Lakehead’s Ultimate Team is DTF (Down to Flick)
What you may not have known about this one-of-a-kind sport
Among the many sports that Lakehead has to offer, Ultimate Frisbee offers an experience for students to practice sport at a unique, high-octane level. For the uninitiated, Ultimate Frisbee is a contact-free sport similar to rugby or football, where teams attempt catch the disk in the opposing team’s end zone to score points. Ultimate is very different from most sports as it is largely self-refereed, attracting a more sophisticated crowd who aim to play hard while still playing fair. Last month The Argus sat down with our Ultimate captain Miki Antonijevic to discuss the many opportunities that Lakehead Ultimate has to offer.
Lakehead currently has a women’s and an open squad who compete in the competitive university series. The open squad is dubbed “open” since women can still play in the open division, but generally it’s separated, creating both a men’s and women’s circuit. In the competitive university series, there is both an outdoor fall season and an indoor winter season. The two series differ further by the size of the field. In the fall, teams face off 7 vs. 7 on a larger field and in the winter, they compete on smaller fields with 4 vs. 4.
Sourced from thunderwolves.ca
To compete in the competitive university series, our athletes travel to Southern Ontario and have done very well in the past few years. Antonijevic said: “The ladies have been kicking butt for the past two years. They won a couple tournaments last year for the indoor series, so they still have their core group and have committed to two tournaments this year.” Our women travelled to Brampton in early February and will head to Waterloo with the open squad for another tournament in the middle of March.
Both squads practice at least three times a week and are always looking for athletes to join the team. Antonijevic says, “We try to maintain that the Thursday and Sunday [practices] are mandatory because we know no one has class at 6 AM […] So really there’s no excuse other than being tired and that’s one of the biggest things about making the team is just showing up to practice. We are kind of low on numbers, so if you are ready to commit to practice, and you are ready to get better with us and show up for practices then more often than not you will make the team.”
If you are interested in Ultimate, but unsure how to start, Antonijevic recommends “the Thunder Bay Ultimate Winter league [since] it’s pretty cheap for twice a week.” You can find all their information on their website. He also encourages students to support Ultimate in any way that they can: “We’re always trying to hold fundraisers and whenever you see something that is put on by Thunder Bay Ultimate or LU Ultimate, it’s putting money towards both our team and the sport in general to help it grow.” He is also thankful for all the financial support that Tom Warden and the Athletics Department have given the team this year, through access to The Hangar and alleviating travel costs.