I’m a freshman playing ultimate frisbee. Do colleges recruit for ultimate frisbee? If they do, what are my steps to be recruited?
Generally (there’s always exceptions to be found), colleges do not recruit for club sports so you would be looking at schools that have a D1 or D3 ultimate frisbee team. I would start by creating a list of those schools and seeing which have academic programs that interest you and would be targets for admittance. Then you can reach out to them directly. You can also connect with your coach(s) to see what guidance they can give you since this is something they should have first hand knowledge of if the program has been recruited from in the past.
It’s possible someone else here will have direct UF experience to share.
No they don’t. S24 plays ultimate at UMASS which is atop ranked program and no kids were recruited.
If any schools do recruiting, it’s likely only soft support…nothing as organized as full coach support/slots, pre-reads, etc.
I would start by looking at colleges that offer scholarship $ for ultimate frisbee players…there are many, and I expect it’s increasing. You are going to have to network during HS by talking with players and coaches at tournaments/competitions about the extent of any recruiting, and also do some research online (there are a number of reddit threads about ultimate and playing in college).
This is the USA governing body: https://usaultimate.org/
There’s also quite a bit of ultimate in UK colleges, with some schools offering scholarship money as well: https://www.ukultimate.com/
My S24 is an Ultimate player, and basically the formal answer is no, not in the sense people normally mean where a coach will have an arrangement with admissions where they can designate a certain number of applicants for special treatment in admissions, and you are trying to get a coach to agree to use one of those slots on you.
Now, informally, high level players might network and student captains and such on the powerhouse college teams might try to persuade top HS players they know to apply to their college, suggesting there would be a place for them on the team. And then admissions might look at a kid with a strong Ultimate background as having a strong EC profile if that is something they do a lot of at that college (basically on the normal theory that some of the most compelling ECs are basically just a preview of how you could contribute non-academically to a thriving college community).
But again, all of that falls short of what people normally mean when they talk about athletic recruiting.
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Echoing what others have said, it seems to be informal. My kid plays Ultimate on a top-ranked HS team, and every year kids go on from his school to top Ultimate college programs, often the same few, so there’s definitely a network.
One of the top college programs that our HS has had a number of kids attend in recent years has a fall recruitment weekend for seniors; my understanding is that there is no formal admissions office relationship, but it’s hard to imagine that the university doesn’t connect the dots when they see a kid from our school who is an Ultimate player. It’s a highly selective university, so to @NiceUnparticularMan ‘s point, it likely doesn’t do any more than make the applicant’s EC profile stand out a little, and they certainly have to be a competitive applicant in every other way.
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In fact in the back of my mind I am wondering if being an Ultimate player helped my S24 with Carleton (now on his short list of possible destinations). But he is also a good fit for them academically and in other ways, so we’ll probably never know (which is fine).
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Frisbee is part of the culture at Carleton! In fact, they design a frisbee for every class, and kids all get one on move-in day. They write their name on the back, and the last thing they do before parents depart is stand in a big circle and throw their frisbees. The kids then all pick up a frisbee and have to find the owner by the end of orientation. It’s a really fun tradition!
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