Surveying the end of season awards landscape (and inventing a few awards in the process) and prematurely handing them out based on Friday play at the US Open.
August 1, 2026 by Josh Katz in Recap
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It is extremely premature to nominate players for our end of season awards just one-third of the way through the first major tournament of the season. There’s still three rounds of bracket play left in the US Open alone, plus all of the Pro Championships, the Series, and, of course, the Club Championships in October, giving every team and every player nearly three months to make their case for any awards nominations. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do to recap the first day of the US Open: give two or three nominations from each (USAU) team for the end of season awards. Some of these will be the actual C/O/D/BPOTY awards. Others will be fictional awards I made up to highlight players I enjoyed watching.1
#9 Washington D.C. Truck Stop
Miles Grovic – Breakout Player of the Year
BPOTY nominees are going to be a common theme for this article. There were so many current or recently graduated college stars that stood out on Friday, probably enough for a separate article altogether. Grovic, the former Maryland star, was one of them. Often starting downfield for Truck’s O-line, Grovic was a constant threat for a big play. He leveraged his threat as a deep cutter perfectly to get open time and time again for chunk gains on cuts toward the thrower, and showcased an impressively deep range of throwing expertise, such as this backhand huck against Portland Rhino Slam!. He’s already finding himself on Truck’s highest-leverage lines and crossing over in key moments, showcasing all the qualities we look for in BPOTY candidates.
Author’s note: Deal with it. ↩
US Open 2026: Real (and Fake) Awards Nominees for US Open Teams on Day 1 (Men’s Div. Recap) is only available to Ultiworld Subscribers
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