Grinnell's Story

My second post about D-III Nationals turned into this…a post I’ve been trying to write in different variations, literally, for years. It explains my motivations for starting this blog, and shows, I hope, how a lot of what I covered in other posts applies to my experiences in college ultimate.

Two years ago or so, maybe longer, my team had a crazy idea: if we worked hard, harder than ever before, we could do great things and maybe surprise ourselves with how far we could get. Sounds simple, right? I started this blog after playing a bunch of good schools in the fall of 2008 and trying to think about what advantages they had over us and how they got to where they did—in some cases, nationals. I thought a lot about size and location and coaches and the growth of ultimate and women’s ultimate, but at a certain level, you can’t beat grit and determination and a desire to want to do better. I learned just how hard that is to implement on a team, but I was also a part of my best ultimate season to date.

Grinnell College is a small, liberal arts school in rural Iowa with about 1,500 students. Unlike many other small schools, we have had an ultimate team for a long time, going back into the 90s, and a women’s team consistently since the early 2000s. We always had a core group of players, and for the four years I was on the team, that core expanded to include more people and more dedication to the sport. This was an important first step in getting us to Appleton last May: dedication to ultimate as a sport, not just a way to get in some fun games and fun times. The two captains my freshman year began the push that culminated in us making Division III Nationals three years later. They said: look, we’re going to be more serious and we’re going to play to win in the spring. They held a few tentative sprint practices once the snow cleared, and a history professor (who has since left Grinnell) helped us with some practices and our zone defense. Despite their efforts and leadership, we didn’t make it past Sectionals that year. The next year, we built even more. We got a big class of first years (who are currently leading the team as seniors) and made regionals.

The next year, my junior year and first as a captain, I started doing a lot of thinking about ultimate beyond the confines of our team and our school, and started talking with my teammates about pushing us to the next level. At that point, we weren’t really sure what that meant—D-III Nationals were still unofficial and didn’t include a women’s side, and though we sometimes thought, “if all of us train harder than anyone has ever trained, we can make D-I Nationals,” we all knew the reality was different in a region that included Carleton and Wisconsin. But we started asking ourselves more realistic questions like, “if our team had mandatory track practices, would you come?” or, “if playing time at tournaments didn’t solely depend on practice attendance, would you come to the tournament? Would you want to be a part of a Grinnell ultimate team like that?” For some people reading this, those questions may seem odd and a given for any team hoping to be at least a little competitive, but for us, given the culture and years of tradition on our team, they were new concepts. Because, despite efforts in recent years, Grinnell was still a team based on the principle of giving everyone who came to practice, regardless of talent, equal playing time, and a team that demanded far less in terms of time from people than varsity sports. The mentality of the team was at times wholly different from the stereotypical, ultra-competitive, win-at-all-costs mentality of other sports. We were, foremost, about having fun and spirit and inclusion than going into tournaments with the goal of winning as many games as possible. We began seriously questioning in the fall of 2008 whether we could keep that Grinnell ultimate spirit, but win more games and push ourselves harder than ever before.

Around this time I also started talking to other teams about how they made the push to the next level. I had contact with a player on Maryland, fresh off of their first nationals appearance, with local players on Luther, another small-school team in our section that was improving by leaps and bounds, and then with one of those captains from my first year who went to grad school at Michigan and to nationals with Flywheel in 2008.

All of these “sources,” despite coming from different types of teams in different stages of development, had three things in common when I asked about their success:

1. A and B teams, or at least the ability to pick from a large group of players to form an elite core.

2. A coach or an outside authority to at least come to some practices and to help with tournaments.

3. Conditioning, conditioning, conditioning.

For us, one and two weren’t feasible at the time. I do think that Grinnell and other small schools can be more aggressive and creative with recruiting talent to their teams. If Luther can have an A and a B team some years, and Carleton an A, B, C and countless intramurals, then Grinnell can as well, but it will take planning and effort. Number two is still a challenge for Grinnell and for other rural schools. The ultimate community in Iowa is already spread out, and finding someone to make the hour+ drive from Iowa City or Des Moines or Ames to help us out remains a challenge, particularly because many of the club players in the state are alums of other schools, and would likely dedicate their talents to their own teams. Even teams who traditionally haven’t had coaches do have dedicated alumni to help them out…but, again, not many alums stick around the 9,000-strong town of Grinnell after graduation and there is no grad school at our tiny institution.

The final point, though, was something we worked on. It was driven due to an increased love for ultimate as a sport—a dedication and a study of it, and, in some quarters, even an obsession with it—that had not happened in a team-wide sense before. I can’t fully describe this change. Certainly part of it was an influx of younger players who had played in high school, and who brought an intensity and varsity-athlete mindset to our team, not to mention a few fall varsity athletes themselves who joined the team in the winter after their seasons were over. Some of it was the men’s team obsessing about good open club and college teams and spreading along that obsession, through Ultivillage DVDs and endless chatter about the current season. Part of it was playing against amazing teams in our own region and being inspired by the athletes and superstars on them. And part of it was discovering the ultimate blogosphere, RSD, and then all the videos and pictures and history and stories you can find on the web about ultimate. I feel like the online ultimate world is getting more consolidated and organized now, but just two and a half years ago, it felt sort of like a treasure hunt, trying to find the best highlight reels, discussions of strategy, and tournament write-ups among a loose confederation of blogs and websites.

However it happened, Grinnell became more and more interested in ultimate, and in a lot of ways, took the game more seriously than ever before. I would go so far as to say there was a real shift in team identity. Grinnell attended Midwest Throwdown last spring and had Cara Crouch as our guest coach for the weekend as a part of the Roundup Division. I wrote a piece for the Huddle about that experience, if you are interested, but the closing paragraph of that piece reads:

"In fact, one of the best moments of the weekend came when Cara called a rookie line. Our seven newest players took to the field and scored. They used the new skills they had learned, but also displayed the confidence Cara gave our whole team. Having her cheering from the sidelines, making in-game adjustments, and telling us about her own experiences helping to build the Texas team into the powerhouse it is today all helped us realize the potential we have on our team. That was maybe the most important lesson I took from the weekend. We have enormous potential for growth and now, more so than ever before, we have the tools and knowledge to improve, along with the excitement and desire to work hard that comes from spending a weekend with a world champion Ultimate player."

That tournament opened our eyes in so many ways. It was part of the continued growth and awareness on our team that we could be better, and had the tools to do so. We got the younger players hooked on the sport itself, as well as on Grinnell ultimate in particular, with its traditions and tournaments and team culture. I think this is intimately tied in to realizing a potential for growth. The team identity at Grinnell turned more into the identity of a sports team, with a responsibility to train and with goals to win. This is why, especially in the spring season, we could make big team changes—holding more conditioning practices than ever and also subbing competitively at every spring tournament we attended.

These changes may not seem like much, but they represented a big transformation in the way things had been done before. True, some people had always hit the gym and the track independently of the team, and we had always subbed competitively in the college series. But to make those changes team-wide and season-wide was a big step in a more competitive direction for Grinnell.

This was certainly not without challenges. We still struggled to get people to work out consistently over our five-week winter break. We did not condition as aggressively when we moved outside in March. And I didn’t find a good way to get people to lift, especially to do the most beneficial lifts for an explosive sport like ultimate: squats, deadlifts, and cleans. I, myself, had just started to learn the basics of effective training for ultimate last winter, and I didn’t know how to get women who had never lifted before to get under the bar when I was still unsure of my own technique. Our relationship with the athletic department is shaky at best, and I didn’t look to any strength trainers there to help our unrecognized, decidedly club-status team. Thankfully, a lot has changed in the past year in terms of resources available to teams ready to take the plunge into more effective training—there is more ultimate-specific knowledge than ever on the internet. I think we made a good effort, though, running sprints on our 200 m track and indoor basketball court, inventing conditioning workouts to do in small winter practice spaces, running agility ladder drills, allowing people to teach the team whatever their favorite method of working out was, from yoga to karate, and trying to develop some basic lifting habits.

As for subbing, it caused some problems on the team that were indicative of divides in opinion over the way we were headed. Some older players thought we were getting too competitive and maybe eroding the spirit of what had made Grinnell ultimate special—acceptance of all players interested in the sport, regardless of athletic ability. This was a big sticking point on many levels. We did not have enough players to pick the best and make an A team, so we had to balance having people on the team on one end of the spectrum, with no ultimate and no athletic experience, with people on the other end: high-school ultimate players who had been playing since orientation week their first year or ex-varsity athletes expecting a certain level of competition. For some of the “old guard,” who had come to Grinnell ultimate in my class of freshmen eager to escape the competitiveness of varsity athletics, our changing team culture was tough to swallow. But on the other side, there were players who thought we weren’t competitive enough, and that our subbing at some tournaments should have been more selective. There were communication problems between the captains and the team about expectations for games. By nationals I think we worked most of the snags out, but, as always, not everyone was totally satisfied, and there is always room for improvement. The strategy behind subbing is an important aspect that captains of any team, especially for small, mixed-level teams without coaches, need to work out. Do you put your best lines out at the beginning and play them a lot, hopefully getting a lead over your team and then relax a bit, or do you mix your star players into more open lines, saving legs over the course of a long day? Or, do you try to play entire tournaments with a tight rotation, as some teams at nationals seem to do?

Despite these problems, Grinnell had its best season ever in the spring of 2010. We planned our practices better than ever, and there was more fire in us at those practices, not to mention more women attending than ever before. We played in some of our first-ever pressured game situations and got a feel for how it was to play when the emotions and stakes were high. We followed our rankings closely throughout the year and kept tabs on other teams in our region. We went to the finals of Frostbite in Columbia, Missouri, got to the semis of High Tide in Savannah, Georgia, and really peaked at D-III Nationals, surprising even ourselves by making it to the semis, where we lost against Swarthmore. We came from behind in two of our pool play games on Saturday, won on universe in one, and played the best we have ever played in the quarterfinals game on Sunday. I think not a single person was unaffected by the excitement and determination we felt build throughout the season, bolstered by athletic recruits and a phenomenal, undefeated weekend in St. Louis with Cara Crouch at Midwest Throwdown in March. The excitement over ultimate even continued after the season when a big bunch of us went to Madison to watch D-I Nationals. Everyone on the team that spring became at least a little bit of a student of the game, and at least a little bit more of an athlete, and it showed.

It wasn’t perfect. There are things I would have done differently. But we set a goal in the fall of 2009, once a division III championship had been announced, and we worked to make that goal a reality. In a lot of ways, the team that showed up in Appleton in May was still a little scrappy, short in numbers from seniors missing the competition to attend their college graduation. But we have always been a scrappy team—on the line we don’t look particularly tall or threatening, with a whole host of people with different athletic backgrounds standing shoulder to shoulder, so there was no reason D-III Nationals should have been any different. As ultimate and the prestige of Division III Nationals and the separate conference structure grows, our scrappy team may find itself edged out by small schools that do manage to do everything I have described here more effectively. I do think it is possible, though, for future captains and members of Grinnell women’s ultimate to take what we started building and run with it, while still maintaining a certain team culture that no amount of sprint practices or team strategy sessions or tight sub rotations can beat out of us, because it comes from attending and playing for an oddball little school in the cornfields of Iowa. And looking back on my time wearing the baby blue jersey of that scrappy team in all its iterations, I wouldn’t give up those years for any other team.