These women's division players are at the top of their game this season

October 14, 2026 by Ultiworld in Opinion

There’s no shortage of talent in the USA Ultimate Club women’s division. We look a lot at team success, and often see familiar names and faces in those discussions. But who are the best individual players? Who brings the most value to winning a championship? Figuring out which stars shine the brightest is more art than science, but perhaps there’s democratic power in numbers.

So who are the best players in the division right now? To try to clear away as much of the white noise created by circumstance as possible and get to the heart of each individual’s value and contribution, we asked members of our coverage team, as well as an anonymous group of elite players, to weigh in on the following prompt:

If you were starting a club team today with the singular goal of winning a theoretical Club Championship this October, how would you rank the players within the division? You aren’t building a team of all of your selections, so don’t worry about how the players complement each other. Consider each pick the first pick of a team, drafting in order, only you can’t pick the players you’ve already ranked above. All players who were on a 2026 USA Ultimate Club women’s division roster of a team that reached regionals are eligible to be drafted. With regards to injuries an absences, we will include all rostered players unless there is confirmation a player will not be competing, or would not be able to compete, at Nationals.

In order to improve how representative our rankings are of the opinions of our voters, we have iterated until arriving at this process. We each listed out our top 35 players to iron out some of the gradations on the fringes and then combined our lists to create a composite ranking. In addition, we included the ballots of a few anonymous elite players and coaches from different teams and regions. We used a weighted scoring system for votes, with Participants’ Ballots accounting for roughly 30% of the composite rankings, and Subscriber Ballots about 13%.¹

The Scoring System (Methodology)

There are three voting groups whose ballots are incorporated: Ultiworld Staff, Participants (Players and coaches from nationally competitive teams), and Ultiworld Subscribers. Staff ballots account for 60% of the final composite score, while Participant ballots take up 30%, and Subscribers make up 10%.¹

All staff ranked between 25 and 35 eligible players, and went through multiple rounds of revisions, and make their ballots visible to the public. Subscribers and Participants were asked to rank a minimum of 15 and maximum of 35. These ballots are anonymous to readers.

This year, we changed to a normalized scoring system to account for the variance in ballot volume by group. We converted raw point totals into a Grade (0-100). This represents the percentage of total possible points a player could have received from that specific voting group. A player who was the unanimous #1 choice of every Subscriber, for example, would receive a Subscriber Grade of 100. This keeps us from getting 500 subscriber ballots that overwhelm the other opinions in the mix.

We’ll start with our top 10, and discussion about that group. Then we’ll reveal the entire top 25, followed by the complete ballots, and additional conversations about the rankings.

Staff Voters

Charlie Eisenhood (Editor-in-Chief)
Edward Stephens (Senior Staff Writer)
Graham Gerhart (Senior Staff Writer)
Keith Raynor (Senior Editor)
TJ Lee (Contributor)
Zack Davis (Senior Staff Writer)

The Top 10

Player	Composite Score	Charlie Eisenhood	Edward Stephens	Graham Gerhart	Keith Raynor	TJ Lee	Zack Davis	Participants (21)	Subscribers (17)
Valeria Cárdenas (Molly Brown)	83.51	1	1	3	1	4	2	2	4
Claire Trop (Scandal)	81.48	2	6	1	2	6	6	3	1
Manu Cárdenas (Molly Brown)	79.74	4	4	5	5	7	4	1	3
Levke Walczak (Brute Squad)	75.34	3	2	2	7	3	5	6	5
Anna Thompson (Fury)	73.17	7	7	4	3	5	8	7	2
Dena Elimelech (Fury)	67.53	18	3	21	9	2	3	5	6
Dawn Culton (Fury)	63.33	5	8	9	4	11	7	15	8
Mika Kurahashi (6ixers)	53.12	6	19	25	11	13	29	4	9
Angela Zhu (Brute Squad)	51.22	9	15	12	24	8	10	14	17
Kaela Helton (Flipside)	49.93	10	9	11	6	UR	14	13	14

[Editor: There may be some sorting issues with the table that cannot be altered at the time. Our apologies for the inconvenience.]

This year, our staff held live roundtables in our Discord. These are available for subscribers to listen to, including below in the subscriber section of this article. The conversations below are modified versions of those transcripts.

Valeria Cárdenas Returns to #1

To start the night off with our women’s division conversation of the top 25 players, as usual, we’re going to start at the top: Valeria Cárdenas (Molly Brown), our #1 rank. This is a return to this position for Valeria, who was #1 in 2024. In 2025, though, she was all the way down at #19; people expressed some concerns about how she had played at the World Games at Pro Champs. But this year, I think the lowest that she was was #4, and that was with subscribers. Everybody else had her #3 and above. She was the only unanimous player on staff ballots in the top five.

So, what’s going on? Was last year an off year? Were we right, was last year actually a down year for her? Why are we seeing her bounce up and down the rankings from #1 to #19 back to #1?

Edward Stephens
I’m one of the people who ranked her very low last year, and I’m one of the people who had her at the top of my list this year. I do think that for whatever reason, I don’t think she had her best year. She was a little out of sorts, and boy, what a difference a year makes! She looks the fastest she’s ever looked. She is bidding more than she’s ever bid before. She is not just accepting control of offensive points when she’s on the field, she’s taking it and kind of demanding it in a way that I think exceeds her previous best when she was at the top of this list before. Her defense is closing in on the territory that we see from her sister, Manu, and her feel for the game and desire to win are off the charts right now. I struggled a lot with this list—I think everybody does all the time—but I don’t think I struggled at all thinking about who to pick as #1 this year.

Graham Gerhart
Nothing that Edward has said is incorrect, and everything really bears true. I think we were proven right last year. If you look at what Valeria’s stats were, even at Nationals, she threw her team out of games and just didn’t seem as sharp on offense as we had come to know in previous years, and just seemed a little off rhythm. Didn’t really seem like she wanted it.

This year, she really does, but when I was looking at the results, I just couldn’t find a reason not to have Claire Trop (Scandal) as the best player. When factoring in everything, the best player on the best team – and I get there are definitely a lot of players that have stepped up on Scandal to lighten the load for Claire – the amount of ability and skill that Claire has is not diminishable, and the consistency has been there. Whereas, like we said, even with last year sort of weighing with Valeria, I do think that shift has come back and she’s in full form. But I just didn’t see anything that convinced me that Claire wasn’t in the same form, and I wasn’t going to dock her for having a good team around her and not having to do as much because she still seemed like she could.

So I was trying to think of this season in total. Granted, I’ve probably seen more Scandal than I have of Molly Brown, although I’ve seen quite a few games of both, especially with Worlds allowing us to see different sides to what the Cardenas sisters were able to offer and what Scandal was able to offer. In my opinion, it just stood out that Claire is the best player on the best team, and at some point, I just have to stick to my guns and say there’s nothing I have seen that makes Claire look worse than last year, so why should I dock her for it?

Who is Tier 1?

We have a point system and the cliff really comes after #7. Valeria is in first, Claire Trope second, and then Manu Cárdenas (Molly Brown), Levke Walczak (Brute Squad), Anna Thompson (Fury), Dena Elimelech (Fury), and Dawn Culton (Fury), and that’s kind of where the cutoff is really for tier one. These are basically almost all of the players who received top five votes. There are a few outliers, but for the most part, that is the cream of the crop here.

How did people view those seven players? Are there people who you feel like don’t belong in that group, or people who are missing who you feel like do belong in that group?

TJ Lee
Yeah, I definitely have that as mostly my clear tier ones. I was another person who actually had Valeria not as my #1; had her at #3. My current order is Dena Elimelech (Fury), Levke Walczak (Brute Squad), Valeria Cárdenas (Molly Brown), Anna Thompson (Fury), and Claire Trop (Scandal). I definitely was all over the place and kept flipping who I wanted where in that. Even now, I don’t think it takes a lot of convincing for me to rearrange that order, but I just see that those players are a clear tier above everybody else right now, and our consensus leaves it pretty clear that it’s not super close.

Dawn Culton (Fury) dropped a little bit further down to 10 for me. Still know a lot about what Culton can do, but just wasn’t able to watch a lot of it. Fury is always kind of a weird team for me. I know I put Elimelech up at #1 right now, but at the same time, this is also very much a team that has very strong, consistent systems that are easy for a lot of players to look great at the same time.

Zack Davis
Oh my word! This is such a tough exercise every year. Valeria was my only pick that I was like, ‘Yeah, I really think she’s the best player right now.”

I don’t know how Claire ended up as number five. I made this list two weeks ago, and then a lot of stuff has happened to me. But you know what? I’ll stand by it. I really think Dena is driving the bus for Fury right now, with Culton and Thompson close behind her in terms of their ability to contribute to the team, both offensively and defensively. Levke is always the heart and soul of Brute Squad when she’s on the field, and Manu is obviously the perfect foil and complement to Vale, so that’s where I ended up with my top seven. But if you show me a list of those seven players in whatever order, I would understand how you got there.

Personally, going back to the Valeria conversation, last year she obviously struggled a little bit and, as Graham said, was kind of throwing her team out of the game. But this year, the difference is night and day, as Edward was saying, in terms of her ability to create space not only for herself, but for her teammates. She’s throwing people open. She’s reading the field in a way that is elite. Pound for pound that she’s probably the best player in the world right now, across any division in terms of field awareness, ability to create space for her team, and contribute. Her performance at Worlds was absolutely stunning. That’s where I ended up with my #1, and then the next six could go in any order, but that’s how I ended up there.

Edward Stephens
Keith, I got something real small to say.

Keith Raynor
Yeah, go ahead. I doubt that, but please.

Edward Stephens
I just want to say that my line for the top tier—my top five—were Valeria, Levke Walczak, Dena Elimelech, Manu Cárdenas, and Sami Smalling (Scandal), and then my line was between Sami Smalling and Claire Trop. I had Claire Trop at six, and it’s not because of how good her teammates are, Graham, it’s because I’m concerned about Claire Trop’s health this year.

When she has been on the field, she’s still been pretty good—maybe not as amazing as we’ve seen before—but I dropped her down because I’m not really sure she’s going to be at 100%, and a not-at-100% Claire Trop is just as valuable as that next tier for me, which is the “Anna Thompson, Dawn Culton, Kaela Helton” tier, Britt Dos Santos (6ixers) for Brit believers out there, and Kelly Hyland (Brute Squad). For me, that injury scare is what kept Claire out of contention for the top spot and knocked her down to level two.

Keith Raynor
I do have players in front of some of the members of this cohort. I have Kaela Helton (Flipside) within my top seven. I’m a little surprised to see the voters cool on Kaela. I don’t feel like she’s playing much differently than she has over the past few years, which has been at a truly elite, load-bearing level. I also have Liv Player (Brute Squad) in this tier basically, and the case Edward wants to make for Sammy Smalling is the one I want to make for Liv Player. We’ll save our full-on case making for down the road, because that’s going to be one of the most fun parts of this anyway.

Graham Gerhart
If I can build on that: The case made against Claire is the same one that could be made against either Liv or Kaela. Kaela’s been working through some niggling injuries this year, which has been a challenge. Liv missed the entire U.S. Open. The same can be said for Anna Thompson, who also missed time this season.

This has not been the healthiest year for the division, and Worlds is part of that. People are trying to gear up towards it and make sure that they are healthy for it. When trying to think of this season as a whole and not just the players who I have seen play amazing games, that’s one of the things I took into consideration with Kaela. I don’t think you’ll find much more of a Kaela fan than me. There are probably a few, but we are all part of one great collective hive mind.

When I was trying to project what this ranking list meant to me, I took health into consideration. It’s hard to say that there has not been some small drop-off with injury concerns, and I tried to keep that in mind for everyone. Some players are able to overcome it. I think Claire largely has overcome her injuries and still been able to perform at the highest level, and Kaela to some extent too.

But in my list, the player I have higher than most everyone else is Kaitlyn Weaver (Flipside), and I put her there largely because of the burden she took on for Flipside due to Kaela’s injuries and what she had to take on without Kaela being able to bear as much of the load. She became Kaela Helton for her team largely because of that, which is one of the reasons why I had her so high.

So health – and to clarify, we’re a bunch of reporters, not actually players in the division, so it’s easier to take a bird’s-eye view – is a major factor in this season and something we will look back on as a disclaimer for a lot of the rankings. Health and durability helped players on my list. Even Irene Scazzieri (Fury) I rated higher because she’s been so durable, able to take on so much, and outpace everyone. In a similar vein, Dawn Culton has been able to hold up for such a long, demanding season. It’s been heavy on my mind how much injury and health played into ranking these players.

Keith Raynor
I, for one, was not making that case against Claire, so I don’t want it to be used against me for my top players, because I can’t say with certainty about most people’s condition regarding how healthy they are or not. Someone like Alex Barnett, who would figure prominently in this list were she healthy, is a different case.

Claire Trop has had injuries, but she has an incredibly high workload and often has played through a lot of those and still been hyper-productive. She has one of the most physical games that you’re going to find. I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t feel like I have enough information about the players we’re discussing or the ones we haven’t gotten to, so I try not to overthink it unless I know someone is in a bad way. I don’t want to put a label on anybody without really knowing.

 

The Top 25 and Beyond

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1. Our experience has shown that participants’ ballots trend towards regional concentrations and emphasizing the strength of their teammates, as well as other quirks such as occasionally not ranking themselves or hate-ranking rivals, which is why their ballots are weighted in this manner. ↩