Celebrating the best off-field leaders of the season.
June 23, 2025 by Edward Stephens and Alex Rubin 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 final D-I award podium is for the Coaches of the Year. As so many teams have added more and more sideline-savvy consultants to their roster with less asked of a single head coach, this has essentially morphed into “Coaching Staff of the Year.” Coaches can impact the game in so many ways — tactics, motivation, communication, personnel management, program development, skill-building, etc. — and it can be hard to divine what exactly each has contributed to their team. But good coaching is something we feel “we know it when we see it.”
- 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 Coaches Of The Year
Dillon Lanier, Timothy Schoch, Noah Hanson, Joe White, Sol Yanuck (Carleton)
Carleton CUT went from going winless in pool play to winning the national championship in a single year. Yes, the influx of first-year talent certainly accounts for part of their change in fortune. But talent without direction only gets a team so far.
Enter the fearsome fivesome of CUT alumni — including four members of their 2017 title team — to take the reins from longtime program leader Phil Bowen. The personnel management, attitude, and team buy-in were standout features of the 2025 iteration from the start. Let’s begin with the rookies. They wasted no time getting Ellis Newhouse reps as the team’s first-look isolation cutter; they trusted Axel Olson to optimize his throws and reset cut timing over the course of the season; they gave Charlie Bitler the green light to work through away shots; they chose not to try to normalize Nate De Morgan’s unconventional and aggressive game. The guiding principle implicit in their decision making was trust — and a wise principle it proved to be.
They had every player, at every point in the season, ready to feature or play a supporting role. The upperclassmen who found themselves sharing playing time with the newcomers were dialed in every time they took the field. And when they weren’t? Lusty full-team celebrations from the entire roster punctuated every score: no half-measures from the sideline matched no half-measures on the field. The total team performance on every level throughout the bracket at Nationals only underlined the clear force of leadership that made this CUT unit a special one.
– Edward Stephens
First Runner-Up
Luke Smith, Ben Wiggins (Penn State)
Since Luke Smith took over the Penn State program, Spank have improved each year, and finally reached the bracket at Nationals this season for the first time in program history. His impact off the field helping to build a culture of hard work, maturity, and dedication allowed Spank to improve their on-field play. While other teams have large coaching staffs, Smith is a staff of one1 in the outpost of State College, PA – hardly an ultimate hotbed and just far enough from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh not to attract quality assistant coaches. With the odds stacked against the team, Smith helped Penn State win the region for the first time this season and brought Spank to a quarterfinal appearance at Nationals – the best finish in team history. “He does the work of five coaches basically,” Penn State captain Doug Hoyer said. “We would have never made Nationals, even if we had the same exact roster, if coach Luke was not a part of this program.”
– Alex Rubin
Second Runner-Up
Tim Gilligan, Caleb Merriam, Cody Mills (Cal Poly SLO)
Operating with what many observers of the men’s division would diagnose as a lack of top-end depth compared to other recent editions of SLOCORE, the 2025 unit showed off just as much pop. Their success — giving eventual champions Carleton a real scare in quarters — was largely thanks to the management, schemes, and emphasis on depth development. In many ways, Cal Poly operated similarly to Brown teams: carefully concentrated touches among four or five players on offensive possessions combined with a dozen or more role players whose athleticism became more pronounced as the year wore on and whose fundamentals were always high floor. The fact that Gilligan, Mills, and Merriam were able to pivot to this approach on the fly is more than enough reason for them to deserve a place on the 2025 coaching podium.
– Edward Stephens
Smith did enlist longtime coaching guru Ben Wiggins to help support Penn State at Nationals, but the rest of the time he piloted the team solo ↩
