Celebrating the best off-field leaders of the season.
June 23, 2025 by Calvin Ciorba and Josh Katz 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-III 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.”
- Player of the Year
- All-American First Team
- 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-III Men’s 2025 Coaches Of The Year
Sam Franer, Benjamin Whitenack, and Jack Hochberg (Lewis & Clark)
I like to break down coaching into three general categories: player usage and deployment, team strategy, and emotional leadership. If your coaching staff is excelling in two of these categories, you’re going to have a good season. But when you completely nail all three? That’s how special seasons are built, and that’s exactly what Lewis & Clark’s trio did on the way to a title and a COTY award.
After watching their offense struggle with consistency during pool play, Bacchus pulled ROTY co-runner up Sam London from the D-line to get another confident handler on the O-line. London’s steadiness freed up Orlando Impas to operate a bit more down field and better connect the backfield with the team’s array of deep cutters, and London’s defense helped the offense get the disc back more often after a turn. That’s good player deployment.
On defense, Bacchus had one main identity, all season long: force middle, force middle, force middle. They drilled the system repeatedly, occasionally adding in additional wrinkles as the team got more and more comfortable with the force middle identity. By Nationals, Lewis & Clark had a devastating D-line that could force turns almost at will, and one that had just enough offensive muscle to convert those turns into breaks consistently. That’s good team strategy and execution.
Emotional leadership is much harder to quantify or even see, but Lewis & Clark’s coaches were spot on in that regard as well. After pool play, the team did a grounding exercise to get back in the right mental state ahead of bracket play that is always emotionally taxing. The focus of the exercise was simple: ignore the pageantry that Nationals brings, and remember they’re still a group of 22 players throwing a disc around on a field in the Pacific Northwest. It’s impossible to say for certain what impact that had on the team, but Bacchus certainly looked the part of a passionate, joyous team, all the way to the pure elation of a national championship.
– Josh Katz
First Runner-Up
Matt Forster, Michael Massad, and Russ Smith (Carleton)
Carleton CHOP is one of only three programs in D-III Men’s division history to win multiple national titles. But since their dominant run in the 2010s, CHOP have struggled to recapture that success. Between 2020 and 2023, they missed Nationals twice and exited in prequarters the other two years, well below the program’s high standards. This year, however, marked a return to form. CHOP won their pool and advanced to the semifinal, signaling a true resurgence. While they may have lacked the star power of other top teams, CHOP’s coaching staff expertly leveraged their depth and cohesion to elevate the squad throughout the season. The team steadily improved, using early-season setbacks as learning opportunities that helped them reach their full potential when it mattered most.
– Calvin Ciorba
Second Runner-Up
Bryan Jones (Wesleyan)
Sure, Bryan Jones has coached Team USA teams, led PoNY to a club championship, earned Coach of the Year honors with the UFA’s New York Empire, and helmed a D-I college program. But the heralded coach found it in his heart to return to the People’s Division™, and, unsurprisingly, brought success with him. Though Nietzsch Factor bowed out in prequarters, Jones helped guide a Metro East squad of over 35 players to a bracket appearance and a second-place finish at the season’s best regular-season tournament, D-III Easterns. His unmatched ability to manage matchups, adapt to opposing schemes, and build effective offensive systems was on full display. Of all the accolades he’s earned, the D-III Coach of the Year second runner-up might just be his most important yet.
– Calvin Ciorba
