One thing I learned about the club tryout process is that it takes weeks. Often, you’ll travel to one or two tournaments before you know if you made the team or not. Now I know the process in college takes quite a bit of time as well; however, in college, you’re guaranteed to play with the B team as long as you keep coming to practice. In the club process, if you don’t make the team, you need time to find another one.
Since I took a year off from competitive ultimate, coming back to it through the tryout process re-aggravated a number of old injuries. Despite my rigorous lifting, sprinting and plyometric work, nothing quite prepares you for the shock of playing for hours at the top level. As such, I had a difficult time balancing my health with demonstrating to the captains that I can be a valuable asset to the team. It was nice that the captains were fairly approachable and didn’t seem the type of people to hold an injury against you, but they still have a decision to make based solely on what they see from your performance.
Luckily, my injuries were slight, and I knew how to wrap them up and tough it out. As you probably already know, I was offered a spot to play with Beach Front Property and took it. I did want to mention that the ultimate scene in Chicago has grown considerably in both size and talent since I graduated. When playing club with Illinois, I always had the attitude that the second tier Chicago teams just took anyone who didn’t make Machine and were beneath our level. That has changed.
If you thought balancing classes/college life and ultimate was difficult, balancing work life/home life with ultimate is a challenging experience. It’s easy to blow off or sleep through classes the day after a late practice or tourney, but it’s a much different story when working in the “real world”. I’m sure my experience would have been different if I lived in the city and close to our practice fields, but I did not.
For Saturday practices, I drove an hour each way (and that was without traffic). For practices during the week, I worked late, caught a ride to practice with a teammate and then ended up taking a late train back to the burbs after practice was over. I tended to get home around 1am and then had to be up at 6am to head back to work the next day (and that was sleeping in). Now, 5 hours of sleep is plenty for me to function normally; however, coming home at 1am when your wife goes to bed a 9:30 has a whole other set of “issues”.
As an accountant and former treasurer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss the finances. Team dues and other expenses are also slightly different at the club level. I still paid a team fee and the cost of jerseys, which actually came to considerably less than what I paid for college dues and jerseys. However, that difference is easily made up with having to pay for my own travel and lodging versus having the team fund cover those expenses in college. We still engaged in carpooling, room sharing and house crashing to cut down on those expenses, but there’s only so much saving a person can do. Also, team scheduling can have a big effect on traveling expenses. For example, I know that Machine’s tournament schedule encourages flying which can easily run you a couple hundred each flight.
Adjusting to a new team often means adjusting to a new role. I played a lot of defense in college, and I tended to get a decent amount of playing time, especially pre broken leg (a.k.a. before I got “Lamped”). On Beachfront, I became more of a “utility” long. I’d play either O or D and usually got 3-6 points of playing time per game. I’m not going to say whether I thought this was good or bad; just that it was different. In going from the college to club level, expect it to be “different”.
One of the great things about this game, is that you can play it for life. I would encourage all of my readers to keep playing the game in some capacity. Whether you’re a perennial at club nationals or a heckler at the summer league championship, this game will always give you new friends, will always teach you new skills and will never cease to be fun.
