On a Sunday afternoon in early May, the women of the Middlebury Pranksters Ultimate Frisbee team were standing in the pelting rain on the sidelines of a soggy soccer field at Williams College. They were wearingHefty contractor-sized trash bags—some with two players to a bag—and were wrapped in Mylar blankets while a stiff wind blew and temperatures hovered in the upper 40s.
The score was 4–3, with the Pranksters up one point at halftime against Williams during their last game of the New England Regionals tournament, while they were fighting their way to earn a bid to the Division III College Ultimate National Championships for the fifth year in a row.
Ultimate is, for the uninitiated, a traditionally counterculture club sport. It features moves like hucks, hammers, scoobers, and pulls, and has an informality and outright goofiness—from handmade uniforms to sideline antics— that’s not remotely possible in NCAA varsity sports. Men and women at Middlebury have been playing Ultimate for nearly 50 years, but in the past several years, the program—especially the women’s program—has built a national reputation for being one of the strongest, if not the strongest, D-III Ultimate programs in the country.
This is Middlebury women’s Ultimate: a team of almost 30 athletes, excelling at a grueling sport while doing handsprings on the sidelines, and dressing in glittery gowns, cowboy hats, and thrifted T-shirts. How can they be so free-spirited while also being so good? And how long can they keep it up?
BIDDING FOR A BERTH
As the 2024 college Ultimate season began, the Middlebury Pranksters women’s team were the reigning and record- breaking three-time D-III national champions. But their bid to the 2024 championship was not a guarantee.
After sweeping the D-III women’s Ultimate competition for the last few years, and even going more than a full season without a loss, the 2024 spring season had been a challenging one. They’d won their last national title in May 2023, and then the team had lost 11 seniors, including Claire Babbott-Bryan ’23, named the 2022 Player of the Year by the website Ultiworld. In their place, 10 first-year students and three sophomores joined the team, most of whom hadn’t played a single game of Ultimate before.
This year’s team was captained by Sarah Rifkin ’24, Keziah Wilde ’24, Pearl Tulay ’24, Grace Sokolow ’24, and Grace Valentine ’24.5, all of whom had played on the past three years’ championship teams. They were faced with a choice. Having never seen success like the women’s team had enjoyed the last several years, should they focus more on defending their title or on rebuilding a program?
“While our goal is to make it to Nationals, we have to acknowledge it’s a developmental season,” Rifkin said in the early spring. “We want to build a team for the next four years, not the next four weeks.”
On that wet May day, they were grappling with that choice. To get to Nationals, they had to win against Williams, a team they’d beaten the day before by one point during the Regionals’ sunny first day. But the captains didn’t huddle around a coach. Instead, the entire team circled up, talked, and then started dancing. It was halftime after all, and such performances were part of what the Pranksters were known for. When the second half began, they held their opponents to a single point while the victorious Pranksters went on to score four more and confirm their berth at Nationals, which was scheduled for May 17–20, in Milwaukee. When the game was over, they rushed the field, hugged each other, and then serenaded Williams with their version of “Tik Tok” by Kesha.
A TEAM OF THEIR OWN
Unlike most teams—including most college Ultimate teams—the Middlebury Pranksters women’s and men’s teams, who refer to themselves as the MLP (Middlebury Lady Pranksters) and MGP (Middlebury Guy Pranksters), see themselves— and often function—as a single program. They practice together, eat together, celebrate together, and often travel together, although they don’t compete together.
That kind of mutual collaboration and respect has brought the two teams a considerable amount of success, especially in recent years.
But there wasn’t always an equal dynamic.
The Middlebury Pranksters Ultimate Frisbee Club originated in 1977. “I was introduced to Ultimate late into my freshman year at Midd,” said Tim Rockwood ’80, now managing director of broadcasting for the World Flying Disc Federation. While he had been a star soccer player and track-andfield athlete at his high school, he said, “I quickly decided I didn’t want to spend my time with those groups. That’s about when I learned that ‘if a ball could dream, it would be a Frisbee.’ The late Tom Rooney ’80 from Buffalo, and Carl Howard ’81 from the Bronx, had each learned how to play Ultimate in their hometowns—they were our ‘Johnny Appleseeds.’ They started it all and taught us how to throw. We already knew how to run and catch. Our first game was in September 1977 against Williams College WUFO, a.k.a. Williams Ultimate Frisbee Organization (Pranksters victorious).”
One of the first women to play with the Pranksters was Corinne Corrigan ’81. “In the spring of 1978, I saw some men playing Ultimate on Battell Beach,” she recalled. “They were—from my perspective—super athletic, talented, really good-looking, and fun, and they welcomed me to play with them.”
Corrigan recruited her friend Kim Holtan ’81 and several others. “Did we women know what Ultimate was? Not really. We had thrown a Frisbee at the beach or to a dog. We would practice throwing and catching on the sidelines while the guys played. This was a time when most of what was available in the sports store was men’s cleats, and sports bras were pretty basic, but we liked to run and catch Frisbees, and we brought music to the sideline so we could dance during practice.”
Even with few other women to play with, Corrigan persevered. “I was a woman, often the token woman, on the Pranksters. I traveled with the men’s team to tournaments at UVM, Williams, and UMass Amherst and Dartmouth, and I would be put in on a point when we were ahead.” (Today’s rules require that a mixed team have at least two female players, but that rule didn’t exist then.)
“The opposing team would then match me with the fastest, tallest guy, and they would of course immediately score. I was really motivated to have women playing women, to have an all-women’s team. So I created WUFAM (Women’s Ultimate Frisbee at Middlebury) in the spring of ’81, and we went to UMass Amherst and played in a tournament against some of the earliest women’s teams from UMass and Cornell, and the women’s club team from Boston, BLU. We had just enough people for a women’s team, barely. Some hadn’t played a field sport before nor were they particularly fast runners, but they were all good sports.”
“Corinne is the single force behind WUFAM,” Holtan recalled in an email. “She scraped that first women’s Middlebury team together by hook or crook—I mean, she kind of kidnapped players to complete a roster. There were some lacrosse and field hockey players who were up for the super fun and that gave us sufficient numbers. When we played, or went to a tournament or to a party, we always dressed for success. By success I mean fun(k)—bling, glitter, rhinestones, colorful prints, spots, animal patterns, faux fur—anything funky. I like how the Pranksters continue to have outstanding colorful expression.” That “colorful expression”—alternatives to the standard athletic uniform, including dresses and tutus, fish hats, boas, and capes—are what the team now refers to as “flair.” “Flair means something different to everyone,” said Sokolow, “It doesn’t need to be earned or bought; it is shared with love.” More than anything, flair is synonymous with being a Prankster. “It’s fun to look not serious but to play seriously.” The teams keep bins of flair that travel with them to tournaments and they wear it whenever standard uniforms aren’t required (which is every game besides the national championships—and they often try to push the envelope there, too).
“WE DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO BE GOOD”
Ultimate quickly became a popular college club sport, at Middlebury and nationwide. The first official college championships were held in 1984, with just a men’s division. The women’s division was added in 1987, and the Division III championships were introduced in 2010 to expand the opportunity for national-level competition for colleges and universities with student populations under 7,500. There are now over 12,000 students playing Ultimate on more than 700 college teams in North America.
But by the mid-1980s, WUFAM, the separate Middlebury women’s Ultimate team, disintegrated. It reemerged in 1987 and then faded away. Joel Thompson ’94, who played for the Pranksters in the early ’90s, recalled in an email that during his first two years on the team, they practiced and played as a mixed team because there weren’t enough women to form a team. “1992 was the year that we finally launched a women’s team—relaunched, as it turns out. We didn’t know at the time that there had been a women’s team before then.”
Martha Crootof Uhl ’04 played on the new iteration of the women’s team in the early 2000s. “We had a core group of really committed players” on the women’s team, she said, “who wanted to be good—but we didn’t know how to be good. We were learning 15-year-old plays that had been handed down by the team. There was no coach. But everyone was super nice and wacky and weird. And I remember feeling like an equal to the men’s team in all sorts of ways. We shared responsibilities together. We helped each other out on the sidelines. That was not a dynamic we saw with other teams.”
In 2010, both MGP and MLP went to Nationals for the first time. Uhl and several of her alumni teammates spontaneously flew to Wisconsin to watch the games. MGP finished 11th, and MLP finished dead last, but the Pranksters’ time on the national stage had begun. In 2013, MGP won the national D-III title, and then returned to Nationals again in 2015. MLP and MGP both went to Nationals in 2019, when the men won again, and the women took fifth.
Momentum was building. As Ultimate became a more established sport, the Pranksters dug in on their identity, which included being completely player coached—supported by a plastic swan named Steve.
Yes. A plastic swan. (Well, more like a goose, really.) Named Steve.
Steve Swan, also known as Swan Steve, is the only “coach” the team has ever had, which is to say, it has no coach other than the athletes themselves. Steve’s current iteration is a large plastic lawn ornament that wears different outfits, including a pink bikini, and a yellow slicker and matching hat, to tournaments. The original Swan Steve became part of the team in 1977. Michael Pearson ’80 recalled, “Steve joined the Pranksters early on—he was a toy extracted from a barrel inside a hardware store and immediately joined the sidelines of all Prankster activities, past, present, and future. It’s believed Steve embodies the truest love for Frisbee, Ultimate or otherwise.”
While Middlebury’s tier-one competitive club sports, such as rugby, equestrian, sailing, and crew, have coaches, in part due to their high-risk exposure, Ultimate—considered a tier- two sport despite being played at a national level—does not. “The movement toward more coaches has been prevalent in recent years, especially for Nationals-level D-III teams ,” said Anna Browne, a sports writer who covers Ultimate for Ultiworld. “While having coaches is definitely helpful, teams like the Pranksters have demonstrated that a coach is not required to play at a high level.” Besides, an official coach is counter to the Pranksters collaborative, self-directed culture, the teams say.
It’s also an added cost. Club sports are funded like other student activities, through money budgeted by the Student Association. Each season, the program is allotted a certain amount of funds.
Anything that they want to do that costs more than what they’ve been alloted— from competitive tournaments, to transportation, to uniforms—they fund themselves. Such restrictions require a certain level of scrappiness. There’s no traveling on charter buses— players drive themselves in their own cars or borrow Middlebury vans, and they’ve been known to cram nearly the entire men’s and women’s teams into a rental house or two (first-year students often have to sleep on the floor), or bunk in with players’ parents.
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
All this history is what brought MLP to the 2024 season.
After they won their third national championship in May 2023, Ultiworld noted, “It takes a lot to make a championship team, but it takes more to make a championship program. Middlebury has a championship program, and that’s what captains Claire Babbott-Bryan and Niamh Carty wanted to express the most after the game. ‘In 2021 and even last year in 2022, we were emerging as a program in terms of our systems and in terms of our trust for each other and our chemistry and our confidence,’ Babbott- Bryan said with tears of pride in her eyes. ‘I think everything really solidified this game and this season for us which is a profound feeling because it means that there’s been a past and a present, but there’s also a future.’”
The future is what the Ultimate captains had been thinking about. After their record run—no D-III Ultimate team, men’s or women’s, had won three national titles in a row—a third of the team graduated. They now had more than a dozen new players to mentor and teach the game to while also building a leadership team and improving play.
Based on their performance the past few years, the women had a plan: to build community in the fall, and then move into a bold spring season going to tournaments in Texas and Boston to play against some of the best D-I women’s teams in the country.
Community building is as important to the Pranksters as skills building. On both the men’s and women’s teams, one member of leadership is the “social captain,” and it’s their job to intentionally create a sense of belonging and shared values and goals. “For a lot of people,” said Pearl Tulay, the women’s social captain, “the Pranksters serve as their primary social sphere. Team members need to learn the game, and they also need to learn who the Pranksters are, what our traditions are, and what it means to be part of the community.”
Community building means scavenger hunts and themed parties (“Jersey Shore” and “Western Night” were two of the events), swimming in the river after practice, and making spray-paint jerseys, but also community standards trainings and expectation setting. “Our community standards meeting happens every fall,” Sokolow explained. “The point is to share the responsibilities of making this community a safe, welcoming, accessible, fun, and adaptable space with the people who take part in it. It’s a collective responsibility. We gather everyone who is interested in being a part of the Pranksters community and explain our community norms.”
They also discuss party culture, and their zero-tolerance policy for hazing, sexual assault, and violence. In the spring, they host a follow-up community workshop, where they revisit these themes and other issues that may arise throughout the course of the year. Once the community foundations had been set for this year, the spring semester play began in earnest. But their plans for a bold spring season didn’t go as they’d expected.
The MLP’s first tournament, Centex in Austin, Texas, placed them as the number one seed, based on their performance in 2023. That year, they had surprised the field (though not themselves) by beating every Division I team they’d played. This year, they lost four out of six games— the first losses the team had experienced in more than two years.
From Centex, they headed to the New England Open. They won more games than they lost but were beaten decisively by the D-I teams from the University of Connecticut and UMass Amherst. They found themselves moving into the season’s playoffs not only no longer the number one D-III team in the country, but not even the number one team in northern New England.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
This year, MLP had chosen to play against Division I teams—but there are big differences between D-I and D-III.
“D-III Ultimate is commonly referred to as the People’s Division,” said Anna Browne. “Unlike in other college sports, most notably NCAA sports, the breakdown between D-I and D-III is not determined by scholarship money, but instead is based solely on school size. Schools under 7,500 total students (undergraduate and graduate) can elect to compete in the D-III division against other smaller schools.
“What this usually means is that smaller schools, typically liberal arts schools, have an opportunity to take center stage on a regional and national level. The D-III division feels like Ultimate at its roots, with almost all players coming to the sport through word of mouth in college. While most players have thrown a disc before, relatively none (compared to D-I), even on the best D-III teams, have played an organized game of Ultimate prior to joining their college team.”
“With the school size restriction placed on D-III, this means that the pool of available players for a D-III women’s team is even smaller compared to their D-I counterparts. It’s common for teams to be struggling to get 15 players, and they bring around 10 to some regular season tournaments. Because of this, a team’s skill can be broadly different if they are missing a few star players from tournament to tournament.”
The Pranksters have no problem filling their rosters. This year, MGP had enough players to have both an A-team and a B-team, and MLP’s roster had almost 30 players. More players than usual had played Ultimate before joining the team. On this year’s MLP roster, nine of the players played Ultimate in high school. Three players were from Vermont, where Ultimate became recognized as a high school varsity sport in 2017. Several were from the Seattle area, and from Boston and Western Massachusetts, where highly competitive youth club Ultimate teams are popular.
In the new recruits, the Pranksters also had plenty of high school athletes from other sports.
Makenna Bachman ’27 had played lacrosse and field hockey since elementary school. “I had forgotten what learning to play a new sport feels like. It was exciting to start from the bottom and have so much room to improve,” she said. “Learning to play Ultimate was a bit overwhelming at first. But everyone was super helpful, and they cultivated an environment where it felt okay to make mistakes.”
Annie Art ’27, another high school athlete with no prior Ultimate experience, agreed. “The Pranksters’ wealth of knowledge about the sport is so deep. Without a coach, there is a lot of responsibility on the captains to teach newcomers every aspect of the game, which they did remarkably well. They taught each skill multiple times in different ways, making it understandable to everyone.”
What they needed from their new players was commitment, said Sokolow. “Having everyone at every practice allowed us to build from basics to more complicated strategies and drills. So much of our success in teaching this year was due to how hard our newer friends worked to get up to speed on both basic throwing/catching skills and offensive and defensive strategy. Many of the players who now know a lot or can play at a very high level learned everything (or almost everything) they know about Frisbee at Middlebury. We try to remind folks of that as often as possible so that they remember what’s possible for themselves.”
Bachman recalls feeling how things “clicked” for her at Regionals. “I really, really, really wanted to make it to Nationals, and I felt like I had finally learned enough to stop thinking and just start playing. Despite, or maybe even because of, the horrendous weather, the energy and chemistry on and off the field was amazing that day. I had so much fun and walked away feeling happy about how I played, which doesn’t always happen, especially since I’m still new to the sport.”
EVERY PLAYER ON THE FIELD
The second week of May, MLP was on a familiar journey. They were heading back to Nationals to defend their title. Last year they’d made history by being the first program to win the championships three years in a row. Would a “four-peat” be possible?
According to USA Ultimate, the sport’s governing body, it wasn’t likely. Instead of being the top seed at the tournament, MLP was in the unfamiliar position of being seeded 10. (MGP, who had a stellar 2024 spring season, was the number one seed in the men’s division.)
“Our original season goal was to play as many games as possible,” said Sokolow. “After Regionals, we asked the team what their goals were going into Nationals, and arrived at a mindset that was primarily competitive (for example, favoring stronger players in order to win games), while still making sure that everyone would get to play.”
They planted Swan Steve, dressed his best in a red strawberry suit, on the sidelines, and they started to play.
And they started to win.
By the end of the first day of Nationals, MLP was undefeated, dispatching their competition with relative ease.
In winning their pool, they qualified to move directly on to the quarterfinals, where they played, and defeated, Haverford/Bryn Mawr on Sunday afternoon. All that stood between them and another shot at the title was the evening’s semifinal against Carleton Eclipse, the team they’d beaten the year before to win the 2023 Championship.
The captains made a decision. The team had agreed that they’d come to Nationals to be competitive, and also to expose newer players to high levels of competition. “When I played my first competitive season as a sophomore, the captains put me on the field in the final for one point. It was playing that one point that gave me the confidence to take the field as a captain at Nationals this year. As captains we wanted to give all of our new players that same opportunity. And we knew that each and every one of them was ready for it,” Sokolow said.
They had a rocky start, with Carleton up 4–1 within the first 15 minutes of the game. And then, whether it was some coaching magic from Swan Steve, or more likely the hard work, experience, wisdom, and the trust that the players had in each other, the tide began to turn. At halftime, the Pranksters were ahead of Eclipse by one point.
During the second half, the two teams traded points, until Middlebury was able to pull ahead by two. Playing in the final was once again in sight.
Until it wasn’t. A missed throw, a dropped disc, an unlucky moment, and Carleton tied the game, then pulled ahead and beat the Pranksters, 15–13. The Pranksters’ streak had ended. But as the captains had wanted, every player on the team had been on the field, playing in the national tournament, in a stadium under the lights.
The Carleton and Middlebury men’s teams, both of whom had been eliminated, falling short of their own title ambitions, ran onto the field and formed two lines together. They lifted their arms up and created a tunnel for both women’s teams to run through. Despite not winning the championship this year, with their third-place finish, the Pranksters had beaten the odds.
“Everything that happened this season happened because this team kept on showing up and believing in what we could do together. I am so proud of us and so grateful to have been a part of it,” Sokolow reflected. “Nothing could have made me prouder than watching when our open defensive line took the lead against Carelton in the semifinal. That’s when I knew we had succeeded as captains. I can’t wait to see where this program goes from here.”
Leave a Reply