Women’s Ultimate Frisbee (WAC) and Men’s Ultimate Frisbee (Detox) played at the Kendra Fallon Memorial Tournament Nov. 1-2 hosted by UCSD in San Diego. Occidental’s teams competed against other clubs in the Southwest, including UCLA, USC, UCSB and others.
According to Detox captain Liam O’Neill (sophomore), the mix of competitiveness and community was a highlight of the tournament.
O’Neill said he believes more of the games were winnable, but he was still proud of how they played.
“We could have done better […] but we played a lot of good teams,” O’Neill said. “The team that we did beat, USD, [is] in our conference, so that’s a really good game to win. Overall we were getting progressively better […] we just need to come out on the other side of some of these games.”
Detox player Will Carter (junior) said there were many positive takeaways from the tournament.
“I’m always big on taking bigger picture positive things from [games], especially in the fall,” Carter said. “We played up to a really good team. We played UCLA’s A team, and they’re quite good. That was probably our best game of the tournament […] we’ve got a bunch of guys who can make plays, we just have to really dial in on our fundamental stuff, and then we’re going to do great things in the future.”
Carter said he was proud the team fought hard late in the tournament despite being exhausted.
“A specific moment that I’m really going to take away from the tournament was the last game of the last day against San Diego State,” Carter said. “It was the kind of game where we were tired, but we still had enough energy to put it all out there. We were still working super hard despite having five games under our belt in the last two days […] showing that we have the hunger to keep playing despite the game being for 14th place or something like that.”
Carter said the team enjoyed other activities outside of the tournament.
“The team got closer over the weekend, which is something that I care about a ton,” Carter said. “We all went to the beach, did a night swim and hung out by a fire and talked, which is super important for building a great team culture. That has been one of my goals for this team this year.”
WAC captain Audrey AlQatami (senior) said she enjoyed the quality time she got to spend with her teammates in San Diego.
“Tournaments are so fun for all of us to bond,” AlQatami said. “Being in a hotel with people and getting to have dinner together and pile a bunch of people into a room and watch the Dodgers game […] those are my favorite parts of the tournament outside of play.”
WAC captain Lily van Linder (senior) said making sure the rookies got more experience was one of WAC’s main goals for the tournament.
“Our goal was to make sure that everyone had a lot of opportunities to get out on the field and learn,” van Linder said. “We came in with around 40 people […] we were hoping to get a lot of our new players some playing time, and we definitely did.”
Van Linder said a highlight was watching the new players take the field on their own for the first time.
“[On] the last point on the games on Sunday, we did a rookie line where we had seven of our new players go, and it was just them playing another group of seven rookies on the other team,” van Linder said. “We [said] ‘Go play, go do what you can,’ and they actually won the point. We were so proud of them […] the future is very bright.”
Van Linder said she wants to help WAC improve for future contests by competing at a higher level.
“I’m [focused on] continuing to grow the team,” van Linder said. “We talk a lot about our baseline and the floor of our team, and we want to make sure we start at a level that we’re happy with and we don’t go below that.”
AlQatami said WAC is already training for a tournament coming up next semester in her home state of Colorado.
“We’re doing a tournament in Colorado called Snow Melt,” AlQatami said. “That should be really fun, and that’ll give us four months to really train and practice and hopefully we’ll be very competitive there.”
Contact Angus Kapstein Parkhill at parkhill@oxy.edu.
