A rousing 7-on-7 pickup game of ultimate frisbee was underway at the Charles Koch Arena field on Monday evening during the Ultimate Frisbee Club’s weekly practice. Coach Kristoffer Broadley, seeing about 20 people on the sidelines, set up cones for another field, and a second game took shape.
It’s a far cry from what practices looked like two years ago, when the club struggled to attract even 10 players.
Broadley helped found the team in 2019, but after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down games for a year, the club was revived in 2021.
“Every year we get three or four more players,” Broadley said. “It’s looking like this year, we’re getting seven, eight, so we’re really looking forward to seeing what we can build with the team we have this year.”
The club participates in tournaments during the spring semester.
Broadley said that last year, they finished around the middle of all the college teams in the country, which is a big improvement from previous seasons.
“Before 2022, we were building, and we didn’t have very many players,” Broadley said. “We’d go to tournaments with 10 people, and you need seven on the field at a time. And so if you’re playing eight games with 10 people, you’re completely tired by the end.”
Logan Langel, now a junior, joined the team on a whim during his freshman year when he saw the club tabling outside the RSC. Despite having never played before, he says he fell in love with the sport quickly.
“I mean, of course I was really bad at throwing and catching at the time, but I’d say a couple of weeks in I was able to play at a somewhat okay level,” Langel said. “And (I got) really good, I’d say about our fall part of the season. And then I was able to throw and catch confidently and have a lot more fun playing.”
Langel says that the quick improvement and team culture are what he enjoys most about the club.
“Even though sometimes you might miss a shot or something, your teammates are always there to help you and cheer you up,” he said. “It’s a very happy sport.”
Eden Broomes, a junior who had zero interest in ultimate frisbee until her boyfriend convinced her to try it out last spring, is trying to recruit more girls to join the club so a woman’s team can be formed.
“I think it’s very important to go out and meet new people and try new things,” Broomes said. “If you like the competitive aspect of it, if we get a big enough team together, we could go to tournaments.”
Broadley said that the team has two primary goals this year: play well enough at the postseason sectional tournament to compete at the regional level and keep recruiting players to the club.
“To come out and continue competing as much as they can, as much as they want to, and have a really good time with a team, that’s not an experience a lot of people get outside of high school,” he said. “And so being able to provide that here is the goal.”
The club meets from 6:30 to 8 p.m. every Monday at the Koch Arena field, south of the arena and west of Shocker Hall.
