Jackie Wang’s introduction to Ultimate came at a house party during the first week of her freshman year at Cornell, when a classmate encouraged her to try out for the school’s club team. Wang, who played softball and ran cross country and track in high school, told her acquaintance to enter the relevant information into her phone and proceeded to forget about it until a notification appeared a week later. . The tryouts were held near her dorm room, so Wang showed up on a whim, despite knowing almost nothing about the sport she sometimes refers to as Ultimate Frisbee.
More than a dozen years later, Wang is captain of DC Shadow, one of 12 teams in the Premier Ultimate League, a community-supported ultimate professional disc league for women and gender-broad people.
“The idea of playing professional Ultimate is a little far-fetched,” Wang, who is in his third year with Shadow, said in a recent video interview. “My parents say, ‘Wait, you?’”
With two weeks left in the 2024 PUL regular season, the Shadow is 4-0 and boasts the league’s best differential of plus-42 points. As DC eyes its first championship and many of its players begin preparations for the club’s upcoming season, Wang and Shadow officials are looking for ways to increase team awareness and strengthen the league in the future.
Professional Ultimate arrived in 2012 with the inaugural season of the American Ultimate Disc League. The District received an expansion team, the DC Breeze, in 2013, and although the league was officially open to all, it wasn’t until 2017 that Jesse Shofner became the first woman to start an AUDL game.
After the season, Shofner and more than 150 others, including dozens of AUDL men’s players, pledged to boycott the league, which this year was renamed the Ultimate Frisbee Association, if it did not ensure that men and women had equal representation in 2018.
Kelly Ross, who had played top-level club football in D.C. since being introduced to the sport through a friend of a roommate at U-Va., joined the newly formed DC Breeze Gender Equity Committee and volunteered with the unaffiliated Club Players Coalition, which was dedicated to increasing playing opportunities, supporting college programs and hosting youth clinics in the region.
Following the boycott, the PUL was founded in 2018. The league debuted in 2019 with eight teams, including one from Medellín, Colombia. When PUL officials announced expansion plans in 2020, Ross helped lead the effort to bring a team to DC.
Ross found an important ally in David Tornquist, who became involved in the junior youth scene in Arlington, Virginia, after his daughter, Caroline, began playing the sport when she was in eighth grade at the HB-Woodlawn high school program and went on to play at Dartmouth. .
“I was retired and I thought this was a great opportunity to give the people I was exposed to a chance to play and highlight how good they were,” said Tornquist, who covered the Shadow’s $5,000 entry fee and remains the president and director of the team. treasurer.
Ross tore his ACL in 2019, but planned to serve as an assistant coach for Shadow in their inaugural campaign before the season was canceled due to the coronavirus. The 2021 season was reduced to a postseason tournament, delaying DC’s home opener at Catholic University’s Carlini Field until 2022.
“I cried at the end of that game,” Ross said. “It was great to look up and see this huge stadium filled with all these people I care about cheering us on. “It took four years of work to get to that moment.”
The club’s final regular season lasts 14 weeks, from June to September, followed by sectionals, regionals and nationals. While club teams travel to smaller cities around the country, such as Olathe, Kansas, and Essex Junction, Vermont, to play several games over a weekend, each PUL team plays five or six games of the regular season for 10 weeks.
Pro Ultimate is more spectator-friendly than club, as games are played in stadiums in major cities, including Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Nashville, and players don’t have to worry about preserving their energy to survive the rigors of a multi-day tournament. General admission tickets to Shadow games, which are streamed on YouTube, start at $16, while children 11 and under are free.
Beyond increased visibility, the biggest benefit for professional players, who sign contracts and receive a nominal stipend for each game, is that the PUL covers the cost of uniforms, travel and accommodation. Playing high-level club football can cost thousands of dollars per season.
“We spend a lot of money out of our own pockets to play club games, and we do it happily because we love it,” said Shadow’s Kami Groom, a U.S. national team veteran who discovered the sport at Washington University in St. Louis. “But having the opportunity to have more structure, play in front of fans, play in a different format and not have to pay travel or equipment costs is really exciting.”
PUL teams are often among the best club teams in their geographic area, and Shadow is no exception. While DC’s PUL team has players traveling from Pittsburgh and Kansas City, about half the roster is made up of players who play for DC Scandal, the top women’s club in the region. The DMV has become a hotbed of the latter after sending five club teams to the national championships last year.
The best PUL teams, including Shadow, tend to be the ones with the least turnover from year to year and have a core group of players who have developed chemistry playing together in the club for several seasons.
There are positive signs for the PUL both on the field and in the stands. When Groom started playing competitively, he said it wasn’t unusual for a couple of elite players to carry entire teams. Nowadays, squads are more slick from top to bottom, making earning a spot in the PUL more difficult than ever.
Shadow, who play their final home game Saturday at 7 p.m. against the Austin Torch and can clinch a spot in the four-team PUL championship with a win, are averaging about 500 fans per game. A 2022 partnership forged with the Washington Spirit, Washington Mystics and DC Divas to connect and support the region’s women’s sports teams has helped increase interest in Shadow since its inception. A larger-than-expected crowd braved rainy and windy conditions on May 4 to watch DC’s 13-7 victory over Raleigh Radiance, which defeated Shadow in the semifinals of last year’s PUL championship.
Tornquist has no plans to stop supporting the team, but he is hopeful that the nonprofit league will rely less on donations from generous individuals to survive, perhaps by signing additional sponsors.
“I would like to see us develop a more business-oriented perspective to strengthen all the teams in the league and the league itself,” Tornquist said. “We are starting to do that. “If there was ever a time to try to capitalize on women’s sport, this is it.”
Meanwhile, Shadow is looking for ways to increase interest in the sport, which has seen an increase in participation locally at the youth and high school levels. In DC, a record seven high schools competed in last year’s DCSAA tournament. Shadow hosts youth clinics and regularly highlights youth teams during halftime of home games.
One of Wang’s favorite aspects of Ultimate is the community. After transferring to Penn and graduating in 2013, she met friends playing clubs in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco before moving to DC. She loves the accessibility and inclusivity of PUL and representing the District, and she would like to expose more people to the sport she stumbled upon.
“We can continue to promote the existing fan base or, if we really want to take it to the next level, I think it’s important to bring non-definitive players to the stadium,” he said. “…I never imagined myself as a professional athlete. “I want others to think this is something they can be.”
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