Part 3: Changes are Bad for the Players

These changes are bad for the players:

Much of what I said about teams applies to players. The lack of development time, the lack of time to really bond, the idea of having a proper season start when the weather turns nice and end just before the weather stops being so nice in most of the country.

The tryout process is truncated and inherently less fair. Teams may try to pack in tournaments every other week (good luck with injuries) or just go into the series way less prepared, or go to tournaments in march, with skeletal rosters (sans college players) in weather way colder than what the series will bring.

But mostly players might stop playing ultimate. It's not a perfect subset, for a number of reasons, but we have a real life example. There used to be a masters division concurrent with open and mixed and womens. You couldn't play both at the same time.



Now masters is a black sheep division. No need for sectionals, everyone goes straight to regionals. It's hard to know exactly how many teams there were nationally (I'm tempted to look it up), and I know the redrew the map, so regional comparisons aren't fully fair. This comparison is fair though:
Masters nationals this year on the men's side only has 13 teams. As in only 13 teams accepted their bid to nationals. One region had a 2 team regionals with 2 bids, only one team accepted their bid.
In my region (Mid-atlantic). There were two teams, loaded mostly with players still playing in other divisions for the fall, many on top tier teams that are in strong contention for nationals bids. There were two other teams, who were literally paid by the host team (in bottles of fine scotch) just to bring a team out for regionals to make sure we had the right number of teams for bids or whatever. 4 years ago, there was a 7 team masters regionals, with some teams clearly better than others, but all masters players. There may be some effect and competition from grandmasters (which like women's masters is a straight trip to nationals for the most part), but mostly participation is down with a summer series.

The numbers don't look quite so bad (still down of course), but that's only because of double dippers, players playing both Masters plus another division (which may have scared off some teams admittedly as well).


Jimmy Holtzman called it on RSD a few years ago when they were moving that series to the summer. It's a really hard sell to go to nationals then, especially if you have a wife and kid. Summer vacations with the family on many teams are acceptable if you miss a practice or two, or some non-series tournament. What happens now that the tournament is Nationals or maybe regionals?


Lastly, there's the elephant in the room on the men's side. MLU/AUDL. The first year of semi-pro ultimate was awkward for sure. Some teams heavy handedly banned players from summer league and things like that, but at this point, the semi-pro teams realize they need to be cooperative with the community, and have done a great job with it (the Boston Whitecaps gave 2 tickets to every team at Mixed easterns for example). Clubs have learned to deal with the pro league schedule, as for the most part many players become available not long after the college players do, and many double dip with practices for both teams. Clearly now a player won't be able to play both. Which is of course probably makes USA-U happy, they will take a few years of lower participation to reclaim a monoply in the long run.