After playing an entire season with Sassy, Holbert is clear about why she loves it. “The co-ed focus is more on support for each other. The team is more important than the game.” Holbert also said that she is completely satisfied with the level of play in mixed ultimate. “It is no less competitive than mens or womens. It is just different.”

Holbert feels that one reason for the mixed format’s success may be that mixed players had to start out being very tolerant of different levels of ability, due to the number of new players in mixed. There were a large number of players who spent their first seasons as ultimate players on mixed squads. Now that mixed has had time to mature, the players tolerate and work strategically with the special skills of the opposite gender.

“I was not convinced at the beginning that the dynamic would work,” she says. The fact that there are men and women means that the team maintains a friendly and supportive atmosphere that she did not experience on womens teams.
“I’d never go back,” said Holbert when asked if she was planning on playing in the womens Fall Series.
— Jenn Sramek

fter much debate the UPA mixed division ran during the summer last year, separate from the UPA Fall Series. Players could have an extended season by playing in both, and while this offered more opportunities for some, it also created tremendous conflicts through the summer. With mixed back as part of the UPA Fall Series, players can choose one open, womens or mixed team to take seriously for the entire season. This forces male and female ultimate players alike to choose their poison.

For women, traditionally the most sought-after for both divisions, the times are changing. I asked Becky Mia and Jo Holbert to share their views about the climate of ultimate for women, and to justify their choice to play in this year’s mixed or womens Fall Series.

Becky Mia, a San Francisco Bay Area resident and competitive ultimate player since 1994 says she was hooked on the sport the first time she played pick-up. “There weren’t many women players in my area, so I played co-ed or slutted around most of the time. In an awesome effort to help womens ultimate (and to get laid) our co-ed team recruited around 30 women and we created a womens team.” The team only went to a few tournaments, but the seed was planted.

Upon moving to the Bay Area in 1995, Mia played with the co-ed teams Ebb & Flow, then Rippit, followed by another series of moves and brief stints with Amazing Grace, a Colorado women’s team; Homegrown Tomatoes, a Texas womens team and Red Fish Blue Fish, a Bay Area mixed squad. Last year to extend her own playing season she started, and is still captain of, a womens team called Aeryn Sun.
Said Mia, “I used to have a strong preference for co-ed, then I had a strong preference for womens. Now I don’t really have a preference. For me, each is fulfilling in its own way. I think some of it depends on the teams I’m deciding between. In my experiences, I think womens tends to be more competitive and disciplined, and co-ed tends to be more sociable and laid back.”

Jo Holbert, also of the San Francisco Bay Area, plays for the mixed team The Sassy Sassafras Lollipop Experience. Holbert began playing women’s ultimate in college in 1995. She had played soccer for two years but decided that it was not for her. After a single season of womens ultimate, Holbert never looked back. She played for two years at Williams College and then three more at Smith College, ending her college tenure as Smith’s captain. She tried playing with a women’s club team on the East coast, but the team did not practice consistently.

Last year, she moved to San Francisco and immediately began to troll for opportunities to play ultimate. She had heard rumors about the Bay Area womens scene, alluding that winning a spot on a team was more about whom you knew than how you played, and that it was more about competition and less about friendship. She was prepared to try for a spot with a mixed or a womens team regardless. As it happened, Sassy contacted her first.