KEITH ENRIQUEZ/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Ultimate player
Kyle "Punky" Smith lays out for the defensive stop
in front of Lucas "Fro" Jones; a term called
"getting ho for the biff."
By Brian Kiley
Daily Bruin Contributor
The game requires the speed and endurance of a soccer
midfielder, the quickness and defensive savvy of a basketball point
guard and the hands of a football receiver.
The team has ranked consistently in the Top 50 in the nation
since its founding in 1996, has never lost to USC and has guys
known as Oddjob, Bruce Wayne and Air Baron.
The game is Ultimate Frisbee, and the team is UCLA’s club
team, Smaug.
Smaug (pronounced “smog”), which gets its name from
a character in J.R.R. Tolken’s novel, “The
Hobbit,” travels to several tournaments per year, competing
against teams from all over the country.
“The season runs for the entire year,” said team
captain Sam Hanig, a fourth-year applied mathematics student.
“Pre-season tournaments are during fall quarter and rankings
are kept starting in January. They don’t count ultimately
until spring quarter when there are sectionals.”
Ultimate Frisbee is played on a 70-by-30-yard field, and each
team’s goal is to advance the disc into its endzone with a
series of passes upfield to teammates. Running while in possession
of the disc is prohibited, and the sport is non-contact. Each team
fields seven players at once, and games are usually played to 11,
13 or 15, depending on the tournament.
The sport requires players to constantly be in great physical
condition because they are always moving when on the field.
“(Ultimate) is literally the most aerobic sport
around,” said Jason Schissel, a first-year physics graduate
student. “It’s even more aerobic than soccer because
all seven players are running all the time. It is so much fun, you
don’t even (realize) that you are working out.”
On tournament weekends, the team drives to the tournament
location. When possible, they stay with families of team members
who live near tournament venues instead of paying for hotels.
“In San Diego at Sam Hanig’s house, every time,
fifteen or sixteen guys will crash at his parents place,”
said Matt Brady, a third-year political science student.
“They’re great people, they feed us really
well.”
Tournaments are usually two-day affairs. In most tournaments,
teams play four games on Saturday, and then the number of games a
team plays on Sunday depend on their record. Tournaments range in
size from eight to 40 teams.
Saturday tournaments are extremely demanding, especially for
those new to the sport.
“Our last game everyone was worn down and everyone was
playing on fumes,” Brady said of his first tournament.
“Everyone just left it on the field. After the game, everyone
across the board was just dead tired. It was memorable in that
I’ll never feel so accomplished and so drained at the same
time.”
Due to the intense nature of the sport, the team spends much of
its practice time conditioning.
“It’s a lot of sprinting and interval work,”
said Smaug head coach Dave Adelson, a post-doctorate researcher.
“In the course of a game, if you are one of the top players,
you will run between three and five miles at an intermediate
sprint, and you have to be able to do that three or four games per
day.”
The Smaug players share a unique camaraderie and have several
traditions that have helped them bond as a team. One is that all of
the players get nicknames.
“When you implement nicknames, it’s harder (for a
defender) to remember a nickname,” Hanig said. “Plus
it’s something special that everybody gets. You have to earn
your nickname on this team.”
Nicknames are given to players based on their personalities or
unique quirks that they may have.
“We have an initiation ceremony and we give all of the
players nicknames,” said Gautam Sood, a fourth-year political
science student whose nickname is “Bruce Wayne.”
“It makes us feel like more of a team,” he
added.
Ultimate is different from virtually all other college sports in
that it is run by the players.
The second rule in the Ultimate Players Association’s
official Rules of the Game is titled “Spirit of the
Game,” and it states in part, “Ultimate has
traditionally relied on a spirit of sportsmanship, which places the
responsibility for fair play on the player. Highly competitive play
is encouraged, but never at the expense of the bond of mutual
respect between players.”
The “Spirit of the Game” is part of what makes the
sport popular.
“There are no referees,” Hanig said. “So
everyone has a mutual respect that when you play a team you beat
them with your athletic ability, you don’t cheat to
win.”
This year’s team has set lofty goals for itself. Only two
teams from this region go to nationals each year, and this year
Smaug hopes to be one of those teams. They will however face stiff
competition from the region’s top teams.
“We play in the toughest region in the nation,” Sood
said. “We compete against UCSB, Colorado and UCSD, and in any
given year those three teams can finish in the top ten in the
nation.”
Smaug’s goal this year is to beat UCSD and earn the
team’s first ever trip to nationals.
“We’re one athletic, tall guy away from being a
contender for nationals,” Adelson said.
Interested undergraduate or graduate students can attend
practices, which will be held Mondays from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. and
Thursdays from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. on Marshall Field during Winter
quarter. For more information, you can also contact Hanig at
samman@ yahoo.com.