Ultimate Frisbee continued from page 8 owners spent most of their time discussing the team’s mission and values, and ensuring that the Summit would be a positive part of the community. Pace’s connections made one thing sur- prisingly easy: Among the team’s sponsors is Star Buds, a Colorado cannabis dispensary chain that boasts the closest dispensary to the Peter Barton Lacrosse Stadium. Wana, an- other cannabis company, has also joined as a sponsor of the team’s Summit Founder’s Club. The AUDL doesn’t have any policies re- garding the use of marijuana beyond asking players to follow the laws of the land and not play games while inebriated, so Pace saw the Star Buds sponsorship as a natural fi t. “There’s already alcohol sponsors all the time in professional sports,” he says. “Most Coloradans already know cannabis is safer than alcohol.” The deal makes the Summit the first professional sports team with a cannabis logo on the front of its jerseys. Nearly 150 people came out in January to vie for a spot on the Colorado Summit. Thirty- six practice players made the cut, with game rosters condensed to twenty. All of the talent is homegrown; however, some of the team’s more experienced players had previously traveled from Colorado to play for other teams. Former league MVP Jona- than Nethercutt, Jay Froude, Matt Jackson and Dave Wiseman are all league veterans. Players get paid, though not usually enough to quit their day jobs. (Fortunately, the games are on weekends, so they won’t have to take days off.) The same goes for coaches. The Colorado Summit has three coaches this year, including General Man- ager Ryan Segal, who’s doing double duty. Segal played for the AUDL team in Seattle for two seasons. While there, he coached a bit and ran social media for the team. He moved to Colorado in 2020, and when he heard that the Summit was forming, he got hired as a coach and then pitched himself as a general manager, too. As a result, he’s helped construct both the roster and the game plan for the team. “It’s really cool building something from scratch,” Segal says. “Getting input from the owners about what they envision and what matters to them and then getting the input from the players that we put on the roster and kind of building this vision, this com- munity, this culture all simultaneously with everyone’s input, it’s been really fun, because it’s just grown straight from the ground up.” Even Governor Jared Polis, who helped recruit Nethercutt, is a fan. “I am so excited for Colorado to gain an American Ultimate Disc League team, and I personally look forward to seeing the Colorado Summit in action,” Polis says. “Colorado is one of the fi ttest states in the nation, and the presence of a professional ultimate team will further help inspire recre- ational athletes of all ages to participate in this sport, which is rapidly growing in popularity here in Colorado and across the world.” The team wants to make sure that fans 10 have a great game-day experience, involving everything from pre-game music — Denver band Brothers of Brass will be featured at most games — to post-game opportunities to come on the fi eld and meet players. Although the owners know that the team will fi nd fast fans in the ultimate community, they hope to attract more Coloradans, too. Nolte thinks that fans of other sports will appreciate ultimate, since it’s something of a combination of soccer, lacrosse and football. “It’s called ultimate Frisbee because it was combining all sports to be the ultimate sport,” he says. “We have end zones and we score touchdowns, basically, so it’s like football in that. It’s consistent movement like soccer. You pass it from person to person to person to score. And then there’s a pivot foot like basketball. Once you’ve got the Frisbee, you have to stop and plant the pivot foot, so there’s all these different components of these different sports that people could come and see and experience.” And they won’t have to pay much to experience it: Season tickets are only $60 for all six games, and indi- vidual games are just $15, with everyone under twelve getting in free. According to Pace, the Summit had the best sales in the league before the season started. Part of that could be price, but he also credits Colorado’s ultimate community. Other centers for the sport are in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York and North Carolina, but Nolte thinks the values of the sport particularly align with the values of Colorado. A large component of ultimate Frisbee is the “spirit of the game,” he notes, an honor system in which the players call their own fouls at the club and collegiate levels rather than having referees. Teams discuss foul calls and reach a resolution; oftentimes players even call fouls on themselves. In elimination rounds of masters national championships — which have been played in Aurora every year since 2018 — trained observers help keep the pace going by set- tling discussions quickly and calling in and out of bounds, though players can overturn an observer’s ruling. The AUDL also has observers. Pro games are also on bigger fi elds than college games and timed rather than decided on points. Usually, the game is over when a team reaches 15 points — but that leads to vari- ability on time that isn’t compatible with television deals or the fan experience. So in the AUDL, each game has four twelve- minute quarters. Fans can watch every game on AUDL.tv and YouTube, and the Summit will have two home games broadcast on Fox Sports 2: the June 25 match against San Diego and the July 30 contest against Portland. The fi rst home game is Saturday, May 28, and the team is hosting a tailgate event starting at 5:30 p.m. at the stadium. The Summit is already off to a strong start, with a 2-0 record, and Segal anticipates more excitement as the season continues. “The entire roster is such a talented roster that I feel like the fans coming to the games are going to fi nd that one player that they really like and are excited about,” he says. “I could name so many players on the roster that I think will just be fan favorites.” Nolte sees the Colorado Rapids, the local Major League Soccer team, as a model for how the Summit could build its fan base. His daughters played soccer through the Colorado Rapids Youth Soccer League, and the family would often head to Rapids games, even buying season tickets. The Summit plans to host youth clinics over the summer. WUL will play a showcase game after the Summit game. “I would say in almost every sport…it’s the men’s team, and everyone pays attention to them, and then young women who want to play, they don’t see a woman playing,” Hanson says. “When you don’t see someone doing something, it makes it harder for you to envision that that’s something that you can be a part of.” DeLay agrees that the owners want to make the sport as equitable as possible, allowing people of any race or gender to try out and including people like Hanson on the lead- ership team. “That’s what success looks like for us,” he says. “It’s not just win- ning games, but how we are able to give back to some of these other communi- ties that have helped create playing opportunities for these athletes, whether it be in college or whether it be in club.” Hanson doesn’t think she Summit members Daniel Brunker (front) and Matt Jackson at practice. Notes Segal: “What the professional leagues allow is for young people, sports fans in general, who haven’t quite heard about ultimate and haven’t seen it played — it helps get the message of what an exciting sport this is out to a much larger group of people.” Even as their team takes off, the owners want to continue building a positive culture in the ultimate Frisbee community. Inclusivity remains a concern. According to Hanson, some members of Colorado’s ultimate community worry that having a professional team could hurt the club side of the sport, especially women who are concerned about gender parity if men have the chance to compete professionally and women don’t. There are two professional women’s leagues — the Western Ultimate League and the Premier Ultimate League; neither have Colorado offerings, though Pace did ask the WUL about starting a team. Gender parity has been an issue through- out AUDL history. In fact, over 150 people signed a 2017 letter calling for a boycott of the league until it provided equal resources for women. As a result, the league commit- ted to taking steps toward gender parity by looking into starting a women’s division in the AUDL and allowing teams to set up parallel women’s franchises. When Hanson signed on to join the own- ership group, one of her fi rst priorities was talking to the local women’s teams, sharing the owners’ mission of inclusivity and trying to set up ways to work with women in the ultimate community. One of those efforts will be hosting a doubleheader with the WUL on June 18, when athletes from the would have joined the owner- ship team if she’d been asked back in 2014. “It would still have seemed like this was just a bunch of dudes who are try- ing to create a sport for just guys, and there’s no thought to the other parts of the com- munity,” Hanson says. The owners are certainly giving thought to other parts of the community now. The Summit has worked with the Colo- rado Department of Corrections to go into prisons and teach the game to individuals incarcerated in the Colorado Youthful Of- fender System. “We can’t replace the support network of professionals, but if any of these guys get out …they have a community that they can fi nd,” Pace says. “It’s a network that ev- eryone needs. Everyone needs a community.” The community is strong in Colorado. Teams from the University of Colorado, Colorado State University and Colorado College all qualifi ed for nationals this year, and both men’s and women’s club teams from the state are consistently among the highest-ranked in the nation and world. Frisbee is increasingly popular outside Colorado, too. USA Ultimate, which is now based in Colorado Springs, is a member of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Com- mittee. Ultimate is being considered as an addition to the 2028 Summer Olympic Games. Hanson says that on one of the team’s fi rst trips with the Department of Corrections, it was powerful to watch kids connecting with professional athletes. “To see the impact it can have when you go and introduce it to people that would have never had the opportunity before to experience it was pretty cool,” Hanson says. “That was a really meaningful experience for me.” There’s a joke in the ultimate Frisbee community, Nolte says: When a ball dreams, it’s a Frisbee. That dream is about to come true. Email the author at catie.cheshire@ westword.com. MAY 26-JUNE 1, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com EVAN SEMÓN
