Jamie Nuwer

of Fremont, California

What do you envision the organization of non-elite or recreational Ultimate to be for the UPA? Would it be like the Series, or a handful of UPA sponsored tournaments, or something else? What differences should there be between the UPA's elite and non-elite organizing?

Youth Ultimate is undergoing a tremendous amount of growth right now. Competition has been restructured in the last few years to cope with the growth. Currently high school athletes compete in leagues and Western/Eastern championships. Middle schools are organizing leagues. Youth club now has it's own summer series. The UPA has done an excellent job at providing opportunities for high-level competition, but more can be done at the grassroots for new and non-elite teams. Leagues are a good place to start as the number of games can be guaranteed. At the end of the season there can be either a round robin tournament if you want to take the focus off "winning" or a placement tournament. The UPA can assist in providing these opportunites by recruiting more local youth organizer volunteers, similar to "Sectional Coordinators". These volunteers can help organize local youth leagues in the way described above with information, training, and support available from the UPA. (For more information about my stance on growth in youth Ultimate, go to my campaign platform page on my website injurytimeout.org or on my facebook group).

College players are already organized into a structure involving 3 main competition venues: independent tournaments, the Cultimate-sponsored tournaments, and the Championship series. Unfortunately most of these tournaments cater to more elite teams and as the competition gets tougher, more local teams are getting pushed out of their own local tournaments. We could attack this problem in several different ways. We could create more high-level tournaments to spread out the elite teams and make room for more non-elite or new teams at any one venue. We could run more qualifier tournaments before the elite tournaments. Or we could help new or non-elite teams organize their own local tournaments or even league play. While I support the first two options I think the UPA should really focus on the last one. Local tournaments, local growth. The UPA already has resources available on how to run and organize a tournament, we just need to make them more accessible and useful to the members. One idea would be to have the Sectional Coordinator be responsible for assisting with the organization of at least one local non-elite tournament before Sectionals. This would guarantee at least 2 tournaments for new or non-elite teams during the season. League play is definitely a possibility as more colleges in a given area create teams.

Club tends to be more elite than the other divisions with even less opportunity for new or non-elite teams. Mixed has traditionally done a better job than Open or Women's at integrating their non-elite brethren. While there are tournaments that tend to have openings for new teams early in the season, once mid-August comes tournaments become exclusive. One idea is to start some local tournaments on the weekends of big mid-to-late August tournaments then follow that up with Sectionals. This gives new and non-elite teams the opportunity to play in the early season with Elite teams then have a separate, local venue later in the season before Sectionals. The key is creating these local non-elite venues. This could be assisted by the sectional coordinator as mentioned above, or there could be Division II sectional coordinator that could be responsible for a local non-elite tournament before the series. Once a division has enough participation, a Division II Championship Series could be considered. Mixed may already have this critical mass.

Recreational Ultimate is the place where new players can easily be integrated into the Ultimate community. For pickup, the UPA should modernize it's pick-up game webpage to help people post and find pickup games. A posting option (like Craigslist) would be a nice addition to that site for people looking to start a pickup game somewhere and looking for members. For PE classes, the UPA already has a guide for beginners that can be downloaded or purchased for teaching. The key is to get the word out about this fun sport by advertising at PE teachers' conferences and magazines. For league play, the UPA has developed a lot of tools to help league organizers. To expand leagues, the UPA could offer grants to organizers from under-developed areas to travel to the League Organizers conference and create an organizers blog for seasoned and new organizers to learn from each other. For intramurals: this is an area that the UPA has recently focused on for growth. Pitching Ultimate to Intramural departments can be done in the same way as advertising to PE teachers. However, the best impetus is from the student body. College Ultimate teams could be recruited to help the UPA in this effort. Possibly, the UPA could pitch it as a way for College teams to fundraise if the school pays intramural organizers. A whole kit could be developed to use for this purpose.

In summary, the UPA should use a multi-faceted approach to providing infrastructure for growth. What techniques are employed should depend on the division/group being organized and the existing infrastructure in that location. The strategic plan addresses many of these topics already and I will do my best to help implement the plans and improve upon them as necessary.

Regardless of your election results, we at The Huddle believe that your development of Ultimate-specific medical advice (as in the UPA newsletter) is a brilliant addition. Were you to be elected, how would you support growth in this area, without being able to rely on your own volunteer-hours (that will go towards the BOD)?

Worry not, I have a group of people already organized to help me out. I've been integrating them over the past year or so. I have a lot of help with these projects now. Also a lot of my current work on the coaching manual will be done in November. It will be available in the next edition of the UPA Coach's Clinics.

The Huddle's Take: Dr. Nuwer is another excellent board candidate. Her previous work on Observer coordination and Injury Prevention is extremely valuable. In general, we are not in favor of any stance which adds work to volunteer Sectional Coordinators as a tactic for other aims.