The World Ultimate Club Championships will be played in Cincinnati, Ohio, from the 23rd to the 30th of July. With the cancellation of the 2020 World Ultimate Championships, this WUCC will be only the third opportunity (after the World Games and WMUCC) to see elite, international Ultimate in the last few years—that means we’ll see last hurrahs, smiles on faces, zany new offensive structures, another evolution of the “meta” (is vert still cool?), and whole new generations of superstars who are here to remind us of our own impermanence and mortality.
This tournament is a real highlight on the international calendar. WUCC has a way of levelling the global playing field, providing a platform for local clubs to represent their community and country. There is nothing quite like playing for your team against the best in the world. In this article, we’ll do a brief overview of the Mixed Division, and get to know the teams that Australia are sending to compete.
Mixed Division
Thank you for this picture Ultiworld. Must be nice being an ‘official media partner’ of the event.
Traditionally, the mixed division at WUCC has been dominated by teams from the USA, which the above draw makes very clear. The top five seeds go to North American teams, with the always exciting GRUT, Finnish juggernaut Pussin Tiristäjät, and our very own Lunchbox Ultimate rounding out the top eight.
Due to the… tornado that hit the tournament four years ago, a lot of the final placing games were never played. How this affects the accuracy of the final seedings remains unclear—the German teams, after their World Games run in particular, seem hard done by and likely to break some hearts. WUCC seeding is not an exact science. IOU believes that WFDF just gives Evan Lepler some Ultiworld articles and Ouija board and sees what he can come up with.
Nonetheless, big pools are designed to nullify seeding errors, and all of our Aussie teams are in a position to surpass expectations. But who are these teams and what expectations shall they surpass? Is lunchbox one word or too? What is a Pie Wagon and are they native to Newcastle? And where actually is Wollongong?
Lunch Box Ultimate — 7 Seed
‘Lunchbox is all about the people, the experience, and the challenge.’ — Max Halden.
While this Brisbane-based team has existed for several AMUC cycles, Lunch Box Ultimate is arguably the closest thing we have to an all-star Australian squad at WUCC. The Queensland-heavy roster is filled out with big names from around Australia (and Germany lol), and claims to be a ‘perfectly balanced meal of players.’ Yum.
The team is full of decorated Australian reps—with current and former players from the Firetails, Dingoes, Mundis, and Crocs squad. You can see the full team list here:
Female-matching athletes to look out for include Captain Ash Mcinnes (known among Brisbaners as the GOAT), the indomitable Dom Simpson, and fast rising superstars like Holly Reeve and Kya Wiya. On the male-matching side, the very decorated Calan Spielman will be a force to be reckoned with, Scott Perry is famously rapid, and Liam Grimmond is just, like, so so good. They’re all good. It’s a great team! Look at it!
If you loved the uniqueness and electricity of the Mixed division, this is a team for you. Coaches Bree Edgar and Anson Chun have had plenty of experience coaching successful Australian mixed teams, and have a real depth of teactics at their disposal. Another strength of this team is connection. The Brisbane contingent have been building on-field relationships with each other for years, and all of the interstaters have overlapped in U20s, U24s and open age Australian teams.
In the words of Co-Captain Max Halden, ‘It’s not a team of superstars, it’s a superstar team.’
Lunch Box are a competitive and aspirational side, but the challenge that they face is obvious and loud and AMERICAN. The path to gold is long and hard from the seventh seed, but not impossible. If Lunch Box can navigate through their initial pool unscathed (which they can definitely do) they’ll enter the massive 32-team bracket with every chance of pulling out something special.
The Lunch Box roster is big and deep—they were able to take it to the Crocs in a showcase game, and their focus on their culture and experiences will serve them well in tough moments. North American teams hate having to work hard against a team that’s having fun.
You can follow Lunch Box’s progress via their Facebook page, probably. They’d also like our readers to know that they’ve compiled a cookbook full of lunch recipes, suitable for all levels of kitchen experience. IOU happens to know for a fact that TiVo’s recipe is avocado toast. DM them if you’re interested.
Wollongong Krank - 13-16 Seed
‘We’re looking to find our best level of play and show it with consistency.’ — Mandy Li
Ah, Wollongong. The beaches, the wind, the wind, and the sunsets. According to the local council website, Wollongong is the ‘City of Innovation’—and anyone matching up against Krank this WUCC will find themselves facing an industrious opponent, wearing a large amount of red, doing strange and innovative stuff. Like sidestacks. Hammers. Tiki-taka small ball. And so on.
Though largely Gong-based, the team has an interesting make up. Here’s the team list (Haven’t heard of squad announcement pictures, @Krank?):
Abby Bachrach-Cox, Annalise Hedditch (Spirit Captain), Hannah Chen, Hannah Nandan, Kirsten Murray, Louisa Battista, Mandy Li (Captain), Monica Chang, Nobuko Kasuya, Rachel Cooney, Taylor Carty, Thea Osmond, Aidan McCabe, Andy Mitchell (Spirit Captain), Angus Jones, Arun Sharma, Callum Faulkner, Coby Ryan, Jack Gray, Jayden Ferguson, Kevin Dang, Matt Lavis, Sam Shellard, Tim Booth (Captain), James Maguire (Coach), Thomas Webster (Manager).
Even if you haven’t played Krank/Surge one million times at Eastern Regionals over the last five years, these names could be familiar to you. Many have represented Australia at the U20 and U24 level in recent cycles, and there are players from all over the place—Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra. Expect some dominant throws coming from the arm of Thea Osmond, whose well-known flick cannon would be worthy of some joke about gun laws in a different political climate. Osmond and Andy Mitchell are key throwers for the Gong, with the speed, height, and sticky hands of Sam Shellard and Hannah Chen likely to be on the receiving end. IOU has also been told that Callum Faulkner’s hammer is looking sharp and ‘ready’—look out world.
Though the club was established in 2013, this is the first time Gong will premiere on the world stage. WUCC is an opportunity for the Wollongong Ultimate Community to rise up, to develop, and to #bleedred over the competition in Cincinnati. With a lot of exciting young players, this tournament is a chance to take individual games to the next level and expand the strength and influence of Krank for many years to come. A secondary goal, apparently, is to convince anyone on the plane that asks who they are that they are competing in human tetris. City of Innovation.
Pool play could go either way for Krank—though Mixtape seems the clear favourite, it seems like Reading Ultimate might present the only real challenge to second place. A strong showing and a bit of wind and anything can happen for Wollongong—in fact, the stronger the wind, the stronger they become. They may well welcome this year’s tornado with open arms. And once they’re in the bracket, anything is possible.
You can follow Wollongong Krank via their Facebook Page, or their Instagram. They would also like to take this opportunity to plug their upcoming tournament Gongmana, an exclusive, beach-side party tournament that has no affiliation with any other beach-side party tournaments you may or may not have heard of.
Pie Wagon — 25-32 Seed
You might have recently watched Pie Wagon competing at the World Masters Ultimate Club Championships and be thinking, jeez, Greeny has some kind of Benjamin Button situation going on. But no. Different Pie Wagon. This is Pie Wagon: Next Generation.
It’s a fresh-faced team, without the big names we’ve seen out of Newcastle in the past. A lot of the roster has represented NSW at the U22s and U18s level, with a number of Australian reps from U20s and U24s teams sprinkled throughout. Here’s the team:
Brittany McCarthy (Vice Captain), Liz Sinclair, Danielle Adams, Daisy Ewan, Elise Bradley (Captain), Rebecca McInerney, Katie Lock (Spirit Captain), Matilda Woo, Elise Pilon, Katelyn Stavinga, Lili Gu, Paige Carver, Josh Bolton (Captain), Luke Prosser (Spirit Captain), Nathan Innes, Matt Diggins, Max Luckman, Jimmy Tan, Jake Christian, Matt Stavinga, Chuck Turner, Will Carmichael, Matt Gubernick, Rodrigo Arcibar, Ryan Turner (Spirit Captain)
Players to keep an eye out for include Luke Prosser on the male-matching side—he’s been tipped to be one of the best and silkiest break throwers of his generation, and is starting to have a bigger impact for I-Beam at Nationals. Brittany McCarthy has represented the Stingrays, and has in her arsenal a massive lefty backhand—the kind of throw that stretches the field and no defender wants to chase. Katie Lock is well known for her army rolling, and expect to see some high grabs from Matt Diggins.
Pie Wagon is one of the oldest mixed ultimate clubs in Australia, and has a proud history on the world stage (5th in 2010, tied 9th in 2018). This is a new wave of the Newcastle Ultimate community, it’s a fresh and relatively inexperienced team with a lot to like about it. They are coming into the tournament with the simple goal of beating their seed, and everything else is gravy. You can’t understate the value of the WUCC experience for development, especially for a relatively regional club—and this young team has an excellent opportunity to play, learn, and grow against some of the best mixed teams in the world. Ideally they’ll bring back some new style of ultimate to Newcastle, hone it in secret, and use it to punish the rest of us in years to come. God help us if they crossbreed that weird Novacastrian horo thing with some geometric innovation from Japan.
You can follow Pie Wagon from their Facebook page.
Good luck to all teams competing at WUCC! We believe in you! Leave your support in the comments!