Basketball, hockey, field hockey, soccer, football and lacrosse are the common sports we all know and cherish as a part of Deerfield’s athletic tradition. While these conventional co-curriculars require great skill, strength, and athleticism, there is a new team in the mix, one which proves that, in order to play, all you need is a plastic disc and the will to compete.
Jem Wilner ’11 worked for most of his junior year and most of his senior year, to date, to accomplish a relatively simple goal: create a recreational Ultimate Frisbee team.
It was in fact quite difficult, as a team must have a certain number of players and permission to play Ultimate instead of an established Deerfield co-curricular. Unlike Taft, Hotchkiss, Frontier, NMH, Amherst High School, and Andover, prior to this spring, Deerfield did not have any pre-existing team.
This is how Deerfield’s new Ultimate Frisbee team will be training. With practices that include running, sprinting and scrimmaging, all the team can do is move upwards.
“Frisbee isn’t team versus team,” said Wilner, “it’s everybody having fun all the time.”
At a collegiate level, Ultimate grows progressively more intense. Athletes can be recruited to top Frisbee schools such as Cornell, Brown, Texas, UC Santa Barbara, Colorado, Stanford, and Wisconsin.
Commenting on his hopes for the season, Wilner said: “My goal [was] to bring this team from a competitive recreational team to an established varsity sport, like the team of almost every other school we play.”
Although the athletic department has yet to recognize the Ultimate group with an official varsity title, the dream continues as the team grows; in a matter of days it went from 12 to 28 players.
The members of the D.U.C., or the Deerfield Ultimate Coalition, look forward to an exciting season after soundly defeating the first opponent, Frontier Regional High School.