UMWON isn't happening so we had a chat instead

Chair/Editor: Hazard
Conributors: Miyen (UCL), Clackers (Lancaster), Hately (Liverpool)

Since UMWON was cancelled, we got a few of the writers together to chat about a few topics. We ended up covering the following, questions will be in bold to make them easier to find. Let us know your thoughts too!

1. Best Uni Game you played this year

2. Thoughts on BUCS league

3. Thoughts on moving UXON to June

4. Best Club in your region

5. Ways to deal with Covid-19 as a team.

Hazard

Hello everyone! Welcome to a chat between some of our uni writers of the 2019/20 season. This is going to be a friendly chat that will delve in and out of a few topics. For now though, why don't you introduce yourselves?

Clackers

I'm Clackers, I play(ed) for Lancaster but am currently clubless. I generally write for the North but have dabbled elsewhere, especially this year - if you see a bedraggled IKEA shark at a tournament then I'm around somewhere

Miyen

Hello, I’m Miyen! I play(ed) at UCL and have just started a season with Deep Space. I generally write for the East & London region, but also wrote an all-region preview for UWIN last February. I usually focus on the women’s side of things, but can probably get opinionated about any division. :))

Hately

Hi I'm Hately, still playing for Liverpool (and will be for the next few years). I'm currently still trying to make a successful prediction about uni ultimate.

Miyen

@Hately, UCL did appreciate your effort last November though

Hazard
And for those that don't know me, I'm Harry (aka Hazard). Pretty much finished for Oxford Uni, and currently signed on a tournament-by-tournament contract to Oxford Ultimate, although I've previously played for lots of other teams. I've been a secondary editor this season due to time constraints, but previously was responsible for whichever uni take you loved/hated the most.

Hazard
Alright, let's start with a bit of a fun one. What's your favourite uni game you've played this year?

Clackers

I honestly don't really remember any indoor season game in enough detail to have it as a favourite, so it might have to be our BUCS league match against Sheffield Hallam - we were roughly 3-1 down and managed to turn it around to roughly 9-3 up.

Hazard
For me, my favourite game has to come from Division 2 UXIN, as the tournament was full of them. I think, within that tournament, I'd say our quarter final against Hertfordshire. It was a nailbiting game the entire way, with both teams playing high intensity mixed and the lead very much up in the air. Plus, I do enjoy marking people like Ernie Simmons.

As an aside while people type, my favourite point was against Edinburgh at the same tournament. They had an amazing pull which took us right to the back corner. They charged down, thinking they'd pinned us, but we'd already agreed our first play was Phili Kent going long. We had a one pass score straight to the endzone, and it was so successful that it ended up being our first offensive play in every subsequent game.

Miyen

As a captain, I always enjoy UCL’s LUSL (London University Sports League) matches, particularly the ones against LSE. For those that aren’t familiar with LUSL, it’s a mixed Wednesday league that runs around London and sees a lot of smaller uni teams that haven’t been able to field a BUCS team, particularly on their women’s side. UCL usually sends our beginners and developmental players to play these matches, and it’s been really fulfilling watching everyone grow and improve as players!

My favourite match that I’ve played is probably our BUCS Fixture match against Imperial. Despite being rivals, we have a lot of friends there, and it’s always insanely spirited. That game was extremely windy and rainy and went to Universe Point, but despite being soaked, they made it a very positive and fun experience!

Hately
No particular favourite game for me this season. But my highlight was our men’s performance at the Youtdoors tournament. Our first real tournament (in decent conditions) with a squad of 8 of which 4 were beginners. Finished 2nd but was blown away with the performances from everyone on the squad #prouddad

HazardHow did we all find the BUCS league this year? I'm particularly interested in Women's BUCS as a new format, but I'm also just curious overall.

Hately

For those readers who don't know, women's BUCS league followed the ECV or "elective central venue" format, so the teams agree to play multiple games against different opposition at one venue (for example ourselves and Lancaster played one of our ECV's at Keele). The main benefits behind it are that it allows for a greater number of players to attend (e.g. experienced players) which otherwise may not be able to make most Wednesday fixtures when the bus leaves at 9:00am. It also shows newer players the standard format for our summer tournaments.

Miyen

Ah, the BUCS league. Lots of mixed feelings there, and the fact that we didn’t have a nationals made it very difficult to see how it all turned out.

From the captain’s perspective, I personally found the Women's BUCS league very difficult administratively. BUCS kept changing our dates for some reason, despite UKU’s publicized dates, making it really difficult to figure out who would be available. It was also rather disorganized on the venue side, figuring out who was hosting, because we ended up having really tiny pitches at Hertfordshire with a cable running 7 ft in the air through the middle of the pitch and botching a lot of our throws. There was also a lot of confusion as to how many teams per region would qualify, leading me to basically tell my team, “we must win everything or else”. High-pressure environment there, oops.

I guess the few positive points are that we were able to spread our 4 matches over 2 days (which didn’t actually work for UCL, but did for other teams), and that we had Sunday’s off in months that were very frisbee-filled with club trials and indoor tournaments. But that was also a bit of a setback - a lot of our women did have to miss a club trial or a friendly tournament that they had wanted to play due to these Saturday fixtures.

Overall, my take is to go back to UWOR. Having a full tournament weekend is both easier to commit to, and (seems) more logistically convenient.

It was also disappointing that the second set of BUCS fixtures took place during COWIN! Given that captains are always trying to encourage players to join club, it sucked having to tell players to choose their uni team over the club

Clackers
Our BUCS league (Northern 2A) also made the unfortunate decision to use the same format as the Women's BUCS league, and it was fraught with complications - although not as many as the Northern Women's League - as club Vice Captain I was involved in our women's team as well so privy to how much of a cluster it was. There was one positive for having an ECV format, and that was more players were available for the games, which was good. However...

Men first:
A large problem with weekend fixtures is that they need weekends to play them in. Term 1 only has 1 or 2 available weekends to play fixtures, and for the Men's league it rained, so the Term 1 weekend was called off. At 8pm on the Friday night before it was to happen, after our AU had closed, and therefore unable to cancel our 6am transport.

The earliness of that transport led to another problem, and that was the constant breaking of BUCS regulations - it states that no weekend game should start before 10am, however games were constantly scheduled for 9am. For the rearranged Term 1 tournament, in Term 2, there were no organisers, and the BUCS 9am scheduling was before the host's sports centre was open on weekends, so all the timings were delayed anyway. For being a weekend tournament, there was obviously no one at AUs to contact for advice. Similarly for the Term 2 tournament, weather forced us to play on different surface pitches at very late notice, and these pitches were not available for the timings in the BUCS Schedule. However the weekend could not have been cancelled, because then there would not have been any spare weekends to have fixtures on in the month (even with no virus).

Miyen

@Clackers - I did follow what was happening with the Northern Women. I was extremely baffled by that split between the “top and bottom half” of the league, before the second half of fixtures, given that teams had not all played each other. Did fixtures end up getting rescheduled after all of those named storms?

Clackers
Now Women:

There was very little communication on dates for the Term 1 weekend, and although on the day it was well organised, it ended up being on a different day to what was originally theorised, leading to a team to pull out. Alongside some more disregard for BUCS regulations about conduct regarding rearranged games.

And then the League split. This came out of nowhere, and affected the two leagues which only had 1 division. For some reason, BUCS closed all league games before the 2nd weekend was due to happen. I imagine this was because the 2nd weekend became impossible to play in having to find a venue and timetable for 8 teams in 1 location. Which maybe should have been a consideration before the scheduling had begun... So all teams were mightily confused about what was happening, and initially our women's team was placed in the higher bracket, but then moved into the lower bracket as the league table shifted around. Which is a consequence of unilateral entering of scores into BUCS - you could just play around with results how you wished.

For the lower bracket final, there ended up no weekend able to host the 4 teams - not that there was any need, because the top 4 qualified for div 1, and the bottom 4 qualified for div 2 - this also meant that it became impossible for teams to change their qualification status.

We had to forfeit all our lower bracket games - although we had to forfeit against a team that already forfeited, so no idea how that worked

Hately
@Clackers, if the ECV format was perhaps better organised and had greater communication from AUs and BUCS, would you prefer that format for Men’s BUCS compared to the Wednesday format? Assuming both weekends take place after Xmas.

Clackers

@Hately - Considering we had three storms in three consecutive weekends, having weekend fixtures is not a good idea imo and I'd prefer Wednesday fixtures again, purely for the flexibility and for the communication aspects (we have AUs available to us if things go wrong)

Hately

Obviously there are issues with the Weekend format, just as there are issues with the Wednesday fixtures. It's just seeing which is overall a better route to go down.

Clackers

ECV is also feasibly impossible for league sizes greater than six (like many of the lower leagues) because of how long games are, regulations on game start, and when sunset is

Hately

Yeah definitely. I think they'd have to be limited to six teams maximum per event, and three games each

Hazard

Following on from this discussion on leagues, I'm curious as to if anyone has any thoughts about the UKU Mixed Club League.

Miyen
I actually just joined the club scene this year, moving out from U20s and Canadian Juniors in previous seasons. So I can’t really speak about what it used to be. I think Deep Space has an interesting approach to the Ranking Events, calling it the “pre season” and then using the time between MRE3 and Regionals as the “season” and attending other international tournaments. I think Herd takes a slightly different approach because they do send players to WOREs or their players go play for open/women’s teams, whereas DS generally asks players to commit to the team for the full season, over open/women’s teams.

Hazard

I've made my feelings on BUCS league fairly well known, but I will say that leagues in general I'm not a fan of, as they promote the worst aspects of tournaments for me (increased travel) and decrease the best aspects (community, as no one talks after games and just heads straight home). I feel the same aspect would hold in a mixed club league, and also makes it harder to build teams in those areas without a current strong team, as people will probably try to play locally.

Hazard

Here's a topic I definitely would have raised in an earlier point if we had chats this year: What do we think of the decision to move UXON from Easter-ish time to June?

Clackers

Moving UXON to June was a great idea for practical purposes, although on a personal note it had usually been good practice before our varsity match

Hately

I can understand why they would want to move it, as it would open up another "free" weekend in the uni calendar during term time. But i think if it was earlier we'd possibly see greater availability from players, and therefore more universities entering. Perhaps this wouldn't affect who would finish in the medal spots, but would help increase participation from Unis with newer programmes.

Hazard
June 13-14 is actually still in the middle of some exams for us. Even though March/April was out of term time, it was likely still better overall - Oxford basically goes awol for final term trainings. I would be interested to see if international students would have been affected more by this date as well.

Hately
A lot of our international players had already told us (Liverpool) that they would have already gone home by this date. So we had decided not to enter this year.

Miyen
UCL was pretty disappointed by this decision, but we understood that it would be feasible for other teams.

For us, there were a lot of inflexible obstacles:

- All final exams for undergraduate degrees of all years take place in May and June. If the tournament took place in June, players most likely would not be attending trainings in the months leading up to UXON, especially since UMWON would’ve taken place 2 months earlier in April.

- UCL has quite a lot of international students and players who often leave the UK for the summer holidays immediately after they finish exams. Since the significant majority of students are finished with their exams by May 25, it was highly likely that our team simply would not have enough players to enter a tournament in June, and certainly would not be competing with our strongest possible team if we did attend.

- Finally, the month of June is often filled with club ultimate commitments. Even if these events don’t clash, It was likely that our students would be limited on their financial & time budgets for ultimate, and might’ve then chosen to prioritise spending on the club ultimate than university ultimate.

Given that UCL won UXON last year, arguably the medal spots would have been affected. But obviously maybe not.

Hazard

As a related point, would everyone have handed over committees/captainships by June? We usually have final term as a changeover term for new captains to find their feet, whereas having UXON there would be something we'd have to adapt around.

Miyen
We normally select our new captains before UMWON, but the actual handover only takes place over the summer. We’ve been lucky to have club players fill in captain roles, so the overlap/handover period has been less important

Clackers

We changed our club constitution to not officially hand over captaining tournaments until after UXON, but trainings would have been run by the new captains after our Varsity in May

Hazard

Let's pivot slightly now to more of a retrospective view. Across the divisions, who would you say has the best overall uni club in your region this year? (I can't seem to get into BUCS play without a login and at this point I'm too lazy to try, so my analysis will just be indoors and therefore South-East).

Miyen

UCL for East and London. I know I have a biased viewpoint, but I do think it’s objectively true!

Hazard

I think I have to go with Surrey for the South East, because three third place finishes (and top south east team in the eastern women's indoor regionals) is very impressive. I’d place Sussex as next best with two regional victories in men's/mixed, but a slightly lower finish in women's takes away the top spot. I know Sussex won Div 1 Men and did a bit better at UXIN. Surrey women did do well at UWIN though, and did get to three Div 1 nationals overall. Different weightings would have given Sussex the top spot - but as they already have trophies I don't feel bad giving Surrey the win here.

I'd say the team that impressed me most is Chichester though. They made Div 1 in mixed/women's, and Div 2 in men's. They had a power year a couple years ago in women, and it looks as though they've been building back up, and I want to recognise them for that.

Posted during the chat by hazard.
As I said when I posted - I do think I give UKUltimemes enough credit for what they do.

Miyen

I back your opinion on Surrey. Their indoor women's team was looking quite strong this year - I was already impressed by their semifinal win against Imperial for EUWIR, but they took a respectable top 8 finish at UWIN and genuinely showed a lot of improvement between Regionals and Nats.

Hazard

I also want to shout out Oxford Brookes women's team - this was basically a last hurrah for them, and they qualified for Div 1 despite not really being close in any other division. Did fairly well at nationals too (13th/20).

Miyen

Since it looks like Scotland's unrepresented by our group, I'll try to take a crack at them.

Overall, I'd probably put my vote towards Strathclyde (3rd at UXIN and UMIN, 12th at UWIN, and top of Women's BUCS league). For Scottish women though, I definitely need to shout out St Andrew's, who ended up sending THREE teams to UWIN, with their first team getting 6th, which was the best that Scotland did at UWIN this year. StA's took 3rd at Women's BUCS league - I wish I knew more about what happened there because it seems like they have a lot of depth.

Hately

I'd say that Liverpool John Moores are worth a mention. They only entered two divisions (Mens indoor and Mixed indoor) but qualified for Div 1 in both, and placed well in the final standings.

Hazard
John Moores also had the highest placed northern nationals team at one of those. Despite Newcastle's dominant women's performance, I'd have to say Durham might be my overall northern pick looking across all results. 2nd at mens, 9ths at women's and 13th at mixed (all div 1 nationals) is nothing to sniff at.
Ed's note: Sorry if we didn't get to your region - we'd been chatting for a while at this point. Please volunteer to be writers next year to help us cover you!

Hazard
I feel we've been avoiding it this chat, but I'd like to ask directly how you and your team have dealt with the current Covid-19 situation? This is a tough time for all of us, and sharing tips and advice with each other is something that can help us all.

If anyone wants to see a bunch of frisbee players discuss the situation pre-lockdown (as well as outline exactly why throwing with non-housemates is so bad, and even public throwing with housemates isn't great), the link is here.

Miyen
Most of our players have scurried back to our humbale abodes (including some in Hawaii, Singapore, Malaysia and Canada), so the biggest concern for us when organising Zoom meetings has been figuring out the sweet spot when we're all awake across the different time zones.

I think what's keeping morale high has been the different challenges going on Instagram. We're currently competing against LSE and Kings to get to 10K squat jumps, our AU has been handing out Handstand challenges to different sports clubs, and we recently created an "ultimate bingo" to fill out. Our team's fitness groups have also been good motivation boosts!

Hazard
I'm hosting an online social tonight (I've found https://jitsi.org/ the best video call so far - free, no login, no time limit, fine for all non-safari browsers). Games with MS paint are a lot of fun, as is jackbox and online catan. There's a good list of free online games here

We've definitely been getting some good fitness tips from our sports fed too - although the local club has been doing fitness calls biweekly at a time I can't do, that I think a fair few uni players are getting involved in.

Our captains were good about emailing out to people once we found things out though. Hoping for a few more socials after this one.

Clackers

Our club had a fitness fb group, and we've co-opted it so that every player is giving lockdown updates as motivation for everyone else - we're doing online socials, and also have a club discord now It's sad that most people left on uncertain terms, and might not see each other again in person (especially for me because I'm finalish year). Some people have been keeping fit and challenging each other

Hazard
Let's close there! Wash your hands everyone, and check in with your teammates. See you on the field some point soon.