These women's division players are at the top of their game this season

October 10, 2024 by Ultiworld in Opinion

There’s no shortage of talent in the USA Ultimate Club women’s 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 women’s division roster of a team that reached regionals are eligible to be drafted. With regards to injuries an 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. We used a weighted scoring system for votes, with Participants’ Ballots counting as 60% of the value of Staff Ballots.¹

We’ll start with our top 10, and discussion about that group. Then we’ll reveal the entire top 25, followed by the complete ballots, and additional conversations about the rankings.

Staff Voters

Anna Browne (Club Reporter)
Graham Gerhart (Senior Staff Writer)
Edward Stephens (Club Editor)
Jenna Weiner (Club Editor)
Keith Raynor (Senior Editor)

The Top 10

Overall Rank	Player Name	Ranking Pts.	Edward Stephens	Anna Browne	Keith Raynor	Graham Gerhart	Jenna Weiner	Participant (1) Rankings	Subscriber (1) Rankings
1	Valeria Cardenas	2019	2	2	1	2	2	2	1
2	Manuela Cardenas	2010	1	1	3	1	3	3	2
3	Claire Trop	1947	4	5	2	3	1	1	7
4	Levke Walczak	1830	3	4	5	5	4	8	12
5	Kami Groom	1737	7	3	4	10	6	9	11
6	Anna Thompson	1657	5	13	7	4	9	5	19
7	Yina Cartagena	1651	9	6	9	7	7	14	3
8	Britt Dos Santos	1562	8	8	6	8	10	16	22
9	Kaela Helton	1560	11	9	8	6	8	6	UR
10	Dena Elimelech	1438	12	10	11	12	5	13	UR

[Editor: There may be some sorting issues with the table that cannot be altered at the time. Our apologies for the inconvenience.]

Three different players earned #1 status on our staff ballots: Manuela Cárdenas, Valeria Cárdenas, and Claire Trop. Considering that none of them finished lower on any of our ballots than fifth, it couldn’t have been an easy call. How did you wade through your thoughts and actually land on one of them?

Anna Browne: For me, I looked at a player’s whole body of work when I was going through these rankings. For these top three, we have exposure to them at the club, semi-pro, and international level. Valeria and Manu were very close going into WUC, but Manu really added that extra bit that made her the clear #1 for me. That being said, all it takes is a standout tournament, or even a single game, from one of these three and the order changes again.

Graham Gerhart: With how close it was between those three, I thought back to the games I had watched them in this season/year and it was Manu who made the largest impression. There wasn’t a game where her two-way ability didn’t leave me flabbergasted.

Edward Stephens: I hate agreeing with everyone, but that’s where I am with Manu’s total game right now. She just gets the nod over her sister this time around for me. I struggled a little with how to rank those two, but not at all with where Claire Trop fell in relation to them. As good as she is, she’s part of the second tier in my mind. That’s where it got tricky for me: Claire Trop, Levke Walczak, Anna Thompson, Floor Keulartz, and Kami Groom are all but interchangeable in my opinion.

Gerhart: Woah woah woah. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Trop is in the second tier. That’s a controversial thing to say considering the success she’s facilitated for her teams. Lest we forget, Trop led team USA over the Cárdenas sisters and Colombia.

Browne: To me, a Trop-less Team USA would still win WUC, but a Manu or Valeria-less Colombia might struggle to make the final. The Cárdenas sisters just contribute at such a high level that is hard for any other single player to replicate.

Trop is incredible at what she does, the best in the world at it without question. But there are dozens of players who also excel at Trop’s style of play. I really only see maybe five players who play the Cárdenas’ way at a truly elite level: the twins, Levke Walczak, Claire Chastain, and maybe Anna Thompson.

Because of this, Valeria and Manuela differentiate themselves from the top 25, and even from the top five, through their impeccable execution of their unique style of play.

Jenna Weiner (Club Editor): Looks like I’m the black sheep of this group having Trop at the top (though it really was close). As has been said and written many a time before, Trop at her best is an entirely centralizing force, including even among the best in the world like at WUC. The Cárdenas’, then, were pulled just a hair back because there are two of them, and they ended up effectively splitting the vote in my mind. While both have proven plenty capable of being The Star on the field at any given time, Trop took top spot because when she is on there’s no one better in every facet of the game, and that took her to the top of my list.

Keith Raynor (Senior Editor): I don’t fault anyone for any order of the three, but they should be the clear tier one. Valeria is the world’s best thrower — is it time to start thinking about if she is approaching GOAT status in that regard? — and still somehow becomes a better defender every time out. The skillset is simply too high a value, even against two more explosive downfield players like Manu and Trop. The margins are still thin, but that was decisive for me.

Most of the athletes selected were competing at this past World Ultimate Championships. How big of a factor was performance at WUC (and its leadup events) in how you ranked in an unusual year?

Stephens: Caroline Tornquist absolutely cracked my top-10 because of her defense against Colombia at Worlds. It’s amazing how she keeps getting better.

Raynor: If any player made a big move from Worlds, it was Yina Cartagena. She played well during last club season, very well during the Gridlock’s title run, and exceptionally at WUC. It was a turn back the clock performance. I thought her time at the tippy-top of the game was kind of gone, but she looked way closer to the top three of this list than outside of the top 15 or something.

I tried not to let one very high level tournament be super determinative, but it is some juicy data to include and ignoring it would have been silly.

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1. 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. ↩