Earlier today the three-day tournament in the midst of the World Games in Kaohsiung, Taiwan wrapped up with the United States victorious over Japan, who they lost to earlier in the day in pool play, in the Gold Medal Game 13-6. Australia defeated Canada 13-8 for the Bronze Medal, and Great Britain beat out Chinese Tapei for fifth place.

FINAL STANDING
1. United States (5-1)
2. Japan (4-2)
3. Australia (4-2)
4. Canada (3-3)
5. Great Britain (2-4)
6. Chinese Tapei (0-6)

LINKS ABOUT TOWN
Official UPA Write-ups — UPA Board Member and podcaster extraordinaire Josh Seamon gave us great daily write-ups from the World Games.

UPA Twitter — A great moment-by-moment account of Team USA’s time in Taiwan, with point-by-point updates of every game.

UPA YouTube Channel — As of this writing they have full games of Team USA against Canada and Great Britain, with surely more to come. There’s also a mix of other miscellany.

UPA Flickr Feed — A fantastic collection of photos of Team USA’s trip to Taiwan.

As a sidenote, allow me to commend the UPA for their first-rate coverage of the World Games. Big ups to Josh, Meredith, and the rest of the team for keeping us up-to-date Stateside.

WFDF Tournament Statistics — WFDF provides full tournament stats for goals thrown and caught, broken down my gender as well.

Scobel Wiggins Photography — The incomparable Scobel Wiggins provides us shots of the actions. Some of our favorites below.

PHOTOS

AND, FINALLY…
Last week we received this note from Mike Mullen, Seattle youth Ultimate guru.

A big thank you to Team USA players and coach (Adam Simon, Beau Kittredge, Chelsea Putnam, Liz Duffy, Sam Chatterton-Kirchmeier, Alicia White, Dylan Tunnell, and Coach Greg Connelly) for stopping by for two hours to coach, play, and interact with the campers and counselors at the Central & South Seattle HS Ultimate Day Camp on July 2.

Seattle Youth Ultimate Camps , DiscNW, and Seattle Parks and Recreation teamed up to run the four day gratis day camp to help jumpstart high school single gender programs in south Seattle. The camp was staffed by two paid leads and equipment provided by Seattle Youth Ultimate Camps, the fields and use of the community center was donated by Seattle Parks, DiscNW donated organizational and liability support, and a number of college players and HS 11th and 12th graders volunteered as counselors. Thanks to everyone involved for helping use serve the 25 girls and 35 boys who attended the camp.

Congratulations to Team USA on their Gold Medal, and a big congrats to Huddle authors Gwen Ambler, Chelsea Putnam, and Seth Wiggins!

Do you know Ultimate too well? Do you stay awake waiting for Fantasy Baseball/Football/Basketball season to come around again?

Here’s your chance to enter into our equivalent. Just for fun.

We’re choosing 6-8 ‘Team Owners’ in the Men’s Division and 4-5 in the Women’s Division. Starting on Monday, July 20th, we’ll put out the rules for those owners, and let them draft their teams from any player in the world. After creating those teams, we’ll let our authors have a chance to break down each team on their strengths and weaknesses, and find out who drafted the best squad of 16-18 players.

We’ll also have a couple of ‘experts’ making attempts at breaking down the draft, pick by pick.

Now, for much of the world, I am sure this sounds like serious nerdiness. And it is. But if you are like us and love Ultimate, know what too much about players you’ve never met, and already spend time daydreaming about Professional Ultimate…here’s your chance to put this knowledge into a game.

Players will draft assuming that they are competing to win a 3-day tournament in September. If you draft players that are injured, we’ll assume they can heal by then. If you draft players that aren’t playing this year, we’ll have to hope they can whip themselves into shape quickly. We’ll have some lists of the players we know (we’ll try to put together a list of 300 for Men’s and 200 for Women’s for our Owners to use as a guide). That super-sweet player you know from Croatia that no one else knows about? That’s just good scouting, and totally allowed.

Owners can be anonymous if they want, but they’ll have to announce which team they are playing for…in an attempt to broaden horizons, our drafting rule is that no team can have more than 2 players currently playing with the Team Owner. Interesting situations that we haven’t accounted for will be voted on by the Owners (or we’ll find a Commissioner to rule on it).

We’ve set up what we think is a decent solution for how to do drafting efficiently and effectively, and we’ll be posting the results for all to see on the following week (assuming no untoward delays).

If you are interested in contributing as an Owner in either division, or as a Commentator on either division, we have a couple of spots left for each role! Let us know at info@the-huddle.org, and we’ll fill those spots on a first-replying basis. If you sign up, but it turns out you don’t know your players as well as you thought….well, you probably won’t win our Fantasy League Prize (we have something for the winner in each division, which we will keep if the Editors team wins it all)!

We hope this is a chance for people to have fun, and to give interested readers a chance to know more about and celebrate individual players at the top of their game.

Keep an eye out for the results coming soon!
Ben & Andy

What do we know about selecting an Executive Director for a large non-profit governing body? Essentially, nothing.

I can only imagine the difficulty in reaching out to a global marketplace and trying to find that single best person to fill a complicated role. Matching skills with future goals is hard enough, let alone trying to find a person that has all of the skills, and will work for your asking price.

In my discussions with UPA members and administrators, price is a major issue; people with the skills that we want as an ED are usually taking a step down, salary-wise, and they are doing it for love of the game or because the job is an especially good fit for them.

Sandie Hammerly was the longest standing ED in UPA history. She presided over a time of tremendous growth and massive increase in player numbers around the USA and beyond. She wasn’t perfect, and despite her success her harsh working style rankled with UPA administrators and members over many issues. Sandie was an iron fist, which is exactly what we were looking for when we found her. Coming from another sport, and with a history of leading non-profits with determination and a nose for protecting the organization’s rights, Sandie was the right choice to lead a UPA that was increasingly dealing with outside for-profit institutions that might otherwise have leaned too hard on the UPA at a cost to us all.

Before Sandie, Joey Gray was an excellent ED at developing bonds to the greater Ultimate community. Like, say, Mixed. But she wasn’t as well equipped to deal with hungry corporations, so when she was done we went looking for (and found) Sandie, who was ready to play tough. The gains we’ve made in the past 5 years cannot be ignored, nor can Sandie’s direct contributions to them. For every coach or team that didn’t get along with Sandie well, or every would be collaborator that was irked, there was a contract or negotiation that was handled professionally and resolutely. From Ben’s experience with CSTV broadcasts of the College Championships, it is clear that without Sandie the game would have been portrayed extremely poorly by a group of editors with little invested in the growth of the game. It was Sandie, by persistence and demanding perfection, that kept those broadcasts useful.

We are in the midst of our next ED search, and it remains to be seen what the UPA has determined are the most important criteria. Even with perfect criteria, there is no guarantee that a qualified individual with the right skills and the right price exists. Given the limitations (and understanding that priorities in these areas mean likely taking on weaknesses in other areas), we propose that the UPA focus on three main strengths.

Most important, to us, is finding an Advocate for the game. We want someone that can walk into a room and really sell Ultimate, both to outside parties and also to the players that have such a stake in the game. The biggest question here: Does this necessarily mean a present or former Ultimate player? We don’t think it is necessary, but non-insiders will need to be able to develop and portray a profound appreciation for the game. This is something that Sandie was never able to do as well as we wanted (keeping in mind that this was seriously de-prioritized when we were hiring at that time). We need a Salesperson.

Secondly, we need an ED that can consolidate the UPA’s view into media outlets. We want an ED that will talk to us. Website announcements, UPA newsletter articles, something…we feel that a major problem with the current state of the UPA is that most of the great things that are being done are almost totally secretive, unless you already know where to look. Did you know that a GrandMaster’s and Women’s Master’s tournament was held this past weekend, driven by the UPA (after intelligently taking up the momentum built up by other Master’s advocates)? Publicity is paramount, and as much as we need a great director we need someone to tell us where that direction lies. We need a Speaker.

Thirdly, we need to develop the UPA into an institution that can join the Ultimate players, coaches and developers around the country. Someone must be able to find a way to leverage the UPA’s resources (both financial and, perhaps more importantly, influential, computational and mechanical) to help the small groups around the nation…and world? As it stands, the UPA is an initial developer of programs. It could be more effective by broadening the tendrils of intelligent support for independent program developers, allowing the UPA to act as a meeting place, a coordinator, an administrator of people from different backgrounds and ideas to bring great ideas forward. We love the UPA Innovation Grants Program (as should be obvious, since we received a $750 grant for this site) but we want the UPA to be, at it’s heart, an Innovation Grant Collaboration. Where would we be without Rodney’s online tools or the NUTC camps or the UCPC or Ultivillage? Where is the next great idea, and when it comes out, will the UPA have a Director than can recognize and support its value? We need a Joiner.

In a perfect world, we take those three skills in a former player who loves the game, works tirelessly, speaks passionately, and wants to work for lift tickets in Colorado. Given that this is unlikely to be in large supply, we trust that our Board is looking for the best Director possible, and we wish Sandie Hammerly well and send our gratitude to her for her long and fruitful reign.

Partnering with a government sporting agency, a group of Ultimate players and administrators in Medellin, Colombia are hosting a tournament as the focal point of a two-week Ultimate event including camps, meetings, and team activities.

Interested in more information? Check out www.tepmedellin.com. Look for the small red buttons to the bottom right, especially for the link to Brochure.

Potlatch will be in full effect this weekend in Redmond, Washington, and I just wanted to say that I hope everyone has a great time, and that I hope more than a few people get a layout block on Ben.

I, unfortunately, will not be making it out this year. Sad, I know.

If you have a chance to, say hi to and thank a Huddle author. Their time and commitment to writing for the site makes it what it is. And if you have any ideas or input for the site, you can find Ben somewhere at the field. He’s the billy-goat looking one. With glasses.

Also, as we mentioned in our feature this week on Race In Ultimate, Downtown Brown will be opening up their circle to everyone for the very first time this year. Find the brown players wearing the orange, yellow, and brown, and say hi.

Lastly, check out this story from KUOW (NPR in Seattle). On The Conversation, Ross Reynolds interviews Bunny Bartram, DiscNW executive director about Potlatch. Near the end, in a moment that makes me proud, Bunny talks about “the coolest thing he ever saw at Potlatch:”

Well, last year there was team called Man Powered Submarine, and they in fact made a man powered submarine. And while it didn’t actually go under the water, they did in fact carry it eight miles down the trail to the park site to play at the tournament.

AWOOOGAH! So good luck to my team Man Powered Submarine, good luck to defending champs DropCop (née DropBull, née DropBear), and everyone have a great time. Wish I were there.

UPDATE
Ben here. A couple of notes on this year’s Potlatch:

1. This is probably the most competitive Potlatch ever, with Team USA/Canada, Jewbilation and Downtown Brown at full strength and with competitive rosters, a returning champ, a huge Seattle All-Star team called Wedding Party Diaper Sniper, not to mention Vagabonds from Oregon.

2. Man Powered Submarine versus Squid Squad. Showcase. Or not? Shhhhh…

3. DropCop, returning champs, is on a mission to save partying from those that do it poorly. To Protect and Serve Drinks. To make sure Potlatch happens again.

4. There have been Potlatch related parties starting last Friday, and tons of Potlatch related events in the last two or three days. Seattle always seems to be a little crazy, this is no exception (maybe the crazyiest I have ever felt it).

5. Last time the fourth fell on a Potlatch night was the year of the Flashflight Game in the midst of a fireworks show. That was a night that is still seered into my retinas (PS No fireworks on the field, please! As per Potlatch rules).

6. Potlatch is going to a no-under-18 model this year. For liability reasons? Too bad, but probably for the best. They are taking up a collection to benefit Seattle Youth Ultimate.