Recognizing the top performer of the 2025 season.
June 10, 2025 by Edward Stephens in Awards
Each year, Ultiworld presents our annual College Awards. Our staff evaluates the individual performances of players from throughout the season, talking to folks around college ultimate, watching film, and look at statistics, voting upon the awards to decide those to be honored. The regular season and the college Series are both considered, with extra emphasis for performances in the competitive and high-stakes environment at Nationals.
After announcing the finalists in our First-Team All-American, we are proud to present Player of the Year, our most prestigious award. Our Player of the Year winner is the best performer of the 2025 college season, and the highest vote-getter for All-American honors. The winner is not eligible for consideration in any of our other individual awards. The runners-up are the second- and third-most vote-getters.
- All-American First Team
- Player of the Year
- All-American Second Team
- Defensive Player of the Year Award
- Offensive Player of the Year Award
- Rookie of the Year Award
- Breakout Player of the Year Award
- Coaches of the Year Award
- Full Awards Voting Breakdown
D-I Women’s 2025 Player Of The Year
Mika Kurahashi (British Columbia)
Years from now, when Mika Kurahashi finally settles into retirement and publishes her treatise The Art of Cutting, I will be the first in line to read it. It’s because, like anyone else who has watched her play so much as a single offensive point, I want to learn her secret knowledge. How does she find herself open, and open, and open again? The regularity of it all can be mind-numbing. Kurahashi is nothing less than factory, and what she manufactures – with monotonous uniformity – is an endless supply of completions for her throwers.
Some of it is apparent to the naked eye. One cannot fail to appreciate her raw speed. (She eats 20-yard dashes the way a dragster eats a quarter-mile.) And then there is the everyday miracle of her earliest-possible-moment attacks, when her arms become cobras striking with such natural, flashbulb-quick dexterity that the disc appears stunned to find a premature end to its flight. Nor has there been a college cutter in memory with a more encyclopedic collection of bobs, feints, and draws to turn her defenders’ brains into mush. We may never understand exactly she came to be so powerful, skillful, and dogged, but we can see it.
Some of Kurahashi’s brilliance this season, though, defied even slack-jawed perception. When the defense knew exactly what was coming – which, in 2025, was quite often given how early it became clear that the UBC Thunderbirds coaching staff had built an entire offensive system around the idea that their star cutter would essentially always be available – and took insurmountable positions to stop it, she regularly defied logic to appear moments later with the disc securely in hand.
But how? It’s a jump cut. Not a “jump cut” in the John Randolph sense of the phrase, but as in the technique of film editing in which a portion of a scene has been removed, creating the illusion of a sudden leap in time. One moment, Kurahashi is on the wrong side of the defender, and then suddenly she is in the middle of lancing a flick to the end zone. One moment, she has no viable path to the nearside cone, and then suddenly her arms are raised in an all-too familiar goal celebration. The intervening moments connecting the setup to the payoff are unknowable.
The truth is that Kurahashi made a strong case for this award even without our taking into account the dark magic of her cutting. You would be hard-pressed to find another player with as much understanding of how to weigh a forehand to take advantage of a tiny window behind a poach or lead a teammate beyond the reach of the deep help and has the capacity to get blocks on the opposition’s most potent offensive player and lifts her entire team with infectious belief and is capable, demonstrating a rare combination of fury and poise with a championship on the line, of making the season’s most improbable and breathtaking clutch play.
In the end it was an undeniable imperative to select an undeniable athlete for the highest honor we can give.
And Mika, if you’re reading this, put me on the preorder list for The Art of Cutting.
First Runner-Up:
Chagall Gelfand (Carleton)
Second Runner-Up:
Clil Phillips (Colorado)
