Scobel Wiggins Photography

Everyone knows Seattle has one of the biggest youth scenes in the world, hosting Spring Reign which fields 44 middle school teams (plus the 36 high school teams and 8 Elementary school teams). In Spring, the DiscNW League (23 schools with 45 teams) hits Magnuson Park every Saturday for a round of games.

Unfortunately, therein lies the problem; its only in the spring, leaving most of these kids all summer, fall, and winter with no Ultimate to play. Given the select few who go to Seattle Public Schools get to play in the Fall, most just have to wait a whole another year till the next spring season begins.

High schoolers have the easy fix to this problem: MoHo. MoHo is a youth club team that started back in the late 1990's but now has grown to become more of a youth clinic for kids looking to play more and improve. It happens all year round, no matter the weather. This group has spit out some of the best players from the Seattle area. In 10th grade I started attending MoHo every week even during the Spring, each week was different, a new skill, a new assistant coach from the Seattle club teams, and a new couple kids who heard how awesome it was. By the end of my senior year, we had 45-50 kids a practice.

I also started coaching around 10th grade (but didn't really get serious about it until 2006) when I realized that all these middle school kids I was coaching kept asking for more once the season was over—more Ultimate, as much as possible. The following summer was when the idea finally came to me for Mini MoHo. The same general concepts that MoHo holds, but applied to a younger group. With hopes of becoming a feeder program for MoHo and the Seattle High School teams we had our first practice in the Summer of 2006.

With the help of DiscNW I was able to email all the coaches and parent organizers from the middle school spring league to spread the word. We held a couple practice on some poached fields around Seattle, getting 6-10 kids a practice. Though small, the kids were improving fast, we enforced their basic throwing skills and even moved on to low releases and long throws. We worked on all kinds of defenses—man and zone—and even took requests from these kids. After all these practices were for them, not us. We often spent half of the practice working on a new skill or expanding on one we already knew and the second half scrimmaging 3v3, 4v4, or playing Mini. These kids got a lot of touches on the disc and that was what was important.

We continued with sporadic practices through 2007 but have had a bit of a falling out due to coaching conflicts. But a new group has grown out of wanting to play more. This is Small Fryz, a group of mostly private school kids in Seattle with a core group of them from the original Mini MoHo crew. The kids had practiced through the summer and even played a showcase game against Mercer Middle School in a Worlds preview game in Seattle. Some of these kids have moved on to high school and are going to become major impact players on their schools teams.

In November, Mini MoHo started up again, with fields provided by DiscNW, with hopes of bringing together all the Seattle youth middle school players that want to play more.

The greatest part about all these programs is that is has the option of being completely free. Attending practices is open to anyone from any school free of charge because the fields are provided to us. It only ends up costing if players want to attend tournaments, travel, or buy jerseys, but none of this is required. Coaches are all volunteers just wanting to help out and give back to the community.

Shannon O'Malley created and ran the Mini MoHo program in Seattle. She is currently playing with the University of Washington and Seattle Riot, and is a former MoHo player herself.