The best players in the mixed division right now
October 10, 2024 by Ultiworld in Opinion with 0 comments
There’s no shortage of talent in the USA Ultimate Club mixed division. We look a lot at team success, and often see familiar names and faces in those discussions. But who are the best individual players? Who brings the most value to winning a championship? Figuring out which stars shine the brightest is more art than science, but perhaps there’s democratic power in numbers.
So who are the best players in the division right now? To try to clear away as much of the white noise created by circumstance as possible and get to the heart of each individual’s value and contribution, we asked members of our coverage team, as well as an anonymous group of elite players, to weigh in on the following prompt:
If you were starting a club team today with the singular goal of winning a theoretical Club Championship this October, how would you rank the players within the division? You aren’t building a team of all of your selections, so don’t worry about how the players complement each other. Consider each pick the first pick of a team, drafting in order, only you can’t pick the players you’ve already ranked above. All players who were on a 2024 USA Ultimate Club mixed division roster of a team that reached regionals are eligible to be drafted. With regards to injuries and absences, we will include all rostered players unless there is confirmation a player will not be competing, or would not be able to compete, at Nationals.
In order to improve how representative our rankings are of the opinions of our voters, we have iterated until arriving at this process. We each listed out our top 35 players to iron out some of the gradations on the fringes and then combined our lists to create a composite ranking. In addition, we included the ballots of a few anonymous elite players and coaches from different teams and regions, and for the first time, our subscribers have also contributed their thoughts. We used a weighted scoring system for votes, with Participants’ Ballots counting as 60% of the value of Staff Ballots and Subscriber Ballots counting as 30%.1
We’ll start with our top 10, and discussion about that group. Then we’ll reveal the entire top 25 for our subscribers, followed by the complete ballots, and additional conversations about the rankings.
Staff Voters
Alex Rubin (Senior Staff Writer)
Anna Browne (Club Reporter)
Graham Gordon (Club Reporter)
Josh Katz (Club Reporter)
Keith Raynor (Senior Editor)
The Top 10
Overall Ranking | Player Name | Ranking Pts. | Graham Gordon | Josh Katz | Alex Rubin | Anna Browne | Keith Raynor | Participant (3) Rankings | Subscriber (2) Rankings |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Sarah Meckstroth | 2309 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 15 |
2 | Khalif El-Salaam | 2229 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 22 |
3 | Conor Belfield | 2076 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 5 | UR |
4 | Jade McLaughlin | 1938 | 3 | 3 | 6 | 6 | 3 | 8 | UR |
5 | Robyn Fennig | 1913 | 5 | 10 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 16 | 8 |
6 | Nathan Champoux | 1865 | 10 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 9 | 10 | 20 |
7 | Caleb Denecour | 1802 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 10 | 6 | 9 | UR |
8 | Sadie Jezierski | 1592 | 9 | 5 | 26 | 11 | 13 | 12 | 9 |
9 | Lindsay McKenna | 1506 | 11 | 11 | 10 | 12 | 10 | 17 | UR |
10 | Travis Dunn | 1484 | 12 | 21 | 9 | 13 | 12 | 7 | UR |
[Editor: There may be some sorting issues with the table that cannot be altered at the time. Our apologies for the inconvenience.]
Three players earned top honors with our voting committee: Sarah Meckstroth, Conor Belfield, and Khalif El-Salaam — all of them decorated stars of the division. Take me through your thought process when you decided which of them should get the nod?
Josh Katz (Club Reporter): It truly felt like splitting hairs among the top four for me (the three named and Jade McLaughlin) and if you asked me to do this again in a week, I’d probably have a different order for them. Something about Belfield just makes him pop more when I watch him play, and that was enough to get him to number one for me. It might be his defensive prowess. It might be that BFG are probably the best team in the country. It might be something else entirely. Like I said, you could put those four in any order and I’d probably agree with you.
Keith Raynor (Senior Editor): Khalif and Mecks are the two most proven entities in a division that always feels rife with change. Heavily fortified, luxurious ports with pristine conditions just outside of the storm, I guess. With WUC out of the way, I’m curious how they will both fare (as well as my #3, Jade McLaughlin) with the focus squarely on a national championship. Maybe we will discover they’ve been supplanted, but I need somebody to prove it.
Alex Rubin (Senior Staff Writer): I’m with Keith. I love that Khalif and Mecks are proven stars at the club, WUC, and World Games levels. They’re able to play multiple positions and could lead their teams to championships. I have Belfield right behind them. He is a budding star but we haven’t seen him lead a team to a title—he’s been the best player on teams that fell just short. I have no problem making him my centerpiece, but I’d choose the other two over him.
How far down does your list go before you stopped considering players for your top 10? And what was the hardest top 10 decision, either from an ordering or inclusion perspective?
Raynor: Dang it, this cutoff is perfectly placed to give me trouble. I felt good about my top nine, but that 10th spot…there’s 6-8 players I could reasonably put there and feel good about it.
Sub-segmenting that group, it came down to Lindsay McKenna, Lukas Ambrose, Travis Dunn, and Sadie Jezierski for me. What’s fun about this group is they all have the same takeover capability, where they can completely dominate and lift up their team. I chose McKenna, who has the most well-rounded skillset and track record, but it was a really tough call.
Rubin: I felt secure in my top five (Khalif, Belfield, Mecks, Nathan “Skunk” Champoux, and Robyn Fennig) and then had some tough decisions from there. At the end of the day my top seven all made the final list, so maybe that’s a more accurate cut off.
Katz: Leaving Lindsay McKenna out of the top 10 was tough, but I was very secure in my top four being the top four, and then there was a group of seven for six spots. She was the odd one out among that crew in the end.
Graham Gordon (Club Reporter): Similarly to Alex, I felt good about my top five, but I had McLaughlin instead of Skunk. After that, 6-12 felt good (Cheryl Hsu, Caleb Denecour, Joey Wylie, Jezierski, Skunk, McKenna, Dunn) and then there’s a bit of a dropoff from there.
Our experience has shown that participants’ ballots trend towards regional concentrations and emphasizing the strength of their teammates, as well as other quirks such as occasionally not ranking themselves, which is why their ballots are weighted in this manner. ↩
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