The Rocky Mountains are uncharted territory for at least one group of Ohio University club athletes, but those students will have a chance to climb to new heights for their program.
The Ohio men’s club frisbee team will finish its year in Boulder, Colo., rounding out its best and most rewarding season in more than 25 years.
Boulder is the site of this year’s Division I USA Ultimate College Championships, and for the first time since the event’s inauguration in 1984, Ohio will be participating.
The path to Nationals has already taken the squad to Versailles, Ohio, for the USA Ultimate Ohio Division I College Open Championships — which it won — and to State College, Penn., for the Ohio Valley Division I College Open Regionals.
Ohio went 5-1 at regionals, earning its trip to Nationals with a 15-8 win against Ohio State in the second-place game. The team’s lone loss came at the hands of Pittsburgh, projected to be a top-five seed in the national tournament. The Bobcats finished the regular season ranked 13th in the country.
Because the club team receives little money from the university, the cost for the trip will be paid by the players themselves as well as through alumni donations and fundraisers. Senior co-captain Andy Ball said the team will have to book its own flights, rental cars and hotels. He estimated the trip will cost about $11,000.
Despite the unfamiliarity of both Colorado and the national tournament, the Bobcats are not going to back down from the challenge of playing with the country’s best ultimate teams.
“The team is definitely not just happy to be there,” Ball said. “We plan on making some noise once we get there.”
Ohio’s regular season schedule, as well as its current training regimen, gives the Bobcats reason to be confident heading into the national tournament. The squad has faced some of the top teams in the country already and has lots of experience to draw on during crunch time.
“We have been competing against Nationals-level competition throughout the season,” Ball said. “We are currently preparing for the high altitude by adding more conditioning at practice, doing track workouts and warming up and doing drills only breathing through our noses.”
The Bobcats have had lots of ups and downs since their latest trip to the national tournament in the mid-1980s. In 1997, the team was within a game of going to Nationals before losing that play-in game. The 2006 squad finished fifth in its region and 35th in the country, but the Bobcats again barely missed their chance to play on the national stage.
One of the most experienced players on the team, Nick Wetzel, said this season’s run has created quite a buzz from those close to the program.
“Our coach was an alum, and he said he’s gotten tons of emails and phone calls and texts from former players,” Wetzel said. “Past and present players are all pretty excited about it.”
Because no player on the team was even alive when the 1984 squad played in the national tournament in Florida, the team is entering completely new territory. Though the team hopes to make the national tournament a more regular part of its season, this first trip is about pushing the limits of performance.
“We’re definitely excited,” Logan Kruger said. “It will be the first tournament that we’ve ever been to that we’ve flown to, so it will be a great team-bonding experience.”
The national tournament features 20 teams that will be divided into four pods of five. The top two teams in each pod after round-robin play will advance to the quarterfinals. The tournament will take place May 25 to 28.
At this point, Kruger said the team is still waiting to find out what seed they will be but expects to be somewhere between 10 and 14.
“Our goal is to make it to the quarterfinals to guarantee a finish in the top eight out of 20 teams,” Ball said. “We have trained too hard and sacrificed so much to not go into the tournament without putting up a fight.”
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