November 3, 2025 by Edward Stephens in Recap
Ultiworld’s coverage of the 2025 Club National Championships is presented by Spin Ultimate; all opinions are those of the author(s). Find out how Spin can get you, and your team, looking your best this season.
SAN DIEGO – #1 San Francisco Revolver, winners of the US Open and Pro Championships, won the 2025 National Championship with a 15-10 victory over #2 Chicago Machine to complete the Triple Crown. Center handler Mac Hecht (6A) continued his incandescent bracket run, but his overwhelming production belied a total team effort. Revolver were the better side in the final by every measure.
The difference was not so apparent in the first quarter part of the game, though, as the teams traded several holds before Machine earned the first break. The opening offensive sets emphasized each side’s greatest strengths. Revolver established Hecht’s pinpoint throwing immediately, as, unconcerned with the afternoon breeze at Canyon Crest Academy, he tossed a pair of mirror-image crossfield hammers to Simon Higgins on successive O points.
Machine answered with a fearless deep game to take advantage of Revolver’s shade-under defensive look. The first ended in almost cartoonish fashion as three Machine cutters – Sam McGuckin, Keegan North, and Rutledge Smith – simultaneously called for the huck from Daan De Marrée, simultaneously split for the endzone, and simultaneously left three Revolver defenders sucking wind in hopeless pursuit. They were all so open than any of them could have caught the goal. (It was Smith who actually got the stat.)
Revolver defended the Machine’s second air raid better, even forcing a turn, but by the time Sofiène Bontemps brought down a contested catch to even the score at 2-2, the message was clear for each of the team’s defenses: their first schemes were not going to do the trick.
“We knew they wanted to hit a soft break to open up a big field to shoot into,” said Revolver veteran Byron Liu. “They did that a couple of times early in the game, so we had a couple of schemes to make sure they couldn’t see free space and release someone into the deep space. So they had to grind through those long points.”
Machine could not afford to leave any receivers alone with Hecht throwing so well, and Revolver would have to back at least one or two downfield threats to keep Machine from piling up quick scores. The defenses switched to less prescribed modes, and the game took on its second complexion: probing and reactive offense.
It was when Revolver tried to change up the natural flow of the game that Machine struck with a break. Often in 2025 Revolver have employed a three-man weave to back defenses away from keying in on Hecht in the backfield. They’ll typically use one of their other primary handlers, Nate Prior or Walker Frankenberg, alongside Raekwon Adkins and Leo Gordon, both of whom have run plenty of dominators in college play. Adkins and Gordon are such regular threats downfield that they usually gain an advantage when defenders tasked with running step for step with them deep have to match their agility in small spaces. But Machine, likely through a combination of scouting and having encountered an almost identical set from PoNY (Kocher, Dameron, Little) in their semifinal, were prepared for the stunt. The trio of Adam Stautberg, Raymond Lu, and Jeff Gao anticipated virtually every move, and Revolver soon abandoned their attempt to plait their way into scoring position.
The first pass after the called set was to a more traditional Adam Rees under cut – and William Wettengel bit past him to get a hand to the disc. A Stautberg score in transition to convert the turn gave Machine a 4-3 lead.
“One of the things we had talked about was that we were making sure we were putting a lot of pressure underneath on guys when Mac didn’t have the disc,” said Machine coach James Highsmith. “We didn’t feel like they were going to be able to throw a ton of away shots unless it was Mac.”
Revolver were ready to roll with the punches, though.
“We set out to be the most dynamic O-line in the division and be able to attack in a multitude of different ways. And I think you saw that all year long,” said Higgins. “We can beat any team with any sort of strategy. If a team gets smart and catches on, we will change, and then they won’t be able to stop that secondary attack.”
There might have been another break in the offing on the very next point. Revolver returned to a Hecht-centered approach after their brief and unsuccessful flirtation with the weave; Machine gummed up the throwing lanes. Smith dove from his matchup near the sideline toward a slow-ish backhand in the center of the field. He must have felt the air displacement as a vibration as the pass traveled an inch from his fingertips. That chance represents perhaps the game’s biggest ‘What if…?’ moment. Had Smith found the block there and given Machine a short field, it’s possible that Machine could have established firm control of the final.
As it turned out, though, it was Revolver’s sophisticated defense, not Machine’s, that would engineer the next takeaway. Revolver, like a few other teams in the division but with much more frequency, made a habit of implementing mid-point switches. Nate Goff fell prey to one of them, tossing an inside backhand to a De Marrée under. De Marrée had already beaten Dexter Clyburn deep before noticing that the mark was not going to give Goff an appealing deep look, so he took a skinny angle back toward the disc. At the precise moment Goff released it, Clyburn and Toby Warren executed the switch, leaving Warren with an easy catch-block.
“We talk a lot about where we’re going to get a block and where we’re not, so that everyone has eyes on the right space,” said Liu. “That’s one time it worked out.”
The ensuing possession to tie the game, which ended with a relatively simple break-and-continue play between Clyburn, Jason Vallee, and Dan Ritthaler, demonstrated Revolver’s ego-less1, high-percentage post-turn offense to perfection. As stellar as Revolver’s O-line were in San Diego, the D-line offensive unit’s more pedestrian scoring plays likely carried the team’s success.
But it wasn’t always pedestrian, especially when Kyle Lew got involved. Lew might be the team’s best thrower outside of Hecht – and if he isn’t already, he made an awfully good case in the final. For Revolver’s next break, stemming from one of Machine’s messier offensive efforts, Lew shot a dart of a forehand across the belly of the field. It’s unclear whether the vision needed to see the angle, the raw speed, or the accuracy of the throw was its most impressive feature. In any case, his shot staked Revolver to a one-break lead that (thanks to a Hecht missile of a backhand to Higgins a couple points later) they would carry into halftime.
“I think we’re the best D-line in the country… on both sides – on the D side and scoring,” said Liu. “Our disc skill floor is extremely high, and that allowed us to have many, many options on a turn. I think that was part of the secret to our success.”
The second half started badly for Machine. Between Warren’s pull that trapped them in their own endzone – Seamus Robinson dropped a disc that would have been a Callahan – and, after a steely goal line stand to stave off one break chance, a Bontemps doink at the threshold of the attacking goal box on their second attempt, Machine were hard-pressed and off-kilter. More than that, they were tired. Another Lew forehand, not quite as audacious as the earlier one but still plenty effective, caught their entire O-line out of position to set up a simple continue pass to Sean Liston.
It got worse from there. Machine held once before a three-point sequence saw 1.) a badly judged defensive poach set in the front that left Revolver with a 2-on-1 situation at the front cone; 2.) a Goff huck that hooked over North’s head and well out of bounds; 3.) Wettengel drop a pass directly to his chest. Given Revolver’s well-established D-line efficiency, it almost goes without saying that they converted both chances to extend the lead to 12-7.
“I think we changed our game plan a little too quickly. You saw the chaos at the end slow their offense down, and that was our plan [for the whole game]. We got away from it a little in the middle when we were trying to claw back with our bread and butter all season, which has been […] playing hard pressure defense,” said Highsmith. “If I could do this all over again, I would just stick with the chaos. It’s tough to see how that game went down knowing that we had a good game plan. We just went away from it when it got a little hard.”
At a certain point, a runway is long enough for the plane to land. Revolver would not have much trouble the rest of the way out. They traded holds and then won the championship with one last bit of panache from Hecht: an OI shot from midfield to challenge Goff. The daring throw – Hecht’s sixth assist was just good enough — and two-handed Adkins catch over Goff’s backpedaling block attempt made a fitting end to Revolver’s championship season. The one-step-ahead connection encapsulated the idea that they remained just out of reach of the rest of the division all season long.
Revolver’s 27-1 campaign is the most dominant in at least a decade. 2021 national champions Raleigh Ring of Fire went undefeated, but their 16-0 record, while clean, was partially a product of foregoing the entire regular season. No other club since at least 2014 (or possibly much earlier)2 has put together such a lopsided win-loss ratio over a full slate of games.
Furthermore, their stars, system, and relative youth suggest that they can play at or near the same level in the future.
“The future is bright. It’s really incredible to see how this team has grown over the last couple of years, and the talent that’s coming up through college and other forms of the game. They bring so much energy,” said Liu. “They’ve got the fire. It’s amazing to see. It’s just an inspiration all around. They’re the future of the game, for sure.”
Will 2025 be seen in retrospect as the beginning of the club’s second empire? The shades of a new Revolver Dynasty were clear enough earlier in the year that many had already begun to speculate. This 2025 championship provides more fuel for that line of thinking.
It’s still no guarantee, of course. The way the program has shaped up, though, signals that even the floor for the next several years is more like that of New York PoNY’s since 2018: legitimate championship contenders every single season. The ceiling, meanwhile, which is now within touching distance, would be supplanting Boston DoG and New York New York as the winningest men’s program of all time.
Machine, on the other hand, are surely weary of these disappointing endings. They have reached the final in three of the last six seasons – no mean feat – only to lose out in their bid for that elusive glory.
“You do get sick of…” reminisced Highsmith. “It’s 2019, 2023, and now 2025, losing in this final game.”
They can take some solace in qualifying for Worlds 2026, as well as plenty that went well.
“Our time is coming,” said Highsmith. “We’ll break through.”
The second half skid that spelled the end for them was not without its sunny moments. Smith continued to be one of the slipperiest players in the division, lubricating the offensive flow whenever it seemed to rust. On the D-line, Gao cemented his status as their most trustworthy stopper and showed off a dangerous offensive side that only just blossomed in 2025. And then there is the incomparable De Marrée, who emerged from his second tour of USAU Nationals pulling a train of highlight plays and one of the most mind-bending stat lines you’ll ever see: 20 goals (T-second in the division), 24 assists (first), four blocks, and zero turnovers. Yes, you read that right. Zero.3
But individual accomplishments are no balm for teamwide hurt. In three 2025 tries, including twice at Nationals, Machine came up well short of Revolver’s mark. No doubt Machine will spend many hours this offseason wondering what more they could have done to crack the nut.
Their soul-searching will likely be in vain. No one was going to beat Revolver in 2025 — by their own admission.
They were the most skilled, most sophisticated, hungriest, deepest, most versatile, most assertive – in simpler terms, the best – team in the country, and they never got tired of proving it.
