the crowd, I was greeted by a lot of calmness. Everyone from the teams had separated the two players and were focused on calming each other down. And that happened very quickly.
Two players on the defender’s team escorted the guilty party off the field. He was already saying to his teammate something like, “I can’t believe I did that. I can’t do that. I felt like he elbowed me, but I can’t do that. That was just so wrong. Can I apologize to him?” I facilitated a face-to-face apology, and the defender removed himself from the rest of the game (one whole point). The team captain (and, separately, the coach of the other team) asked me what should happen and I told them what would happen in an observed game: an ejection and removal from the first half of the next game, plus any additional sanctions from the Tournament Director and USA Ultimate. They agreed more should happen, but wanted to make sure any team punishment didn’t fall short of any expectation. The TD and USAU did in fact decide to remove the player from the remainder of the tournament. The team had already independently decided to do the same. Everyone was on the same page.
I commend everyone involved for how they handled the altercation. But there was something missing before the incident that almost certainly would have prevented it. It’s something I see every so often in ultimate but would like to see a lot more often.
Rewind to last year’s men’s division final at Nationals between Chicago Machine and Washington DC Truck Stop. I watched Walden Nelson tell his teammate he made an inaccurate call. The stage couldn’t get any bigger and the stakes couldn’t get much higher, but he calmly told him what he saw and how it jived with what the defender was claiming when contesting the foul. The call was retracted. I’ve known Walden for a long time and would never expect anything other than the highest level of spirit from him. He showed in that moment how teams should act in games, and how we should all act in life.
Now back to the much more recent past of 2024 Southeast Regionals. The throw was floating. It was going for a score, everyone was watching. When the defender contested the foul that put the fateful chain of events in motion, his teammates should have told him it was a foul. They should have told him it was a dangerous play. I guarantee that if they did, the much worse action that happened after that wouldn’t have occurred. No one would have had to break up a fight or broker an apology or bench a teammate or administer a sanction. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. I get that we need to be good teammates. I get that we need to be supportive. But there comes a time when we need to step up to the plate and say what’s true, not just what we want to hear or what helps our cause. If Walden can tell his teammate he’s wrong on a close contact foul during a national championship game, there isn’t a situation out there where we can’t tell our teammates when they are clearly wrong and clearly dangerous. We need more Walden Nelsons.
I want to be clear that this is not a shortcoming of a specific team, it just happens to be a recent event that illustrates something that could and should be much better across the board. It’s not even a problem specific to ultimate. I think it reflects an endemic problem of society. We are often too quick to pick our side automatically and slow to defend our opponents when they are right. Corporate scandals happen because people want to win more than be on a team that plays fair. We’ve gotten some of the worst political candidates imaginable because we care more about defeating our opponents rather than standing for something good (don’t get me started). I’m sure you can think of numerous examples you have seen both within the world of ultimate and within the world at large.
The world at large is, granted, a pretty big responsibility to take on. But our little self-officiated corner of it isn’t. Let’s start with the game of ultimate. Let’s start by exhibiting the honesty and fair-mindedness to say to a teammate, “Actually, I do think that was a foul.”
Ultiworld’s Edward Stephens, who plays for Hooch and was also on hand, gave an account of the incident near the end of the Super Sunday Regionals Reactions Deep Look episode. It is available for subscribers. ↩
