‘THE DARKSIDE’: Ultimate Team Stands Out

FAYETTEVILLE STUDENTS FINISH FOURTH IN NATIONAL TOURNAMENT

Hayden Hairston, front, and Cole Borgstadt vie for the disc Wednesday.
Hayden Hairston, front, and Cole Borgstadt vie for the disc Wednesday.

— Despite age, experience and tradition stacked against it, the Fayetteville High Ultimate flying disc team placed fourth out of more than two dozen prep teams last month at the Chicago Invite.

The national tournament played host to teams from Nebraska to Virginia and Arkansas to Minnesota, competing at the Naperville Polo Fields in one of the largest high school Ultimate tournaments in the country.

Fayetteville’s team roster features just a handful of upperclassmen — all juniors — and the rest are sophomores, freshmen and one eighth-grader. The program was started in 2009-10 and actually won the Chicago Invite in 2010 with a senior-laden team. Only three current members competed with Fayetteville last season.

“We lost everyone. They built a foundation for this team, but this is a completely new team,” said sophomore Clayton Adams, one of the three holdovers now serving as a captain this year. “We definitely got a lot of experience in Chicago, and I feel like we can go back next year and win the whole tournament because we’ll be bringing everybody back.”

Despite just two and a half years of competition and a young team, Fayetteville is ranked 34th in the USA Ultimate national high school poll, one of just two Southern teams in the top 40 and the only Arkansas team among the 550-plus teams listed.

“Ultimate’s not really established in Arkansas yet, but it’s still good to know that we’re the best in Arkansas,” Adams said.

The Ultimate team does not receive any funding from the school, and because there are few organized teams in the region, the athletes have paid their way to tournaments in Wichita, Kan., and Chicago and have looked at trips to St. Louis and farther north in Ohio and Wisconsin.

“Around here, there’s not much competition,” junior captain Sam Borgstadt said. “It’s a lot of traveling, and our tournaments are a long way away. Since there’s not much recognition of the sport here, there’s not much help from the school or anything. Some of the teams that we played in Chicago, Ultimate is a varsity sport at their school.”

Fayetteville’s team is nicknamed ‘the Darkside,’ after one of the club’s founders told the initial participants, “Welcome to the dark side of Ultimate.” Flying discs are a common sight at parks and college campuses, but the Fayetteville players are in it for more than recreational fun.

“It’s a really technically challenging game. A lot of people just play for fun, but if they aren’t really serious about it, they’re not really interested in practicing with us because we’re pretty serious,” Borgstadt said.

They hold two-hour weekly practices, working on fundamentals and conditioning before scrimmaging and evaluating. Borgstadt said they’re going to compete at a state tournament soon in order to qualify for nationals in 2012-13.

Adams said they are trying to get more middle schoolers involved in conjunction with the Fayetteville Disc Association to feed into the varsity program.

“We’re going to try to start a spring youth league, just for casual players, and if they get into it more, they could possibly play with us,” he said.

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