All things being equal, I would really prefer not to take this knowledge of the game to the grave with me. Over the past twenty or so years, I’ve worked relentlessly and tirelessly trying to teach a team a far more superior framework to play the game by; Shredding.
Over the past dozen or so years, time after time after time, coaches, players and members of the community with social media platforms have broken their commitments that they had made to me. All with complete impunity.
Those Mother F#$?%kers
I arrived in Boone on my 52nd birthday….what to do?
I know that I’ve got an offensive system that breaks Ultimate and I know that Dischoops is superior to Ultimate on every possible level, but getting a new sport launched is an enormous challenge (especially given the fact that players are dopamine addicted to Ultimate).
So I come up with this crazy idea; if only I can teach a team, any team, my system of Shredding, then everyone will learn my system, realize how dumb Ultimate is and they’ll all start playing Schoops!! Right? OK, that’s only slightly grandiose, but how else can I wake people up to the fact that there’s a far better game to play than what they’re used to?
I really, really don’t want to take this knowledge to the grave with me.
I can’t emphasize enough how much of a driving factor this has been for me for a very long time. I’m the only person on the planet who knows what I know and I all I’ve wanted, really, is to give this knowledge away. But how?
Here’s a ‘brief’ chronology of what these past twelve years have been like.
In the summer of 2012, I played a lot of pickup with Adam Russel, Justin Allen, Jeff Nordgren and other App State and community players up here in Boone, NC. Justin agreed to have me coach App State (for the full season, contingent on how an initial two week trial period went), only to renege on his commitment. The two week grace period never happened.
On April 27th, 2013, I drove up to Axton Virginia to introduce myself to Mike Denardis at Collegiate Regionals. We stayed in touch and spent many, many hours in conversations about my offense and later that year in September, I coached Darkside the fundamentals of my offense for an afternoon.
We stayed in touch throughout the winter and in April of 2014, after promoting my offense at this point for a full year with Mike, I made the six hour round trip drive to a Starbucks in the Raleigh area to meet with Mike and Dennis Tarasi ostensibly to discuss me coaching my offense to Ring of Fire. We came to an agreement and I turned around and drove back home.
A week later, when I showed up to get started (as we had discussed at Starbucks), Mike had neglected to let the team know I was coming and of course, that didn’t go over well at all. Mike denies that he made the agreement with me, but next time you see him, ask him what “Frank, I gave you the keys to the car” meant. He’s not being honest when he says we never reached an agreement.January 27th of 2015, Charlie Eisenhood of UltiWorld posted this transcribed “interview” of a Skype conversation we had. He assured me that this was a ‘pre-interview’ for a subsequent interview he intended to do with me later and that he wouldn’t use this maerial directly. Furthermore, because he recorded it, he could have easily just posted the video of the interview ‘as-is’ where you had my smile, my warmth, my humanity and my humor but instead, by just transcribing it into a dry, cold text format and the way I was perceived by the reader was completely different from watching the video. This would have had a completely different effect had he just posted the video of the skype call.
Three days later, January 30th of 2015, Elliot Trotter of Skyd Magazine wrote an article about my mental health that was completely and unironically insane. For the people in Boone who know me, the article was completely out of line, bordering on libel. Most of them just rolled their eyes. Elliot doesn’t know me, has never met me and yet he’s willing to make a clinical diagnosis about the state of my mental health?
Literally just a few weeks later, Skyd posted this article about one of my inventions, the brushed aluminum, shock-corded, Goaltimate kits I had come up with. Skyd didn’t give me credit for it, in spite of the fact that I reached out to Elliot directly and I also corrected them in the comments section* of the article, with a photo from Santa Cruz in 2005 with Ben Wiggins playing Goalty with one of my kits. To this day that haven’t revised their article to give me credit.You can’t make this shit up. First Skyd insinuates I’ve got some problems with mental health, and then just 39 days later they publish an article about one of my many, many innovations in the sport while refusing to give me appropriate attribution, even after I pointed out their omission.
*if you look at the photos I posted in the comments section of the article, you can also see another one of my inventions, spring-loaded, steel plated, artificial turf hoop holders.In the autumn of 2017, I once again reached out to App State (all the legacy players from my first go-around in 2012 having departed by then) and I reached an agreement with the team captains, Matty McDaniel and Otto Solberg.
They were skeptical, as many have been, about my offense and so we all agreed to an initial trial period, whereby if I met three (and only three) objectives, I would finish out the year. These objectives were limited to these three easily attainable goals:
1) I had to prove my offense wasn't just a gimmick offense
2) I had to prove I am capable of coaching it
3) I had to prove that my offense worked against elite Collegiate teams
I worked with the Nomads throughout November’s and December’s shortened holiday calendar and in the first weekend after school started in January of 2018, we played in a Clemson sponsored tournament in Greer SC. Objectively, I crushed it in all three objectives and in fact, I exceeded my own expectations for what I thought I could accomplish in such a short time and in spite of that, they reneged on the agreement that they made with me.
McDaniel’s lame excuse for not keeping his commitment with me was “Frank, the players just don’t respect you”. Matty, I’ve not been respected in the Ultimate community for 40 years (ironic for a game and culture based on mutual respect, wouldn’t you say). Had you and Otto made a fourth condition 4) You have to get the players to respect you, there’s no way in hell I would have agreed to that deal.
We would have won the collegiate national championship had you kept your word.I can’t begin to describe to you how distraught, depressed and despondent I as from this latest example of Ultimate players breaking their agreements with me, with impunity of course. What is it about the game that promotes such a lack of accountability, oh, right, it’s that damn Spirit of The Game and the lack of consequences/penalties.
I had been on double secret probation on /r/ultimate for years, which in and of itself was another case of a lack of tolerance for someone who thinks differently. The subreddit is manned by a cadre of liberals who think they own Ultimate Frisbee, but that’s ok. It’s a cesspool anyway, but it’s clear that they wanted me to conform to their way of thinking.
Let me give you an example. During the 2016 UPA Natties weekend, there was retro game played between Austin and Florida that harkened back to the acrimonious era of the late 80s. It was actually pretty hilarious. Mitch Dengler was so out of control that he literally went on to the field to intervene in a game that he wasn’t even officiating. This was a laughable violation of the entire Observer system. Mitch had no business being on that field, but that didn’t stop him.
There was constant intentional fouling, bad calls, escalation and retaliation. This was straight out of the Uglimate Era classic, the 1989 UPA Finals Between NYNY and Tsunami.I posted on /r/ultimate something like “Yay, the return of Uglimate. The Observer experiment has been an abject failure”
The response that I got from one of the mods was basically to send me to re-education camp and to train me on how to rethink my responses through the lens of their Etiquette of False Decorum. I was literally reprimanded by one of the mods for this post. You can not make this shit up.
Here is the example I was given on how I should have originally written my post:"Today's game between Austin and Florida was marred with several bad calls and intentional fouls. This goes against our core tenets. We're better than this"
Huh?
Are you being serious right now?
That’s not how I talk, I have no desire to talk like that and I’ll never talk like that. Fuck that shit. This game was a complete disaster for anyone who thought that Observers were a good idea. Observers have been a blight on the game ever since they were instituted and they should have never happened.
Out of principle, whenever I’m being told to adhere to someone else’s ideological sense of moral superiority, my answer is always No, Thank you. One of the most immoral things a person can do is to impose their moral superiority on someone else. My commentary was completely fair and appropriate.
The term Uglimate was first coined by Hall of Famer Steve Moonie, one of the all time great players of the game. I didn’t make it up and the game between Austin and Florida in 2016 at natties was an Uglimate game (by definiton) and made a complete mockery of the Observer system (which was only instituted as a band-aid in Ultimate to try to address the problem with Uglimate in the first place).
Observers were always a bad idea and this past, very disgraceful 2023 Natties proved that.
What a hoot that tournament was and everybody knows it, but yeah, let’s censor Frank for voicing his opinion.
Bansfield, by the rules, shouldn’t have even been ejected, AJ stripped that game winning catch in the semis, there were many, many horrible calls all weekend and the observer system needs to be abolished.
Either we’re going to have referees or we’re not, but you can’t have this milquetoast, half assed compromise that doesn’t serve anyone’s interest (except Dengler’s).In any event, after the App State Nomads reneged for a second time in five years, along with Denardis not honoring our agreement, I put everyone on blast with one last reddit post.
There was honestly nothing wrong with it, but I knew it would get me banned.
One of the most disgraceful actions that the Nomads took was that they forced me to play Aiden Todd in the tournament in Greer. Unbeknownst to me, Aiden was enrolled in the local community college and was therefore ineligible to play in the tournament. The Nomads had even explicitly reached out to the UPA for an exemption to be able to have Aiden play on their team in tournaments and their appeal was denied. Aiden was a horrible player and I wouldn’t’ have played him a minute in the game if I had a choice as my job was literally on the line, but none of the Nomads or captains told me, I only found out afterwards.
So, in my last, long diatribe that I posted on /r/ultimate, I sarcastically asked the community whether or not I should “blackmail” the team with this information. I say sarcastically because when I posted the diatribe on /r/ultimate, I simultaneously sent an email to the Collegiate Coordinator for the UPA (who did nothing to reprimand them of course). One of the reasons I was banned from /r/ultimate was because I was accused to have threatened to blackmail a team.
That’s a lie. I never threatened anyone. What a hoot, the team that illegally and illicitly played in a tournament with an ineligible player gets off scot-free and meanwhile, the person who got fucked over by them gets a lifetime ban on the Ultimate Subreddit. Sure, that makes sense.
In October of 2018, the person who runs the @Being_Ulti account of Twitter (Brian Sherry) reached out to me to invite me to man the account for the week leading up to and including Natties Weekend.
To be clear, I first told him I wasn’t interested, I didn’t want to do it and that I had enough of the Ultimate community’s bullshit, but he kept re-iterating over and over again that I had the account carte blanche for the full week and I could do whatever I wanted with it and that I had the account “as if it were mine”, as long as I didn’t cross any lines.
I didn’t believe him but he gave me his assurances and he literally coaxed me into accepting his invitation. The opportunity of doing a live play-by-play tweet-storm of the games over the coming weekend was too good to pass up and it sounded like a perfect recipe for mayhem, so I accepted.
However, as soon as I started posting, my tweets were inundated by players randomly and falsely accusing me of being a racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, white supremacist, neo-Nazi bigot. We all know the drill. It didn’t bother me. That’s the world we live in.
These people were literally engaging in racist (anti-white), sexist misandry (anti-male) and heterophobic (anti-hetero) because I was a white, hetero male, completely oblivious to their own blatant bigotry, while virtue signaling that I was somehow the bigot. Pretty funny really, if it weren’t so sad.
Next thing I knew, in spite of assurances that I had carte blanche to post on the account as if it were my own, Sherry was emailing me and instructing me to post differently. I hadn’t crossed any lines and I was probably posting something like 40-60 tweets per hour the first day for possibly 16-18 straight hours. So much so, that I had to take the second full day off, I was so exhausted by it.
By the third day (technically only my second day manning the account because I had taken a day off)., I had gained a considerable following within the Ultimate community. There were a lot of players out there who were enthusiastically thrilled that someone was saying out loud what they had been thinking in private for years, but were too uncomfortable with saying any of them in public. This is what probably scared the establishment ideologues the most, the fact that I had been given a platform where I was able to communicate directly with all the disenfranchised players that was fed up with the elitists as much as I was.
I was their voice and there was a lot of pent up frustration in thousands of players who felt and thought along the same lines that I was tweeting about. At the end of the second day, I was discussing how mixed Ultimate should have never happened, and it only happened as a result of the Uglimate era and that co-ed Ultimate makes about as much sense to me as co-ed hockey.
Mixed Ultimate is undeniably dangerous. Just watch this:I followed that up with citing scientific studies highlighting that because of biophsyiological differences in the cranium/brain between men and women (generally speaking, he two hemispheres in female brains are closer together and the two hemispheres in male’s brains are further apart), that women (in general) have superior social and emotional intelligence while men (in general) have superior spatial awareness.
Sherry immediately reneged on his agreement with me and I was yanked off of @Being_Ulti before the end of my second day. Sherry did this with impunity and I hadn’t done anything wrong. Anybody with half a brain knew that what I wrote was fine and that I never said anything remotely sexist, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, etc.) but that didn’t stop him from breaking his word.
Communication can only happen through discussion and conversation where opposing viewpoints are allowed and shared. You have to wonder why so many people are unwilling to tolerate fact based, long form, intellectual communication (inside and outside the Ultimate community).In February of 2021, Gerald Chizmadia who was coach of the Detroit Mechanix, reached out to me to discuss me teaching their team my offense. We then had a two hour zoom call with Gerald that went very well, and we followed that up with another two hour zoom call with owner Brent Steepe the following week, principally to discuss me coming up to Grand Rapids to coach my system.
We ended the call with Steepe committing to talk with his team caps and opinion leaders about the idea of me coaching the team my offense and that he’d let me know one way or another if I should come up the following weekend for tryouts.
The day I was set to drive up, I finally got the email from Steepe that I had been waiting for. He gave me the green light and said that the coast was clear to attend so I hopped in my car and made the twelve hour drive.
That mother fucker made the same identical blunder that Denardis did, he didn't bother telling his players I was coming up (in spite of that fact that this is what he agreed on in the zoom call that he would do this). You can imagine that this didn’t end well. “What the fuck is Crazy Frank doing here” I heard one player mutter to another.
Steepe had committed on Saturday to having me work with the ‘A’ team on Sunday to begin teaching them my system but the engagement ended with me receiving an email as I was leaving my hotel room on Sunday morning, instructing me not to attend the session and for me to go home. Unbelievable.
To date, the Mechanix haven’t won a game since the Obama administration. How have they not been booted out of the league by now is Beyond Me.
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The Final Insult; The Indianapolis AlleyCats
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Shredding and how it breaks Ultimate
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