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Western’s ultimate rises

Let go of your stick, drop your balls and pick up a disc.

Ultimate is one of the fastest growing sports in North America with university teams turning up across the country.

“It’s like a combination of basketball and football because with basketball you can’t move with the ball and it’s the same concept of getting a touchdown in football except that we can’t run it in,” Jordan Meron, the Western Sharks women’s team captain, explained. “It takes the hardest parts of a bunch of sports and puts it into one game. You have to run, catch and throw.”

Despite what many people think, ultimate is much more than just catching a Frisbee.

“It involves a lot more strategy than people give it credit for. It is not just like running around,” Kyla Garvey, one of the Western Sharks cutters, said.

Unlike many sports at Western, the ultimate team is not a varsity sport. The Sharks do, however, represent Western in intercollegiate ultimate.

“A lot of Western teams have to pay fees and our tournaments are pretty inexpensive so it would probably end up costing us more to be recognized,” Meron explained. “It’s just better for us to do our own thing.”

The Sharks finished strong at the end of the 2010 season with the Open team walking away with the silver medal at the Canadian University Ultimate Championships and the women’s team capturing bronze. The open and women’s team entered the 2011 season with titles to uphold.

This year’s Nationals took place in Waterloo on October 14-16 where both teams had to brave the heavy rain and strong winds to defend their titles.

“At Nationals we had the crazy weather and the more experienced, strong teams really pulled away from the weaker teams, so we had the advantage there because we were stronger in those aspects,” Meron said. “We can play a really strong zone defence so we were able to thrive more in that weather.”

The women’s team faced Queen’s in the final game where both teams were put to the test. During the Eastern Championships, Queen’s walked away in second place with the Sharks in fifth so they had a lot to prove.

“When we got to the finals we had played Queen’s twice already this season and we had beat them by a lot, so we thought we could win, but then we blew it and disappointed ourselves and lost,” Meron explained.

Western started off strong, scoring the first two points. Queen’s got onto the scoreboard at the 21 minute mark.

“Being a really athletic team we kept the intensity up for the whole game,” Garvey said.

Both Western and Queen’s fought a hard fight but within the last seven minutes Queen’s tied it up 6-6 and in the last five minutes got the final goal winning 7-6.

“We knew we were going to do really well because last year we came third and we didn’t lose any players so we knew we would be strong. But the weather was really crazy so it would have been anybody’s game so we were really happy to make it to the finals,” Meron explained.

The Sharks Open team did not finish this season as strong as last year.

“Our team needs more experience,” Ryan Leung, the Sharks open teams captain, explained. “It is about building up experience because a lot of the new players haven’t played in tournaments like that before.”

Their inexperience was detrimental during the CUUC finals as the Open team placed 12th out of 19 teams.

“We had a lot of turnover this year—ten people graduated last year who were all very key so this year we started rebuilding,” Leung said. “We expected that we wouldn’t do as well as last year  [...] Next year is going to be a lot better.”

With such short seasons, both the open and women’s teams rely on teammates to practice individually during the off-season.

“We need a little bit more time to play together because we had only been playing for a couple of weeks before Nationals came along and we kept getting better,” Meron said. “I think if we could have had another two weeks we could have peaked and beat any other team easily.”

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