It’s great that the Union are building a competitive team, and it’s a great sign for the league that they care so much about winning.
January 30, 2025 by Alex Rubin in Opinion
It’s official; the Chicago Union are back in contention for a UFA title. Over the last few weeks, Chicago announced the signing of several star players who should enhance the team’s competitive abilities. I’m happy that my hometown team is set to field its most competitive roster in years, and I also think it is a genuinely good sign for the league that the team is coming together in the way that it is. The players Chicago is bringing back into the fold care specifically about winning in the UFA–a rarity in the league.
A recent history of the Chicago Union
Since his move to Chicago in 2017, Pawel Janas operated as the engine of Chicago’s UFA team. He became a league star as the focal point of the offense, setting league records in assists and completions both per season and over a full career. He also operated as a key recruiter, helping to convince other stars like Matt Rehder, Nate Goff, and Kurt Gibson to join the team. Coming out of the 2021 COVID hiatus, Chicago brought together most of the best men’s division players in the Chicago area. While many had previously shown an aversion to playing professionally, once on the team, the Union made two consecutive Championship Weekend appearances in 2021 and 2022–beating the Minnesota Wind Chill in the division final both years. Stars like Gibson, Goff, Joe White, and Paul Arters dotted the roster. Chicago lost both years to the eventual champion and, in 2023, Janas decamped for the west coast and signed a six-year contract with the Los Angeles Aviators.
In LA, Janas was again the primary thrower on the offense and a key off-field leader. He didn’t need to wait as long as he did in Chicago to find success; the Aviators blew past perceived expectations to advance to the west division championship game. By 2024, however, Lukas Ambrose and Calvin Brown had left and the Aviators stumbled to a 3-9 season. “It was a shit show,” Janas said in a ‘Live with Lep’ episode looking back on the 2024 season. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the Union also saw an exodus of talent as Goff, White, Ross Barker, Jeff Weis, Jason Vallee, and Kyle Rutledge, among others, departed.
While things looked bleaker for Chicago, they still made the playoffs in 2023 and 2024. However, Minnesota advanced both years to Championship Weekends, winning the UFA title last season. Nothing riled up the elite players in Chicago more than seeing their rivals do the one thing they couldn’t: lift the league trophy. After seeing a Minnesota team that many thought was good but not great play better than everyone else for one weekend, Chicago assembled a team they think can take down the champs.
“We can’t let Minnesota win again,” Goff said in the January 7 edition of Inside the UFA.
Revenge Tour
One of my favorite movie tropes is a good “gather the team” montage. While it didn’t have the cinematic mastery of Mighty Ducks 2 or MacGruber, watching the Union Instagram account announce signing after signing this offseason reminded me of reading news articles in my childhood of the 2008 USA Men’s Basketball Redeem Team. Every time they landed a star player, the reality of the team as a competitive force became more clear.
The Union are loading up with another Championship Weekend appearance in their sights. The team is bringing back stars of rosters past like Goff, Arters, and Jace Bruner alongside former division rivals like Xavier Payne (formerly of Indianapolis) and Victor Luo (Madison). All of those players play together for Chicago Machine in the USA Ultimate club division. Another Machine teammate, Daan DeMarree, the first-ever back-to-back Ultiworld European Men’s Player of the Year selection, is joining for his first pro season, and he is bringing another ringer from Europe in Sofiene Bontemps.1 Most controversially, Chicago brought Janas back into the fold, despite his supposed six-year commitment to the Aviators.
Janas was blindsided by coach Jeff Landesman’s firing in September 2024. In an Inside the UFA article posted on the league’s website back in November, Janas shared some insight into the team’s decision making–including that he was left out of a key decision. But there he still refers to the Aviators as “we,” suggesting he might play for the team this season. Then, he and the team amicably parted ways and allowed his return to the Union.
Wanting to Win
This article isn’t a tell-all about Janas’s move, despite his large personality and the eye-catching nature of reneging on a six-year contract after just two seasons. That kind of nonsense happens in professional sports all the time–ultimate players just aren’t used to it.
My point is that it’s awesome that Chicago is bringing together enough talent to be competitive again, and it’s even better that a cohort of top players are chasing success in the UFA. I love that a bunch of former Union players felt so personally affronted that Minnesota would deign to win a title that they decided to invest in their own team specifically to take them down.
For years as the AUDL and now as the UFA, the professional league felt like a relative afterthought. Many top players played in the league, but nearly all of them valued their time in the club division more than the UFA. Players would regularly miss UFA games for club tournaments.2 The New York Empire lost many key contributors between 2019 and 2021 when their local club team New York PoNY asked their players to demonstrate a stronger commitment to the club division–and it might have cost them the 2021 championship.3
There are still some communities where the sense that the UFA is lesser than the club division feels palpable. Plenty of talented players live in Michigan but will not play for the Mechanix, for example. But year after year, the UFA puts together a great experience for fans and players alike, and it’s good for the sport that more and more top players are investing the time and energy in playing in the UFA alongside their club careers.
For a while, the UFA provided another competitive outlet, a way to travel and play expense-free, and a sense of professionalism to a hobby that we take really seriously. Some UFA lifers cared about the league–especially in cities like Indianapolis and Madison that do not have a strong club presence in the men’s division–but many saw it as a fun thing to do and a great way to prep for the real season in the club series. Now it feels like more players care about finding success in the UFA. This influx of talent back to Chicago does not come across as a group of club players looking to stretch their legs before the season or get some extra reps in ahead of another deep run at the National Championships.4 Instead, it comes off as a group of players dedicated to building a successful team in the UFA, and that motivation is a step few teams have seen in recent years.
Eyes on the Prize
It is not just good for the UFA that players are taking the league more seriously and playing with more purpose–it’s also good for the sport of ultimate. While UFA naysayers fixate on the wider field, timed quarters, and referees as negative developments in the sport, the fact is that the UFA is doing more to grow the game at the youth level than any other entity in the country. Last summer, I went to explain to a group of 10 year olds how to play ultimate. None of them said they played before, so I went over the basic rules. I was floored when one of the kids asked why we couldn’t double team because they saw frisbee players do it on Instagram. The UFA left its mark!
At this point, the UFA is the most visible ultimate frisbee a kid can find. See the chart below:
| UFA | Ultiworld | USA Ultimate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 318,000 | 117,000 | 51,300 | |
| X/Twitter | 29,600 | 32,200 | 33,400 |
| YouTube | 191,000 | 174,000 | 35,300 |
Note: the PUL and WUL each have under 10,000 followers on each platform.
The UFA dwarfs USA Ultimate and the other semi-pro ultimate leagues in follower count. It’s not even close. The UFA is getting more eyeballs than anyone.
For the best players in the world to want to be part of the UFA, then, is a good thing. We want to showcase the best of the best, and for better or worse, the UFA is the best showcase of ultimate that exists to the outside world right now. The league deserves credit for putting together a media infrastructure that develops fans beyond existing ultimate players and stays relevant in a busy sports media landscape, but the players are the product. Yes, people who don’t know any better might not realize that there are ultimate stars who do not play in the UFA, but it also feels right that at least a sizable chunk of the league’s player base is starting to care about the league not just as a sideshow but as a legitimate manifestation of the sport.
We’ll find out in a few months if Chicago’s additions are enough to bring the city its first pro ultimate championship. No matter who lifts the trophy, I’m excited to watch a talented, motivated team do everything it can to match its biggest rival, and I’m excited that fans get more access to watch more talented players play frisbee.
DeMarree, Bontemps, and Arters all play together on the Belgian club team Mooncatchers ↩
The league has paid more attention to aligning their schedules in recent seasons to avoid this ↩
The only title the Empire did not win during their 2019-2023 dynastic run ↩
Where Chicago Machine will be among the favorites to win ↩
