These three defenders put forth awesome and impactful seasons.
June 16, 2025 by Alex Rubin and 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.
Our awards continue with the Defensive Player of the Year, recognizing the individual, and two runners-up, who we felt were the top defensive performers this spring. Whether through generating blocks, shutting down options, helping out teammates, or all of the above, these defenders stood out doing the tough work that too often go unrecognized.
- 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 Men’s 2025 Defensive Of The Year
Zeke Thoreson (Colorado)
Ctrl+C. Ctrl+V. For the second year in a row, Zeke Thoreson wins Defensive Player of the Year honors. His five blocks paced a Mamabird side that reached the national final — but that isn’t the reason he finds himself once again at the top of a worthy slate of contenders (and the first repeat winner in D-I since Jeff Babbitt in 2015-16). No, Thoreson’s appeal is so much more visceral than that.
Players, coaches, and people who watch ultimate have a sixth sense for when passes will be completed. You measure the speed and the relative positioning of all the bodies involved, and you think: That’s safe. When Thoreson is playing defense, though, it throws everybody’s calculations out of whack. Safe passes become, improbably, endangered. He is explosive enough, both on the ground and in the air, that his coverage radius extends to imagination’s limit. And, when tested, his signature ability to get to the disc first — coming from out of position, finding clean routes, finishing with a catch-block — flashes all the sudden dexterity of frog’s tongue. A ‘safe’ pass thrown to his matchup is about as safe as a fly hovering in the vicinity of lily pads. The skill was on display for the entire world during his heroic four-block performance in the championship game.
Is it fair that he wins the award despite having transitioned to the O-line for 2025? Even with an O-line who admitted that, as a group of risk-takers, they put a premium on post-turn defense, perhaps not. But it definitely wasn’t fair for opposing D-lines to have to find a way past such a tremendous defender.
– Edward Stephens
First Runner-Up
Ryan duSaire (Carleton)
CUT’s four-month championship run was a feat of adaptability as they tweaked and re-tooled their lines from tournament to tournament and game to game. One constant? The dependability of Ryan duSaire. The defensive hunger he demonstrated — partly a product of his innate nature, and partly due to the season of deprivation he spent on the injured reserve list as a freshman in 2024 — showed itself in his in-perfect footwork, his single-mindedness, his viper strike reaction times, his supercharged acceleration, the precision with which he brought hand to disc. And, most crucially, it showed in the way he would reset and do it all again with every ensuing CUT point. The seven blocks he registered at Nationals (a team high) only capture a part of the picture. Both terrier and titan, duSaire was the end-all, be-all of matchup defense in 2025.
– Edward Stephens
Second Runner-Up
Sam Kilgore (Colorado)
With DPOTY Zeke Thoreson moonlighting as an O-line cutter, somebody had to step up and guard opponents’ top matchup. Enter Sam Kilgore. Kilgore and his trademark bandana took on the Ben Damerons and the Mica Glasses of the division and slowed them better than anyone else. His performance limiting his All-American matchups with matchup defense enabled Colorado to focus their defensive scheme elsewhere and really diminish the effectiveness of opponents’ offensive schemes. With unwavering effort and instincts to match the micro-movements of his mark, Kilgore always felt a step ahead. Just a second-year player, Kilgore’s defensive impact helped propel Colorado to the national final this year, and will benefit ‘Bird for the foreseeable future.
– Alex Rubin
