Queen City Tune Up 2025: Tournament Recap (Women’s Div.)

Tufts EWO launch themselves into the title picture with an emphatic undefeated weekend.

February 18, 2025 by Bridget Mizener in Recap

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Rock Hill, SC — As an event that attracts some of the country’s top programs, Queen City is always billed as a clash of Nationals heavyweights. After two years of relatively ho-hum, chalky results, QCTU finally delivered the drama fans craved: haymakers and upsets. #8 Tufts EWO outmaneuvered #6 Carleton Syzygy 9-7 in the final, announcing themselves as bona fide title contenders. Meanwhile, #3 UNC Pleiades and #1 Vermont Ruckus, the tournament’s top seeds, looked strong but fell in the semifinals, proving that this year’s championship picture is as wide open as any since before the pandemic.

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E-Whoa: Experienced Tufts Edge Out Young Syz

With their victory over a red-hot Syzygy side, Tufts claimed the Queen City crown for the first time since 2017. Their resume this weekend — a +33 point differential across three games in pool play, a resounding defeat of North Carolina in the semifinal, and an impressive performance in the title game — makes a compelling case for EWO being not only today’s top dog of the East Coast, but a legitimate contender come May.

Carleton and Tufts entered the final riding high after dispatching top-seeded UNC and Vermont by identical 11-6 margins in the semis. For EWO, it was an especially cathartic victory — since the pandemic, they’d posted a 0-6 record against North Carolina, including three straight QCTU semifinal losses, a fact not lost on this year’s team.

It was Syzygy, though, who got the first upwind break of the gusty afternoon, moving the disc into the second level of the Tufts zone with ease before Mia Beeman-Weber found Audrey Parrott in acres of green grass. But Tufts responded — they were able to convert a gritty upwind hold as Lia Schwartz found power position and hit Annabel White. It was White who also scored the subsequent goal for a downwind break, corralling a fluttering disc after another Schwartz huck got pushed around in the wind and getting back on serve at 2-2.

The EWO cutting corps in general were strong all weekend, but White’s performance on Sunday jumped off the screen. She’s poised to get plenty of recognition this season — her jaw-dropping sky in the semifinal was just one highlight in a standout weekend. Her counterpart and PotY candidate Emily Kemp, deservedly, drew a lot of defensive attention, which left White relatively free to work. Again and again, White ended up in advantageous matchups, at times drawing Carleton rookies without help over the top. Carleton simply didn’t dedicate enough defensive resources to slowing her down. While Syzygy’s freshman class had a solid showing overall, White and her throwers made sure to exploit those single-coverage matchups relentlessly.

“The coaches wanted to nickname her AI because you could just tell her something one time and she’d just do it,” said Schwartz.

That quick pace of learning was lacking in another aspect of the game — the wind. Carleton just never quite calibrated. Syzygy struggled at times to move the disc laterally against the breeze; careless edges got caught by the gusts or pushed down into the turf. More than one throw was swept sideways, traveling farther horizontally than vertically, and upwind throws continued to pop up.

Tufts, on the other hand, were self-assured with the disc up and down the roster. Ryanne Barrett provided a very capable backfield presence, and look no further than Mina Brown throwing a hammer for a goal to see exactly how confident EWO were with the ball in their hands.

After all, this is a Tufts roster that graduated just two players from their 2024 UBC-beating, near-semis-miss season. Every single new EWO rookie has previous ultimate experience. The skill floor for this team is very high and it showed, allowing them to convert upwind goals.

As the Syz swings and hucks continued to sail to the turf, providing plenty of chances, EWO notched the final upwind break of the game and the corresponding downwinder to go into halftime up 6-4. That gap would be big enough to stifle any hopes of a Carleton comeback within the 75-minute round time.

For Carleton, this was still an encouraging performance, especially coming off their loss to Oregon at SBI just a few weeks prior. Audrey Parrott was extremely effective in the downfield space, and the backfield duo of Shanti Chier and Chagall Gelfand picked up where they left off last season. Their rookies are making strides as well: Eliza Barton, a Seattle product and varsity soccer player, is getting significant run on the O-line, while Madeline Kallin and Melba Henley contributed solid minutes on defense.

The win is an impressive statement from an EWO team looking to break through to the very highest ranks of the game. For much of the 2010s, Dartmouth dominated the East Coast. It looked like Margo Urheim-era Tufts might step into that void, but the pandemic disrupted that progression. Vermont then surged onto the scene with its pipeline of high school talent, while West Coast teams — fed by deep Seattle and California youth programs — only grew stronger. Tufts have been nationally relevant for most of the decade, but this iteration might be the best EWO squad since their semifinal run in the early 2010s, and they’re hungry to prove that.

“I’ve been on the team four years, been to three Nationals, lost in quarters every Nationals,” explained Tufts’s Lia Schwartz. “Every year, the chip on my shoulder gets a little bigger. It’s the same story for a lot of this team.”

The story of EWO’s 2025 season still has a lot of chapters to write, but boy do the first few pages look good.

UNC: The Stars Return to Earth

UNC are still the disciplined and intelligent team they have always been, but it’s clear this year their margins are thinner than ever.

Without an injured Erica Birdsong exerting her gravitational force in the downfield space, EWO were able to focus the bulk of their defensive energy on the backfield. Tufts’s huge pulls pinned UNC deep in their own end zone, forcing Emily Przykucki and Allison Reilly to work upwind through gusts of 50+ mph. With no downfield release valve, they were forced to over-rely through high-difficulty swings and unders that Tufts keyed in on. Still, their 8-3 win over Vermont in the third-place game — while just a placement result — demonstrated they can still beat anyone, even without their best player on the field.

Pleiades’s top-end talent is still elite and they’ll always be exceedingly well-prepared, so discount them at your peril. But this Queen City confirms what many around the division suspected (or rather, hoped for): for the first time in years, they are not title favorites — or potentially even semis favorites.

Vermont: A Work in Progress