Players with a wide range of experience compete throughout the entire year. The goal: to win the Canadian University Ultimate Championship.
Each Wednesday night between November and April, the Stinger Dome is packed with flying discs and excitement. Amid dozens of teams from across Montreal, you can find the Concordia ultimate frisbee team practicing and competing for up to five hours per week. Whether in the offseason or preparing for nationals, the team members enjoy being together and playing the sport they love.
“My favorite part [of playing] is the community it builds,” said one of Concordia’s team captains, Sophie Belanger. “I’ve met a lot of people who go to Concordia and who enjoy playing frisbee, which is amazing. They’re two big things in my life, and getting to find the people who cross over in those little segments — it’s really fun.”
Ultimate frisbee, widely known as “ultimate,” is considered a modern sport compared to others. Created in 1968 by a student in Maplewood, New Jersey, ultimate is one of the fastest-growing sports in North America.
Games are typically played in a seven versus seven players format. Teammates work together to pass a frisbee until reaching an “endzone,” similar to American football.
At Concordia, the frisbee team is recognized as an intramural sport, which is a recreational-style group of sports that Concordia offers. Each individual who signs up to play has to pay their own share of the price.
Just two seasons ago, the team barely existed. Concordia team captain and player Romain Guignier said that after the team rebranded, it saw an overwhelming amount of interest from student-athletes. The rebranding consisted of increased advertising, a modernized logo, and new jerseys. This has given the team a rebirth.
“I actually get to share my love for Frisbee with people at the same school, and that was not the case in my first semester and last year,” Guignier said. “It was quite tough, and now we’ve built a group where everyone wants to go practice even when we don’t have official practices — everyone is committed.”
Guignier explained that the ultimate frisbee program at Concordia grew from eight players to 54 this past summer. Because of the overwhelming demand, Concordia was able to form two teams for the outdoor months.
This year, Concordia competed with a men’s open team and a mixed team. Open teams consist of any combination of players, while mixed teams have at least one person of each gender. The team is hoping to have high enough recruiting numbers to form a full women’s team in the future.
“For our program itself, like for it to actually grow, we do need a lot more, at least women [players],” Belanger said. “Right now, we have enough players to make a men’s team and a mixed team, but the mixed division is [played] five versus five, so it’s not as high of a level. So ideally for me, I would really hope to have a women’s team with solid coaches.”
During the regular season, the teams play games on weekends and practice two to three times in the week. While the team is in the second division — meaning they do not have a concrete regular season schedule — the goal is to eventually win the ultimate grand prize: the Canadian University Ultimate Championship.
“Our goal, when we gathered up with the execs before the season, was to have both a competitive side, so [that] we have really good players who want to compete at [a] high level, group nationals, and have a pretty intense train,” Guignier said. “At the same time, we want to promote the sport. We make sure to make our practices accessible to everyone who wants to commit.”
Support for the game has been evident throughout the entire offseason.
Over one hundred players from around Montreal compete at the Stinger Dome each Wednesday night. The league is called Ultimate Grand Montreal’s winter league, which most of Concordia’s players participate in. As many as eight five-versus-five teams and 24 four-versus-four teams compete each week. Games start each hour between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m.
“We found this league and it’s at [the] Concordia Dome, which is amazing,” Belanger said. “It’s probably higher-level than our actual practices, so it really is here for improvement.”
For the time being, Concordia’s ultimate frisbee players hope to continue to grow the teams. Matis Garrigues, a player for Concordia, said that when the time comes to register in the fall, anybody who has an interest in ultimate frisbee should give it a try.
“It’s easy to like, it’s not super complicated, there’s no basic rules,” he said. “You have nothing to lose.”
