24 games will be broadcasted from this year's Pro-Elite Challenge East!
June 25, 2026 by Edward Stephens in Preview, Video
Ultiworld’s coverage of the 2026 club ultimate season 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.
The 2026 club season kicks off in earnest with the East Coast version of the first of the main USAU events. Pro-Elite Challenge East features the 2025 championship winners in the women’s and mixed divisions, as well as the men’s division’s 2025 second- and third-place finishers. All of them look ready to continue their run of excellence in 2026. Serious challengers await in all three divisions, however, both for PEC East as an isolated event and as a harbinger for October. Seeing how the established elite and ambitious second-class units take their first steps of what will be a fascinating campaign is baked into the weekend’s excitement. And as always, early club tournaments tend to give us a sense of which players are poised to have titanic impacts on the entire summer and fall.
We’ve got you covered for all the exciting action this weekend. Read on for the streaming schedule and a full tournament preview of all three divisions, and follow along on the PEC East Event Page for livestreams and updates throughout the weekend. It all starts Saturday, June 27th, LIVE on Ultiworld!
Tournament Profile
- Date: June 27-28
- Location: Browns Summit, NC
- Weather: Partly cloudy with highs in the upper 80s, 5-10 mph winds, slight chance of rain
- Score Reporter
More Pro-Elite Coverage Than Ever Before
We’ll have three livestreamed games every round from the Pro-Elite Challenge! Due to significant heat issues in 2023 and forecasted highs in the upper 80s this year, PEC East will feature just three games per team per day.
All broadcasted games will be available on-demand for viewing immediately following the live broadcasts.
How To Watch
You will need an Ultiworld Standard or All-Access subscription to be able to watch games from the 2026 Pro-Elite Challenge.
Full Broadcast Schedule
Tournament Preview
Mixed Division
The Quest for a Three-peat Starts Here
Let’s put Ann Arbor Hybrid to an early season test, shall we? The back-to-back champions embark on their quest for a third-straight USAU title1 – and world club title, as a treat – with some light modifications. Gone for the single gender divisions are former University of Michigan all-stars Aaron Bartlett and Kat McGuire; their places will be assumed by the scarcely less effective Eileen Bequette and Jack Shanahan. Most of the architects of their success remain, though: Rachel Mast, Sara Nitz, Nathan Champoux, Maketa Mattimore, Dalton Smith, and many more.
Hybrid are formidable, but the season won’t be a cakewalk. Heck, PEC East won’t be a cakewalk. A short list of the teams standing in their way in Browns Summit includes:
- New York XIST, Hybrid’s opponents in the 2025 final, who also return most of their core (Jolie Krebs, Axel Agami Contreras, Abby Cheng, Ryan Drost), also have their sights on a big WUCC run in Ireland, and also add some key playmakers (Theo Shapinsky, Theresa Yu).
- Boston Slow, longtime mixed blue bloods who could rival either Hybrid or XIST as the strongest defensive side in the country thanks to players like Davis Whitehead, Yuge Xiao, Erin Rea, and new recruits Gus Haflin and Tomo Liou.
- Annual early season Monstars Austin Disco Club, who add college playmakers Jake Worthington and D-III PotY Ria Stevens.
- 2024 national runners-up Boston Sprocket, who have hardly lost a step.
Any of those challengers could take down Hybrid this weekend. And from there, it isn’t too difficult to imagine them making a serious push to upset the division’s pecking order in October.
Regional Ups and Downs
There is more intrigue just below the title contention level, as PEC should give us a glimpse into which potential regional resets could materialize in the postseason. The Atlantic Coast, for two years the domain of Washington DC Rally, might tip back to longtime regional emperors Philadelphia AMP. Rally will still be quite good – players like Brandon Lamberty and Maya Kikuchi will help ensure they play at a Nationals level – but a talent swap with Washington DC Scandal has sent their talismanic O-line light Sami Smalling to the women’s division in exchange for Jess Sourbeer, and as great as Sourbeer has proven in her career, it’s hard for anyone to live up to the greatness of Smalling. AMP, meanwhile, build on last season’s return to Nationals by adding clear firepower – James Pollard and Grace Maroon – to their arsenal.
The Southeast has proved one of the more unstable regions of the decade, with teams from five different cities (Nashville, Huntsville, Atlanta, Durham, and Savannah) representing them at Nationals and none of them able to manage better than back-to-back appearances. Significant roster shakeups every season have led to seismic changes in the landscape. Three of those teams will be in action at PEC, with established competitors Nashville ‘Shine looking to get back to the Big Dance ahead of Huntsville Space Force and 2025 surprise qualifiers Savannah Conspiracy. All three of them, of course, will be looking to get an early season edge over the ambitious sides (Durham Toro, Asheville Parliament, Atlanta Roma) who will not be in attendance. (At least for this weekend, Space Force seem to have an advantage thanks to one-time pickups Brett Hulsmeyer and Dena Elimelech.)
Finally, while Toronto Union carry little hope of toppling the dominant Hybrid in the Great Lakes, they could play well enough to capture a bid, which would throw the calculations of much of the rest of the country into chaos. There are certainly plenty of rankings points on the table this weekend, and they have enough talent to swipe some of them.
Men’s Division
First Look at Championship Hopefuls
As has been the case for almost a decade, the race to the top of the men’s division is wide open. At least four teams with title ambitions begin their season at PEC East: Chicago Machine, New York PoNY, Washington DC Truck Stop, and Boston DiG.
Machine and PoNY are the biggest threats in the club, having retained much of the talent that landed both of them in multiple championship games this decade. And while it isn’t clear exactly which of their 2026 upgrades (Machine’s Zeke Thoreson and Elliot Hawkins; PoNY’s Ethan Lieman, Nima Lhamo, and Declan Miller) will be part of the PEC East proceedings, you can bank on some combination of their established stars like Sam Little, Rutledge Smith, Daan De Marrée, Nate Goff, Chris Kocher, Ben Jagt, Ben Dameron, and Paul Arters to light up the complex.
Angling to break through at the expense of one of them (or of West Coast bruisers San Francisco Revolver and Portland Rhino Slam!, who take the field in a couple weeks at PEC West) are Boston DiG and 2023 champs Truck Stop. DiG’s woes at Nationals have been well-documented, but that hasn’t been a talent issue. A locked-in Tobe Decraene could end up being the toast of the division, and (unconfirmed) word on the street is that they are picking up Thomas Edmonds. Truck have revamped their roster in a serious way for the new campaign after a somewhat disappointing 2025, bringing on international stars Elliot Bonnet, Sofiène Bontemps, and Louis Betrancourt. It’s unclear how many of the pick-ups for either of these sides (or their established stars like Christian Boxley, Jeff Babbitt, Alexandre Fall, and Calvin Stoughton) are making the trip to North Carolina, though, so we may wait a while to see what they can do at full strength.
Recruiting Wars
Beyond the established championship tier, plenty of other teams have made splashy additions. Will those additions help unlock latent potential in the entire roster and propel them to new heights? Minneapolis Sub Zero found themselves on an upward track in 2025, and they bring on current (or recent vintage) college stars Nate De Morgan, Micah Davis, Leo Farley, and Zach Morton to stay on that trend. It could be a splashy debut. Similarly, Raleigh Ring of Fire get immediate upgrades in the form of 2026 D-I PotY Tobias Brooks (returning to his hometown team) and fellow spring offensive standout Christian Belus. Could they help push Raleigh back toward the top of the division? Toronto GOAT, too, have found some top young players for the new campaign, having plucked them all from different Canadian clubs: Vancouver Furious George’s Justin Podnar and Max Pettenuzzo, and Ottawa Phoenix’s Maxime Ayad. Atlanta Chain Lightning, meanwhile, are half-rebuilding after turning over a lot of their roster, but the presence of Utah’s Will Selfridge and a raft of other young stars might keep the changing of the guard relatively painless.
The major new faces on Philadelphia Pacmen and Portland Red Tide, by contrast, are modeled on bringing a proven veteran alongside teams with shorter track records of national success. For Pacmen, the key piece is Antoine Davis, poached from PoNY. Could he help get even stronger results for them than last year’s run to quarters? Red Tide bring on a slew of masters+ age players, including Rowan McDonnell, Ian Engler, and Chuck Cantone, in a bid to repeat (or, indeed, improve upon) their much-deserved 2025 Nationals appearance.
Women’s Division
Debut of the Champs
Boston Brute Squad’s title defense starts now. Based on recent trends in the division – no team has managed to go back-to-back since San Francisco Fury did it in 2017-18 – it isn’t going to be easy. That said, they’re in great shape to do it, having brought back their best uber-veterans (Becky Malinowski, Angela Zhu, Elana Schwam) and recent stars (Levke Walczak, Liv Player, Laura Ospina, Kelly Hyland). They’ll supplement them with a bevy of intriguing imports plucked from rivals Washington D.C. Scandal (Jackie Wang), mixed division squads Sprocket (Katya Piskun, Sara Rudolph) and Toro (Claire Revere), and local college feeder Tufts (Mina Brown, Ellie Lemberg). A lot of those players will make their debut this weekend, and how they mesh will be a crucial bellwether for Brute’s title odds.
Tiering Everyone Else
Round robin play will provide a welcome assessment of every single team in the group. Why let questions linger when we can have direct results? (Power rankings are not very important in the grand scheme of things, but this setup is a power ranker’s dream.) Here are some of the answers we can expect to see based on the matchups:
- Will New York BENT continue to perform closer to the championship tier than the quarters-hopeful tier? And do they have the pieces they need to finally reach semis?
- Does the Raleigh Phoenix rebuild – they have turned over a huge amount of key contributors – leave their six-year quarters streak in jeopardy of ending? Or can the backfill of younger Triangle-area players ably replace the lost production?
- What is the Mid-Atlantic pecking order between three squads – Pittsburgh Parcha, Washington DC Grit, Philadephia Flight – who have played each other remarkably close in recent years?
- Are any of Madison Heist, Atlanta Ozone, or Boston Seige putting together the kind of roster or approach that could lead to a return to Nationals?
Which would match the magical mid-2010s Minneapolis Drag’n Thrust run ↩
