The Impact of Juniors Players

This past year, Carleton picked up two freshmen with more silverware than anyone on the team. One won a club national championship playing (not just riding the bench) with Mischief, and the other was a captain of the gold-medal-winning US juniors worlds team. They were able to help pick up a Carleton team that didn't make Nationals last year and take them to the quarterfinals - almost semis. Of Pittsburgh's three main handlers, one was All-Region fifth-year player TallE, and the other two were freshmen - the Metro East FotY and junior worlds player, and a national youth club champion with Philly SEPDA. After Sean McComb and TallE led Pitt to Nationals the two previous years, McComb graduated and the two freshmen came in and the team didn't miss a beat.

Oregon has been reloading on the back of high school studs from South Eugene for the past couple years. Harvard rode on the back of Will Chen, the Stuyvesant baller, and now they're getting a freshman who has played with Chain for two years and captained the US junior worlds team. A third of Stanford's team played in high school. Brown was carried on the backs of high school studs from NMH and Paideia for their championship season (oh, and a little guy from Amherst, what was his name again?). Colorado has been the recipient of copious juniors talent as well. Teams that made waves this year like Minnesota have more and more players drawn from their high school leagues.

But the influence doesn't begin and end with the big teams. Juniors players who go to small colleges don't want to stop playing ultimate, and as a result new teams are forming across the country. San Francisco State and Hartford are just a couple of the many new teams competing at sectionals this year. Connecticut College in the women's division made the jump to Regionals this year, with an all-region junior worlds freshman leading the way. I think that we can expect to see the University of San Francisco appear at Bay Area sectionals next year, as they're picking up a junior worlds player as well.

But most rosters at Nationals were not loaded with juniors players. It's clear that schools like UCSB and Florida can compete without a constant stream of juniors players. Large schools have a huge pool of potential players and former high school athletes to draw from (12 of the 16 teams at nationals on the open side were state schools). But looking at the roster of a team like Carleton, they're a juniors ultimate haven. Brown was led by juniors players when they won nationals. Right now, it seems like smaller schools need to hope for those juniors players who want a small-school environment, and not wait to pick up superstar athletes from their admittedly academically- and size-constrained player pool.

Schools like Pittsburgh have reached out to juniors players at local tournaments and at larger events like High School Easterns. At Easterns both my junior and senior year, Pitt players went around handing out CD's with photos and information about Pitt Ultimate. Counselors at camps like NUTC made connections with students to send them to their alma maters - Wesleyan, Carleton, and MIT to name a few. But as more juniors players become more aware of the college ultimate scene, they will start to base their decisions more and more on what schools will give them a chance to play high-level ultimate. The influx of ultimate players at Carleton is proof of that - I myself only applied to Stanford and Wisconsin (with Carleton as a backup). It may begin to be the case that juniors players will stop being a parity-inducing force, and that they will actually start to separate the programs that have made it from the programs going nowhere.

State schools are beginning to reap the benefits of having a good high school ultimate program in their state - Pittsburgh has the benefit of having two, Oregon and Minnesota are doing well, and Georgia ends up with a few Paideia kids every year. But it's schools like Georgia and Wisconsin where a juniors player may start off with an advantage (and knowing how to throw is a pretty big advantage), but quickly be surpassed by a far more athletic new recruit. Even four athletic A-team juniors players at Stanford were taken aback by Robbie Cahill going from zero to hero in less than a full year. But as juniors players continue to develop, that gap will be more insurmountable for most players at smaller schools, who don't have 20,000 ex-varsity athletes to choose from.

I think it will be very interesting over the next few years to see how Whitman College performs, as they're typically a mid-level finisher at NW regionals who just came off a phenomenal recruiting year. Can they make anything out of it? Will they take a possible third bid to Nationals in a few years? Or even the second? On a similar note, this is Rutgers' best recruiting class in years - will they finally be able to make it to the second day of Regionals? Rutgers traditionally picks up a lot of NJ juniors players who haven't had much out-of-state or high-level experience, and they don't adapt as well to the more physical and fast-paced college game. They've also had problems with numbers at practice, and they'll be another team to watch try to put together the pieces. Rutgers is also a massive school that traditionally hasn't gotten the best recruits, perhaps as part of a vicious cycle of underachieving. Whitman and Rutgers - can they take advantage of their incoming freshman and actually make some waves? We'll have to wait and see ...