Ultiworld

Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to learn how to play ultimate, your options were pretty limited. Good coaches were few and far between, game footage was limited to a handful of grainy reels a year, and the full catalog of written instruction could be read in a matter of hours by breezing through a couple books and surfing some stray early blogs. If you weren’t lucky enough to enter the sport within an existing hotbed, trying to improve your skills was as much a challenge of locating information as it was of consuming, understanding, and putting it into practice.

In 2007, two coaches in Seattle — Ben Wiggins and Andy Lovseth — set out to change that, collecting the wisdom and experience of top players and presenting it on a site they called The Huddle. Every few weeks, they’d come up with a new topic to explore and solicit thoughts from a cadre of high-level coaches and players, finally giving aspiring talent access to the brainpower of the game’s elite.

In the decade since The Huddle went dormant, the thirst for strategic insight and learning tools has only accelerated. Coaching resources, video projects, training camps, and YouTube channels have all proliferated to try to sate that thirst. Heck, Tuesday Tips remains one of the most popular columns on our site. But despite the explosion in ultimate content, it’s still not often that newer or younger players get to hear directly from the biggest stars in the sport about how they approach or think about the game.

Today we’re launching The Play Call, a new resource that aims to once again democratize the expertise of world-class players on how they improve specific skills or what they’re thinking about and focusing on in specific in-game situations.

For our first issue, we tackle a critical part of the field: how to be more efficient in the red zone. To tease out the accumulated wisdom on this topic, we gave our authors the following prompt:

It’s double game point and you’ve just entered the red zone on offense. What play(s) do you want to be able to call or what end zone system do you hope your team has in place so you can feel confident that you will score without turning it over?

Here’s what some of the top players in the game today had to say.

ROBYN FENNIG   |   SADIE JEZIERSKI   |  SEAN KEEGAN

LAUREN KIMURA   |  JONATHAN NETHERCUTT   |   NICKY SPIVA