Why I'm not covering BUCS league this year

Writer/Editor: hazard

So, the title says it all really. For the past couple seasons, I've been one of the main people helping cover BUCS league. I've been organising writers, editing/writing articles, and putting countless hours into it. I do this because I enjoy covering Ultimate, and I enjoy playing Ultimate. I had my misgivings about the BUCS league initially, but I wanted to try it and keep these feelings private since I have a fairly public persona in coverage.

Having now tried it for a few years, I feel that pretty much all of my original misgivings have been confirmed, and some have been added. So I'm now done. I'm not playing it, I'm not covering it. I'm putting my energy elsewhere.

Before getting on to why, I want to make something clear - I've nothing but admiration for the UKU volunteers and employees who put countless hours into organising such things. I think it has benefitted some universities. I would very much implore some athletes from those universities to start writing, because you will bring an enthusiasm to coverage that I do not wish to try and fake. This article is about my personal feelings towards it, and why I don't want to support it anymore. The reason I'm making this public is that I know a number of people with similar misgivings, and I've heard some Women's teams say they'd like BUCS, since it "seems to be working for Men's". In my opinion, it isn't. I feel this argument needs to be made publicly.

I'm also aware UKU sent out a survey about BUCS league and are trying to get feedback. I wish them all the best, and hope those reading this filled out that survey. While my personal preference is still for tournaments, steps to restructure the league in certain ways could well address many of my issues. Again, my complaints are not against UKU, but against the league in its current form.

Here are my arguments:

1. I don't think leagues are good for the community
In tournaments, you spend a lot of time hanging out with your team, and you play a lot of different teams. Quite often you end up chatting with people, recognising faces, and accidentally making friends. Having a league system stops this. I've have asked around a lot, and I've struggled to find any examples of teams socialising with each other before/after games. It's a case of turn up, play, go home. In my eyes, this makes us more a collection of teams than a community. Particularly playing for a university that doesn't get much spare time to go to other tournaments, this makes things seem very distant.

2. The emphasis on Men's Ultimate
In both coverage and training, a lot of focus has to be given to Men's Ultimate. In one way, this isn't a bad thing - there's lots to cover and if we had resources, we could do weekly updates. However, Men's isn't the only division. I know some universities do split the funding between Men's and the other divisions, and try to distribute training time equally. I know some that use it as an excuse to pretty much sideline the Women's and Mixed divisions entirely. We have limited time in the year, and I personally would much prefer to spend it playing Mixed or a mixture of Mixed/Men's. Or even to have some time to go and sideline at some Women's tournaments. The way Ultimate approaches gender still requires some work, but I still think it's better than many other sports, and we should be wary of anything that might work against that.

3. The travel time
For me, travelling is the worst part of any Ultimate. So the fact that you can travel multiple hours for one game seems really inefficient. Let's set aside that Bangor and Newcastle are in the same league, so that fatigue/availability decides the winner (rather than whoever is actually the best team). Travelling is just draining, and is bad from an environmental perspective too. It can require extra club members to give up time on multiple occasions just to be drivers, since many university players are too young to hire a minibus. And travelling a long distance just for a blowout game is just depressing either way. In a tournament, you're guaranteed at least a few good games for your trouble. No such guarantee in BUCS league.

4. Division 1 Nationals is very far away from the best 16 teams
I know UKU are aware of this and trying to fix this, but the method of deciding the top teams is decidedly broken. Nationals is supposed to be a showcase of the very best of university Ultimate. The fact that in one weekend the Women's division got a far better approximation of where teams should finish than the Men's division managed over an entire year shows something is very broken. In my eyes, there are a few reasons for this (the imbalanced regions, the lack of correction for this imbalance, how a team plays on Wednesdays don't reflect how good a tournament team they are, etc.), but the overall point is my focus here.

5. Promotion/Relegation
Being on the team that won Division 2 Nationals and got demoted to Division 3 obviously hurt. But consistently 3-5 teams are fighting in the second leagues who would do decently in the upper divisions, but instead play a lot of walkover games. I admittedly didn't play every league game when my team were in Division 3, but I only played one game that had a margin closer than 10 points - and that was against the other team to get promoted that year. Aside from the clear relegation of teams that shouldn't be relegated (which hurts their development for a whole year due to a lack of close games), the path to promotion is arduous and silly. Having a separate cup with randomly drawn knockouts for Nationals qualification will again exclude some good teams from Division 3 Nationals. I know teams which have had to decide whether to focus on the league (promotion) or the cup (qualification). This gives far too many games in my eyes, and gives teams tough choices they shouldn't have to make. Also, the fact that one lower division in a region can be way stronger than another is silly too. What annoys me most is I feel there is a way this could work within the league structure - no cup, and a one day tournament between the top two teams of each lower league to decide promotion and Nationals. You can adapt this to give a chance at fighting for Division 2, to decide whether teams should actually be relegated or not, etc.. Many variants on this exist, and I feel quite a few are better than the current set-up.

6. Spirit
While spirit is certainly being recorded, the BUCS league doesn't have any public record of spirit that I can see, and I can't recall any spirit trophy for BUCS league last year. Given how important spirit is to our sport, the fact that spirit seems to be being sidelined somewhat isn't overly positive. Hopefully it is just something that took a couple years to get round to - the fact UKU managed to push for spirit submissions on the BUCS website at all is good - but my personal experience in BUCS is that spirit is treated more secondary in league matches than in a tournament.

And, a subjective one to finish:

7. I don't care if it makes us like other sports
For me, one of the only convincing arguments for a BUCS league is that it gets more money. This is not nothing - it helps teams pay for coaches or subsidise members. But it is quite often conflated with "it makes it more like other sports", a reason I wholeheartedly do not agree with. Ultimate was born out of a counterculture. It is no coincidence we are the only team sport which is self-refereed. There is a Bruce Lee quote: "Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.". This is what I feel Ultimate should do. There are absolutely things about other sports we should copy, whether in tactics or in training. But just adopting a structure which (in my eyes) adds nothing to either the enjoyability, the competitiveness, or the quality should be one of those things we discard.

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Thank you for reading this. My original draft of this article had other reasons (Not every student getting Wednesdays off, the fact I feels it hinders development, and having different regions for indoors/outdoors, lower teams not getting any chance to play better teams, etc.), but I decided to cut it down to pick only those reasons which applied more universally and were less subjective.

I've decided to take the rare step as a University student to decide to actually focus on Mixed this year. I wouldn't encourage others to take this step unless you really wanted - I've had the privilege of playing a lot of years of University Ultimate, and UKU put in a lot of work for your benefit. Whatever opinion you hold, just remember: we all care about our sport, even if we differ on the best way for it to improve. Be polite, and remember, even online, there is a person at the opposite end of all words.