Imagine your team is down at halftime against reigning champs, Chapel Hill, and your teammate, Alex Hart, stands up on the bench to give an inspirational speech. This is for all the marbles. As the final half begins, your teammates start going for long runs into the end zone, receive passes from nearly forty yards out and score. Nearing the end of the game, your team is up 12-11 and tensions are high. As the clock starts ticking, another teammate, Matthew Russell, stops with a defensive play, picks up the disk and spots teammate Brandon Fair sprinting toward the end zone. Russell flings the disc. Two Chapel Hill players leap but Fair soars, grabs the disc with two hands and lands into the end zone. Your team has won the Ultimate Frisbee state championship.
Northwood’s only team state championship title is, in fact, from the 2007-08 Ultimate Frisbee club. Ultimate is a fast-paced game, requiring a high level of conditioning, communication and basic athletic skills. On the field, similar to a football field, one team of seven players throws the Frisbee to each other while avoiding a turnover to the other team. While in possession of the Frisbee, you cannot run but only throw it to your teammate.
In 2008, then-senior Alex Hart, who now teaches physical education and coaches boys’ basketball, along with teammates Hart Phillips and Russell, discovered Ultimate Frisbee at a cross country summer camp at North Carolina State University.
“We found ourselves throwing Frisbee every day after practice and we started thinking about how we would expand from just throwing after practice to something bigger,” Hart said.
After talking about it around school, the “founding fathers” came upon social studies teacher Skip Thibault, who had played Ultimate in college.
On the weekends the team would find a time and play at either the Field of Dreams or the practice soccer field. They promoted themselves throughout the school through posters, T-shirts and humorous intercom announcements written by Hart or Phillips. The team name, Lunatic Fringe, is described as a term used to characterize members of a political or social movement as extremists with eccentric views and was given by Thibault.
Although the team was agile, some lacked the skills essential to the game and the upcoming state tournament.
“We only had a few guys that could really handle the disc well and throw it accurately. Nearly every player on every team we faced during the tournament could accurately throw the disc using the forehand and backhand,” Russell said in an email. “We also didn’t really know all the rules. These other teams had been playing league games and tournaments throughout the year. There was a big learning curve for us during the course of the tournament.”
At the state tournament the competition was intense.
“It was so cutthroat that we needed an adult in charge if it got ugly at times,” Thibault said. “Ultimate is a game where they don’t have officials and you make your own calls. I didn’t have enough patience for that.”
The tournament was a two-day event with non-stop competition against some of the best teams.
“It drained me of all my energy, left me bloodied, black and blue, but when I think about the guys piling on each other after winning the championship and seeing Thibault hoist that trophy up in the air, I can’t help but smile,” Russell said.
Along with the dog pile and accomplishment of winning the championship, the team received a trophy and celebrated with McDonald’s McFlurries.
“We took turns with the trophy and treated it like it was the Stanley Cup,” Thibault said. “So I took it home the first night and then Alex [Hart] took it home, and then Hart Phillips took it home and each of the guys took it home for a little while.”
The victory was very special and made an impact on many of the players’ high school experiences.
“It was one of the highlights for sure—it was basically another excuse to goof off with friends, say ridiculous things over the intercom and ultimately beat a bunch of private school Gibbons snobs at their own game,” said Phillips in an email.
However, Ultimate Frisbee is not sanctioned by the North Carolina High School Athletic Association and the championship doesn’t really count.
Many factors contributed to the fall of the Ultimate club. The seniors graduated and the underclassman tried to continue, but although Thibault said he enjoyed the experience, it was time for him to resign from the club.
“The next year people came up to me and said, ‘Okay, what are we doing?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Talk to somebody else,” Thibault said. “We had a lot of fun but I would never do it again; it was miserable just arguing with those adults.”
Since 2008, the club has not returned, but it could be a possibility.
“I don’t know where it stands now, but I joke with Coach Hart that he should crank it up again,” Thibault said.
– By Natalie Womble
