Ultimate Frisbee continued from page 7 AUDL. But the MLU folded for fi nancial reasons in 2016, eliminating competition between the two entities and solidifying the AUDL’s role as the pro league. Matt Krei, who was born in Colorado and attended Colorado State University, discovered ulti- mate Frisbee in 1997 when he was living in Dallas, working as an ap- plication developer. He became an original owner of the Dallas AUDL franchise, and when he returned to his home state, he wanted to push the game here, too. “My teams have always been the Denver Broncos, the Den- ver Nuggets, the Colorado Ava- lanche, the Rockies, so I have a really close tie to my home state,” Krei says. “I became so-called addicted to ultimate. I’ve just always wanted to do anything possible to promote the sport within the state of Colorado.” Krei sold his stake in the Dallas team and bought the franchise rights in this state. “I could have just bought it and been 100 per- cent ownership for the Colorado franchise, but I wanted to make it more of a community-type deal, and I felt like if I bought it myself that other people might look at that as selfi sh,” Krei recalls. “I sent out an email to everybody I knew and said, ‘Listen, I’m buy- ing into this Colorado franchise; would anybody else be interested in buying into it?’” Darin DeLay and three others responded, forming the original ownership team of fi ve in 2014 and securing the rights to a Colo- rado team. DeLay, the urban design manager for the City of Arvada, had started playing the game when he tore his kidney in half playing lacrosse at Ball State University. The school wouldn’t let him play lacrosse anymore, he recalls, but okayed ultimate because it involves less contact. When he moved to Colorado, DeLay immersed himself in the ultimate scene, playing on league teams or- ganized by USA Ultimate. As he’s aged, he’s graduated from the open-level Johnny Bravo team to the masters-level Johnny Encore to the grand-masters Johnny Walker. Krei currently plays on the great-grand masters team, Johnny Cashed. But even though Krei and DeLay had the rights, the AUDL was hesitant to put a team in the state because travel costs to games would be so high. Teams on the West Coast, in the Midwest, on the East Coast and in the South were close enough to drive to games, but every team would have to fl y in order to play in Colorado. “I like to think that nobody wanted Colo- 8 rado in the AUDL because they’re afraid of the bite they were gonna get from the dog that we can put on the fi eld,” DeLay jokes. Finally, after years of frustrating delays that caused the other three original owners to sell their shares, the league contacted Matt Krei (front left) and Darin DeLay bought the franchise rights in 2014; Dave Wiseman (top left) and Joe “Smash” Anderson are on the Colorado Summit. about bringing us in as an expansion.” In fact, Colorado is one of three new teams, along with the Salt Lake Shred and the Portland Nitro. That brings the total number of teams in the league to 22, and the owners had to work quickly to make it happen here. At the same time that the league was pushing to expand, Sal Pace, a former state representative and Pueblo County commis- sioner who now works for the Marijuana Policy Project and the US Cannabis Council, was looking to buy into the AUDL. Although he doesn’t play as competitively — the other owners are going to the World Masters Ultimate Club Championships in Limerick, Ireland, in June — he’s been playing for about thirty years, has introduced his children to the sport, and loves the ultimate community. When Pace asked the AUDL about start- ing a Colorado team, the league connected him with Krei. The two had lunch to dis- cuss a buy-in, and Pace was soon on board. DeLay, Krei and Pace were open to other owners, too. Krei reached out to Jim Nolte, who owns Ultimate Lending Team, a mortgage-loan business in Colorado, and has played ulti- mate since 1995. A number of his clients play the game, and Nolte and Krei had become friends through clubs. Nolte agreed to join DeLay and Krei in 2021. “They were like, ‘Hey, we’re ready to an- nounce Colorado as an expansion franchise. Are you guys ready?’” DeLay recalls. “We’ve been waiting for ten years with very minimal action to kind of get it to happen…and then, fi nally, it was like the AUDL was serious the ownership team. Pace knew Emily Hanson from his days at the Capitol, where she’s a legislative liaison for the Colorado Department of Human Services; he invited her to join the group, too. Combined, the fi ve owners have over 100 years of experi- ence playing ultimate, Pace says. No matter how wild a legisla- tive session gets, Hanson says that she always makes time for ultimate. After discovering the game in high school, she formed the fi rst women’s ultimate team at Luther College in Iowa. In Col- orado, she helped combine the two main women’s club teams, Box Lunch and Rare Air, into a joint team called Molly Brown. From there, she’s graduated to Molly Grey and Molly Blue. “I know they were really interested in making sure that the owner group wasn’t, for lack of a better term, a bunch of old white men making deci- sions, and they wanted to have some different perspectives,” Hanson says. “I felt like that was something I could offer, both in my involvement with the community in Colorado outside of the club series, and then with the women’s sports and the women who play out in Colorado — making sure we’re bringing those voices into what we’re creating as a team.” Once the ownership group was set, it moved quickly to get the team off the ground. Hanson estimates that the owners did a year’s worth of work in a few months, because they knew they couldn’t pass up the chance to have a Colorado team this year. The league had offered the option of starting in either 2022 or 2023, Krei recalls: “As I started talking to [Pace], at fi rst we were like, well, the 2022 season might be really quick. The more we also quick for the Dallas franchise, but the league didn’t have as many specifi cations for stadiums and other guidelines back then, making the work in Colorado a bit more complicated — but also less confused. “With Dallas, we just picked a high school,” he says. “It was a high school fi eld, and it might have been a private high school or a nicer high school, but there weren’t any requirements for lockers or showers or any of that stuff. It was just, ‘If you can hold a game somewhere, just hold the game somewhere.’” Securing the University of Denver’s Peter Barton Lacrosse Stadium as a venue for all the team’s home games was the toughest part of preparing for the 2022 debut from a logistics standpoint, Krei says. Even tougher was coming up with a name. “We probably lost weeks of productiv- ity working on the team name,” Pace says, but they’re happy with the result. The process involved checking each pos- sibility for copyright issues as well as doing a Google search of the potential name to make sure it wouldn’t take people to an undesir- able website; the owners also worried about the potential for offensive slogans or slips of the tongue. For example, DeLay and Krei originally thought that naming the team the Colorado Double Blacks would be a fun nod to the state’s ski industry. But the league pointed out that announcers calling the game might shorten the name to the Colorado Blacks, which could be offensive. The Stampede was another suggestion, but the league is moving away from any names that con- note violence. The Dallas team, which had been the Roughnecks, is now the Legion. So Stampede was out. Ultimately, the owners decided on the Summit because the name fi ts with their values: To reach the summit, you have to make a journey — and each part of the jour- ney needs to be executed with care. The league didn’t love the name at fi rst, Delay recalls, saying it was too generic. But once the owners explained the meaning, the league got on board. To make sure the team was as inclusive as possible, the owners de- Mathieu Agee lays out to score in the Summit’s game against the Seattle Cascades. started talking about it, and then getting [Hanson] and [Nolte] on board as well, then it was kind of a mutual decision of, ‘Let’s just shoot for 2022.’” Krei remembers that the process was cided to call it the Colorado Summit, rather than tie it to Boulder, Denver or Fort Collins. During the run-up to the announcement of the Colorado Summit last December, Hanson says, the continued on page 10 MAY 26-JUNE 1, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com EVAN SEMÓN JONNY RED / @J.RED_PHOTOGRAPHY
