Why does ESC offer so much excitement every year?
21 August 2024 by Edward Stephens in Recap with comments
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The Elite-Select Challenge is USAU’s best idea
As a fan of the club season, I never thought I would reach this conclusion, but here we are.
I’m a (small d) democrat who plays: regional level for club, and otherwise happy to play pick-up, local league, single tournaments, high-level goalie, low-level goalie, non-dressed-for-sport mini , no matter what. If there’s a disc and some space to run around, I’m in, and anyone who wants to join in is as welcome as a ray of sunshine in winter.
But as a reporter for, opinionate about and follower of club ultimate, I am totally elitist. For better or for worse, what I care most about is the pursuit of greatness in this sport of ours. I want to see the best players from the best teams compete against the other best teams. Give me Fury and Brute Squad. Give me 2020s Truck Stop and 2010s Revolver. Give me all the Molly Brown and Ring of Fire semi appearances over the years. Give me the Drag’n Thrust, AMP, Mixtape decade. Give me Robyn Fennig and Chris Kocher and Khalif El-Salaam’s excellence year in, year out. Give me more international superstars that summer in North America. Give me serious challenges that just fall short, upcoming dynasties and teams that suddenly put it all together to burn for four days in October. In short, give me Saturday and Sunday for the Nationals and all the parts of the regular season leading up to it.
And yet I can’t help but be drawn to the spectacle and drama that is the Elite-Select Challenge. Each year brings a new pile of excitement—from last-ditch bids to renewed postseason goals to memorable collapses. Because the juggernaut programs typically keep it out, it’s also the perfect place for rising stars to shine free of the brightest lights. Last year, Fort Collins experienced shame. end the near-perfect regular season as a glimpse into their title future, the ascension of DiG from non-Nationals afterthought to contenders, the biting implosions of ozone and condors, and the first glimpses of what high schooler Chloe Hakimi might be capable of at the highest levels. It was popcorn stuff.
The 2024 edition last weekend in Indianapolis lived up to all those expectations. It featured a fantastic performance from Riot as they tried to regain their former heights that have been out of reach in recent years, and one from their counterparts in the men’s division Sockeye who have almost completed a huge bounceback from their poor 2023 end by drawing heavily on the region’s young people. It featured steely performances from mixed talent Drag’n Thrust (obviously aiming to get back to a championship match) and Mixtape (charging into power bid territory after a lackluster early season as Ali stormed into the late rounds of Rumble in the Jungle ). It featured a not-ready-for-the-wind Chain Lightning barely pulling out of a tail with a bid intact, their Saturday the kind of train wreck performance that can light up the masses with electric schadenfreude. It featured Doublewide’s new hotshot Xavier Fuzat setting the Nationals field on fire, both with his ever-open cut and his X-arms celebrations, that he has fully arrived as a force to be reckoned with. And there was heartbreak: Dark Sky, Vault, Rally and Blueprint all entered the tournament with strong bids to lose – and lost them. As a result, their Nationals’ hopes are now in serious jeopardy.
It’s not always the nicest ultimate you’ll ever see—especially when the crosswind is whipping up—but it’s popcorn. And it all exists because USAU made the brilliant call during the beginning of the TCT era to not only require competition between national-level teams and regional-level teams, but to make that kind of cross-pollination the sole basis of a tournament. Clubs with illustrious histories such as Drag’n Thrust, Riot and Furious George must prove they still have what it takes to be ahead of the wider ranks of teams historically below them on the pyramid. It’s the ultimate put-up-or-shut-up event.
Nowhere was this demonstrated more than in the shuffle, chaotic even by the division’s standards. What could have been a ho-hum event until the semi-finals given the lack of (expected) top competition on the fields was instead a showcase for the depth of ambition in the division. In a field that had representatives from every region of the country, only one out of 16 teams managed to achieve multiple wins over the weekend1. Shocking disruptions were frequent. Bidhawks waited with bated breath for a frisbee-rankings.com update both Saturday and Sunday night because even the direct effect (not to mention the second- and third-order tomfoolery) of today’s results on the algorithmic image was too complicated to hazard a guess.
When a rating system has people on the edge of their seats, you know you’re doing something right. Kudos to the brain trust that came up with the Elite-Select Challenge, USAU’s best idea.