Ultimate

The sport I’ve organized a lot of my life around. I’ve captained it, coached it, and kept playing wherever I’ve ended up.

Fire of London

For my first year at Northeastern, based in London, I played a full season as starting O-line handler for Fire of London, a top-ranked UK club, a spot I earned as the youngest player on the roster by roughly five years. (I’ve since moved back stateside, so I’m not with the club anymore.)

Handler is where the offense is organized: you touch the disc most, you run the reset when a play breaks down, and you make the read that decides whether a point keeps going or ends. Playing it on a top side, years younger than everyone else, forced my real-time decision-making to get a lot better. Fire is where I learned to rein in the naive, hero-ball instinct, and that throwing the disc backwards to reset the flow and rebuild momentum is never a bad play.

Lakeside

Before London: varsity captain at Lakeside, assistant coach for the middle-school team, and team MVP (Nov 2022).

Coaching middle schoolers is the fastest way to find out whether you actually understand something. You can throw a good cut on instinct, but explaining it to a twelve-year-old so they can do it too means you have to actually know why it works.

Curve, and the haunted goaltie

Fire wasn’t the first team I found in London. That was Curve, a mixed club and the most open, welcoming group I’ve ever played with: every skill level, sessions and meetups almost daily, “goaltie” every Saturday, a tournament every couple of months.

After about a month of practicing with them, I got invited to their Halloween goaltie hat tournament. Teams were drawn by Curve and balanced by skill to keep things fair, and the flyer carried one warning: “Spirits may be angered by a lack of costume. 👻 Dress up… or risk awakening something truly dreadful.” So I played as the Phantom of the Opera, one of my favorite characters anywhere. We won the whole thing. Photos below.