My ultimate frisbee journey
The story of me and frisbee
I really enjoyed Ultiworld's New Faces at Club Championships series a few years back. Each article in the series shares the stories of a number of players making their first appearance at club Nationals. I haven't made it to Nationals yet, but a few readers have asked to hear my story.
This ended up longer than I expected. I suppose we all love to talk about ourselves. But it's (maybe) worth the length because my story is atypical—both in the path I took and because there aren't that many people out there writing frisbee strategy blogs. So, if you're interested in hearing about how I became me—in the frisbee sense—I'm happy to report there's lots of detail below.
Here's my story:
Pre-high school
My first exposure to ultimate frisbee was as a kid. My aunt played college and club ultimate in the NYC area in the late 80s/early 90s. We threw the frisbee together in the front yard once or twice when I was in elementary or middle school. I never played, but she had explained it to me once or twice: it's like football, you try to score in the endzone. So I knew ultimate existed, but it wasn't really on my radar before college.
I played lots of sports growing up. We (the kids in the neighborhood) regularly played basketball, baseball, football (in this essay "football" refers to American football), and street hockey. I played youth league soccer from about 2nd-7th grade, baseball from about 4th-7th grade, wrestling in 7th and 8th grades, and basketball and football from 3rd grade on (continuing into high school).
High school and college (2005ish to 2013)
I continued playing sports in high school. I played varsity basketball all four years at a relatively small school (about 750 students combined in 9-12th grades). I took a few years off football then played for the high school team in my junior and senior years. I ran track my freshman year but didn't fall in love with it.
I tore the ACL in my right knee as a high school junior, in the fourth game of the basketball season. After surgery and rehab and playing football and basketball my senior year, I tore my ACL in my left knee with two games left in the basketball season. I decided to not have surgery on this one, since my competitive sports life seemed like it was just about over.
Before I hurt my knee my junior year of high school, I was hoping to play college sports. I wasn't going to be a D-I athlete, but I had a reasonable chance to play D-III basketball or football (In my experience, this is more common in the Northeast—where I grew up—since there are so many small colleges there. My older brother played D-III college basketball).
The spring of my senior year, after my second ACL tear, I made a decision that would later have a big impact on my frisbee-playing future: I decided to become ambidextrous.
I had always been relatively good with my off hand. In baseball I was a switch hitter from the very first time I remember swinging a bat in the backyard. As a basketball player I practiced my right-handed layups because it's a vital skill in that sport. But those small skills aside, I was definitely a lefty.
A few weeks after I tore my ACL, I was at the YMCA shooting hoops, and I had the following thought: well, I clearly can't challenge myself by playing competitive sports anymore, so how about a new challenge: becoming a right-handed shooter. I started to live as a righty, no matter how awkward it sometimes was in those first couple months.
I started college at Arizona State in fall 2009. My roommate and a guy two doors down the hall from me both joined the ultimate team. My roommate had played frisbee in high school and was excited to play in college. He was the first person I knew who would, like, talk about frisbee. The guy down the hall wasn't quite that into frisbee, he just thought it seemed like a cool sport worth trying out. Later that year, I made friends with another ultimate player in my Calculus class, and through those connections I ended up meeting a few more ultimate-playing friends.
I really clicked with my frisbee playing buddy from down the hall. We were both engineering students, and shared a number of intro-level classes freshman year. We were both high school athletes and we still both really enjoyed playing basketball. We had a similar nerdy sense of humor. We both cared about doing well in school and were less interested in partying and drinking than the average freshman.
But I didn't join the frisbee team myself—in the end, I really never had an opportunity to play sports in college. After not having surgery on my second torn ACL, I came into college my freshman year with no ACL in my left knee. After hurting my knee again in the spring, I decided to have surgery that summer. As a result, I came into my sophomore year rehabbing an ACL surgery. My junior year, I was starting to feel strong and athletic again...until a couple weeks before Thanksgiving I tore my left ACL again playing intramural basketball.
After a spring heavy on depression and light on playing sports, I flew home for the summer and had my ACL repaired again. Which meant my senior year was spent rehabbing. There was never an opportunity to join the ultimate team, even if I had wanted to. But I didn't want to—my knees were bad enough that I never considered it.
Throughout those years, I'd throw the frisbee in the quad every once in a while with my ultimate friends, and played disc golf on campus a couple times.
Post-college, pre-ultimate (2014-2017)
I graduated in 2014 and moved to the Boston area for a job, where I lived until 2017. I actually played pickup ultimate once or twice, but never really got into it. I probably threw a frisbee once a year when I'd go back out West to see my Arizona friends. I didn't play any sports seriously during this period. I lifted weights sometimes, I played rec league soccer, and I played pickup basketball on some weekends.
My ultimate career begins (late 2017-2019)
In late 2017, I moved to Shanghai for work. Preparing for my move, I did a search one day for "ways to meet foreigners in Shanghai". Ultimate frisbee was one of the first results that caught my eye. With all the exposure I'd had to ultimate, I decided it would be a good way to meet people in a city where I knew literally one person. I told myself I'd go to frisbee twice a week, and I wouldn't stop until I had made some friends. Happily, my friend-making scheme succeeded, and as a bonus I started to get into playing frisbee. I joined the city league and played in a few club tournaments with pickup teams in 2018 and 2019.
It's not that easy to get good at frisbee living in Shanghai. Field space is at a premium, so I never played more than two, or at most three, days a week. When my friends and I wanted to have a throwing session during the day, we needed to jump the fence to the soccer field at a local university because the guard wouldn't let anyone in who wasn't a student. I had to pay to play (roughly 8-15 US dollars) almost every time I played, including for pickup. But I did get better, slowly. It was easy to improve since there were so many areas for improvement.
I played my first ever frisbee tournament with a pickup team in Nanjing, China, in early 2018. It rained through most of the tournament. I was unprepared for the caloric needs of playing multiple rain-soaked frisbee games in one day, and on the second morning of games I was so hungry I was inhaling the on-site tournament snacks: bananas and plain white bread. I was actually voted my team's MVP by the other captains, but I'm convinced that's because I looked memorable—a long haired white guy with a huge knee brace. It's certainly not because I was good.
Cut from the B-team (late 2018)
After a year in Shanghai, I went to a tryout for the local club team. Although frisbee has recently exploded in popularity in China, when I was there it was still very niche. In a city of 25 million people, there were only enough players for about two mixed club teams—an A team and a B team.
(Side notes: There were also a few college teams, a few high school teams, and sometimes enough players for another pickup team to go to club tournaments. In China there's a spring single gender season and a fall mixed gender season—in other words, these two teams were not in addition to other single-gender club teams. A friend recently told me there are now "dozens" of club teams in Shanghai.)
I went to tryouts and got cut. Cut from the A team, and from the B team too. Probably only 10 people got cut from the B team, and I was one of them. I'd only been playing for a year so I wasn't good, but I felt I had some potential, at least. I asked one of the captains to give me feedback on my tryout. He told me, essentially, that I was a turnover machine, that I was uncoachable, and that I didn't have as much potential to improve as other players.
Lucky for you all, I still have that conversation—I took a screenshot of the most relevant part which you can see here:
I think everyone who knows me would agree that I'm no longer a turnover machine and was, in fact, able to change my game over time. If you have doubts—about your skills, about your field sense, about your ability to improve over time—remind yourself that someone was once willing to tell me that I was a turnover machine with little room for improvement.
To be fair my former captain, we did have a productive discussion and the leadership invited me to re-join the team. I'm not sure what I said that convinced them. Perhaps they didn't realize I'd only been playing for a year. Or perhaps the conversation just made them realize I was actually someone who cared a bit about my frisbee future. (And again, they weren't too strict because there were barely any players cut!)
In 2019, I quit my job and moved home to the States a few months later. I wanted to take some time off work and spend time doing other things I cared about. I had enough savings that I knew I could get by without working for a few years. I'd always lived very frugally and made a solid salary working for 4+ years as an engineer.
Back in the US, taking frisbee more seriously (late 2019 - 2021)
Back in the US without a job, I had lots of time to think about what it was exactly that I wanted to do. I decided that I wanted to become good at something. At the time, I felt like I had always been sort-of motivated, sort-of good at stuff. I got pretty good grades in school. I kind-of spoke Spanish (and now kind-of spoke Chinese, too). I was kind-of good at a few sports. But I had always shied away from committing or had gotten interested in a new hobby before I took any of those skills to the next level. I'd never really mastered something.
I realized that even though I was pretty good at a number of things, I felt like I was missing out on a part of life by not being really great at any one thing.
I decided that I'd try to do that now, while I was taking time off working. There were two obvious candidates for what I should become a master at: I wanted to keep learning Chinese, and continue developing the language skills I started building when I lived there. And I wanted to get good at ultimate frisbee (For more on my goals, see here).
Sidebar: Some friendly motivation
Wanting to master something was the main reason I wanted to be good at frisbee. But I had another fun reason, too. Remember my friend who lived down the hall freshman year? We stayed close—and he kept playing frisbee, and kept getting better and better. He's Travis Dunn, known for playing for the San Diego Growlers (semi-pro), SoCal Condors (Club Open) and Arizona Lawless (Club Mixed). No, it's not a total coincidence he's been mentioned multiple times on the blog.
For those of you who don't follow semi-pro ultimate closely, he's currently 8th all-time in the UFA in career assists and was recently Ultiworld's 2023 Mixed Division Offensive Player of the Year.
I didn't have a specific goal for how good at frisbee I wanted to be, but in the back of my mind, I knew that one day I wanted to be able to play together with Travis. Like many people, I got into frisbee thinking "I just want to have fun with my friends!"...but in this case, my friend was extremely good at frisbee.
We still haven't really had a chance to play together, living on opposite coasts, but we'll get there one day.
(Nowadays I have a third reason for wanting to be good at frisbee: I have to uphold the reputation of my blog!)
Anyways, back to the timeline. I had decided to get good at frisbee. I spent a few months relaxing and traveling after a stressful couple years abroad, and then I settled down in the new year, 2020, to start my project. Of course, a few months later we all stopped playing due to COVID-19. But I had a target to throw at (something like this), and starting March 2020 I threw the frisbee for an hour a day. I also set aside time for watching game film or reading frisbee strategy online.
Throwing practice was almost always just me and my target, but as the pandemic situation improved that summer I also threw with friends sometimes. I joined an ultimate-playing COVID "bubble" and we played 4v4 once a week until the vaccines became available in spring 2021.
Getting more skilled but never playing club (2021-2022)
In 2021 pickup started back up, and soon local leagues restarted as well. I was playing frisbee four times a week in the summer, and even got up to five times a week for a few weeks in the fall (a bad idea, in retrospect).
On top of that, I was working out—and was still throwing for an hour a day. There were ups and downs, but an hour a day is enough practice that my throws got better, relatively quickly. Although I was slowed down by the fact that, as an ambidextrous person, there were a lot of throws. Righty flick, righty backhand, righty hammer. Lefty backhand, lefty scoober, lefty hammer. For a while I experimented with a lefty OI flick as an around break throw.
Getting more athletic was harder than getting better at throwing, as I've written about elsewhere. Every time I started reaching a new level, I'd get hurt. My personal best 1-mile time peaked in late 2020, and I didn't get back to the same speed again in 2021. I twisted an ankle. I dropped a weight on my foot and lost two weeks to a gnarly toenail injury. And so on.
I didn't play club in 2021. There were a few reasons for this. I wasn't really "plugged into" the local frisbee scene, and I was still worried about COVID, so I didn't hear about tryout opportunities and wasn't actively searching them out myself. I also wasn't proactively searching for club opportunities because the small city I live in didn't have a strong club team in the city. I felt—and still feel—awkward about the idea of traveling to play frisbee. I don't own a car, partly out of a desire to do right by our environment. I would never travel to another city to play basketball or soccer, so doing lots of travel just to play frisbee has always felt a little off to me.
So, no club in 2021. But I did win a summer league championship and was continuing to improve quickly.
Struggling through knee pain (late 2021-2024)
At the end of 2021, I injured my knee again. At first, I tried to play through it. The injury wasn't as acute as a torn ACL, but its lack of severity was bad in its own way: I didn't realize I needed to take it seriously until it was too late. I re-aggravated the same injury a few times. My knee was stiff and swollen and did lots of crunching and grinding.
I took a couple months off in early 2022 and the worst of the pain went away. Playing club wasn't an option. I did sign up for summer league. I made it through the season relatively pain-free, but still had swelling and lots of crunching and grinding. At the end of the summer league season I decided I couldn't let myself play seriously again until I fixed my knee.
Eventually I got an MRI in November 2022, but it was too long after the injury to say for sure what had happened: they saw indications of a meniscus tear, and broken cartilage on the end of the bone next to the meniscus tear. There was scar tissue in multiple areas, presumably from my previous surgery.
In the fall 2022, I jogged around slowly at pickup. But even that activity level wasn't low enough for recovery, so in the first three months of 2023 I didn't play at all.
Through it all, I continued to throw for about an hour a day. It's now been almost 4 years of daily(ish) throwing.
As 2023 went on, my knee started to feel better and I began playing some pickup again. It still makes some loud popping/crunching noises, and probably will forever, but it's strong and stable and not swollen. We've finally made it to the present—early 2024. I recently started playing in a league again for the first time in a year and a half, and I'm working on slowly getting back in shape.
My first Callahan video appearance
In early 2023, although I was taking a break from playing, I made my first appearance in a Callahan video...sort of. At the end of Brown University star Leo Gordon's video, one of his listed "accolades" is "2022 Rhode Island Summer League Quarterfinalist":
It just so happens that he lost to my team in that quarterfinals game. I'm definitely not better at frisbee than Leo Gordon—especially not now that he's spent the last two years playing against elite competition and I've spent it barely playing at all—but I did manage to beat him upline for a goal once in that game.
Coaching and writing
Another question people might be interested in is: what made me the kind of person to write this blog? A few things seem worth mentioning.
Growing up, I played a lot of sports. My dad had played sports, and often coached the teams I played on. I learned some sports lessons from him; every once in a while there would be a coaching book he checked out from the library or a VHS tape he bought to learn more about coaching. I'd read/watch these and learn a little bit about the game.
As a teenager I started reading sports analysis online. I was there from the beginning when Bill Barnwell (football) and Zach Lowe (basketball) started writing articles breaking down game footage. (According to Wikipedia, that wouldn't have been until I had already started college, but I feel like I was reading this type of content as early as high school.)
The frisbee strategy articles I write are inspired by what they did (especially Zach Lowe's “Ten things I like and don't like...” column). I probably read Michael Lewis's Moneyball within a year of it coming out in 2003, when I was in late middle school. Sports analysis has been on my mind for a long time.
In school, I studied mechanical engineering, which further developed my ability to think about the way things fit together in 3D space, and got me comfortable thinking about angles (see The box-out dump cut) and axes of rotation (see: Forehand: wrist, grip, and wobble). My professional work experience has also required a lot of attention to detail, a skill that I think helps me in both playing and writing about frisbee.
As long as I can remember, I've always loved reading. According to the spreadsheet I've kept since 2013, I've read 500+ books in the 11 years since then. Not all those books were about sports, but many of them have influenced my frisbee writing and coaching, in big ways and small. The approach I take to frisbee is just a small example of the approach I take to life in general. I mostly read nonfiction—books about science, books about how we think, etc. They've definitely strengthened my ability to analyze carefully and separate good explanations from the bad ones.
I didn't start coaching frisbee until quite recently. I got my first coaching "job" at the beginning of 2023—after I had started writing about frisbee. I'm currently in my third semester of coaching a college B team.
Nature vs. Nurture?
Am I (relatively) athletic and good at thinking about frisbee because I've been blessed with good genes? Or because hard work pays off? It's a popular question (see my reviews of The Sports Gene or The Genetic Lottery), and I wanted to say a few things.
Nature vs. nurture can be hard to separate. My older brother played college basketball. My dad played junior college football. On my mom's side, two uncles and a cousin played college football, and another cousin broke her high school's record in the javelin throw. But is that because we have the genes to be athletic, or because we grew up in a family culture that encouraged sports?
Personally, I'm not sure I'm any better at sports than what would be "expected" based on the large amount of time I've spent working out, playing sports, and thinking about sports. At the same time, obviously, genes play some role — even leaving every other possible genetic influence aside, I and all the family mentioned in the paragraph above are all average or slightly above average height, which is mostly genetic.
But hard work played a big role as well. (and don't forget there's a genetic component to willpower and the "desire" to be active.) I can tell you for sure that I have no special natural talent at throwing a frisbee. I'm only (relatively) good at it because of the amount of time I've spent practicing my throws.
I remember playing high school basketball and feeling like my body and brain were working at different speeds. Sometimes I'd know where I wanted to go but would lose the ball on the way there. Other times I wouldn't see the right play to make even though I had the physical skills to have made it. Field sense (or court sense) came only after lots of reps. Eventually I got there, but developing good field sense wasn't a guarantee if you were judging based on the way I played basketball in eleventh grade.
Realistically speaking, I probably have above average "natural talent". But I also don't know anyone who's worse at frisbee than me but worked harder at it than I have. None of us are making the NBA—it's full of people with outlier genetics, and even they have to work extremely hard. But due to its nicheness, frisbee is different. Put in the hours and you'll end up more skilled than almost everyone who isn't working as hard as you.
So, am I good at frisbee now?
For those readers who don't know me personally, I should probably actually say something about my frisbee abilities. Skills wise, assuming my knees are healthy and I'm in shape (which is a big assumption, to be fair), I feel comfortable saying I'm a club Regionals-level player (in the USA).
My hucks aren't Regionals-level, but being ambidextrous, I can throw a lefty backhand, lefty scoober, and lefty hammer better than almost anyone at Nationals. My tendency has always been to work on all of my throws. As a result, I have a lot of throws that are not-quite-elite. If my skills plateau that might always be the case. But if I continue improving, I could end up one day having more elite-level throws than most.
I'm confident I can still improve. I've only been playing for 6 years—less than half as long as peers my age who started as college freshmen. And realistically speaking I didn't play much frisbee in three of those years:
2017-'18: At the beginning I didn't take frisbee very seriously—I played twice a week without much throwing practice
2020-'21: I played once a week or less because of COVID restrictions
late 2022 - late 2023: I rarely played (and never at full speed) due to my meniscus/cartilage injury.
In fact, I've still played less than 10 frisbee tournaments in my entire life: five tournaments with pickup teams in China (in 2018 & 2019), and two one-day tournaments since I've moved back home. I've still never really played for a club team (nor have I played in college obviously).
The biggest question is whether my knees can stay healthy for a few years straight (at least I have some theories on how to do that). To reach the level I imagine myself playing at, I'll need to (a) get lots more in-game throwing reps, and (b) get back to how athletic I was a couple years ago—at least—while avoiding any more serious injuries.
In short, if you're comparing me to other ultimate frisbee content creators (like Jack Williams or Rowan McDonnell), I'm not very good at frisbee. But I'm pretty good compared to the population of people who've had 3 ACL surgeries and didn't start playing ultimate until they were 26.
So there you have it. I'm 32 now (in early 2024), and I've played ultimate for 6 years, after a lifetime of playing other sports. I tore three ACLs between ages 16 and 20. When I was 28 I decided getting good at frisbee would be a cool life experience, and then I more or less went and did it. I've been coaching frisbee for a little over a year. I'm getting back in shape after a recent injury, but as of now I’ve never played for a club team and you won’t (yet) find my name on ulti-verse.com.