Ideologies attract hypocrites like a moth to a flame
fph
In 1982, I envisioned a future of the sport where once it became professionalized, two major changes would happen to drastically improve the game (possibly even making it a real sport).
These two things were that the screwball rules would be normalized to make the risk/reward ratios balanced and that real team owners would manage teams from the top down and that the inmates would no longer be running the asylum. With a business model based on entertainment value being a core principle, these two changes would push the game to new heights.
With the AUDL, neither of these two things happened. In a game with an inherent and overwhelming offensive bias, the geniuses behind the AUDL made the game objectively less entertaining by making the field approximately 40% larger (the UFA endzone is larger than an NBA half-court).
As for the inmates, they’re alive and well and in full control of the game…..
The final insult; The Indianapolis AlleyCats,
At long last, we’ve finally made it to the entire reason I sat down to write this series of article in the first place, which is to tell the extraordinary story of the final indignation and most disgraceful, savage breach of trust of them all.
In a game, culture and community based on the honor system and the Spirit of the Game, this has to be the most dishonorable thing that has ever happened in the history of Ultimate.
On October 7th of 2023, I reached out to Tim Held, the owner of the AlleyCats. I’m not sure exactly why I did it, other than just to start a convo and say hello.
We immediately set up a zoom call and spoke within the next day or two. Tim liked everything he heard and I’m from South Bend and he lives in Mishawaka, so we hit it off and agreed to take the next steps in bring me in to teach my revolutionary offense.
I literally had been waiting 40 years for a professional team owner to have a top down approach to running a team, like every other professional sport in the world.
We next had a group zoom call with Tim, the coach (Drew Shepherd), the CEO (Derek Tow) and a few players, and that also went very well. After that, we had another group call with a player/minority owner (Travis Carpenter) who couldn’t make the previous call.
Of note on this call was that Shepherd asked me an odd ball question about Gender Equity in Dischoops. It was definitely a harbinger of things to come as he clearly was very prejudiced against me. My gut instinct was to hang up on the call immediately and I wish that I had, but the carrot being dangled in front of me was too massive to pass by. This may be the best and last chance I ever get to coach my offense, be patient, I thought to myself.
I subsequently had one-on-one calls with Drew a couple of times, Travis a couple of times, Tim a couple more times and one or two calls with Derek.
This all culminated with us agreeing to host a third Shredfest event in Indianapolis. These Shredfests are events that I’ve been putting on with Johnny Bansfield and AJ Merriman, with Shredfest I in Lexington, KY in May of 2022 and Shredfest II in Charlottesville, CA in December of 2022. I do have to say, that when we put both teams’ seven on the line in Charlottesville, there were very fine people on both sides.
We scheduled Shredfest III in Indianapolis for mid-November 2023 and AJ agreed to make the nine hour drive from DC and Johnny planned on driving up from Lexington.
This event was part of the evaluation process that would ultimately determine whether or not the AlleyCats would bring me on to coach the team Shredding. In advance of the weekend, the owner Tim Held sent out this email to Johnny, myself, the coach and Travis Carpenter:
Given my previous 50 years, this was literally a lifelong dream coming true right before my eyes. It’s a fulfillment of everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish. You can’t imagine what getting an email like this, a week before Shredfest III was like for me. I kept telling Tim that he was too good to be true……little did I know what was about to happen.
This Shredfest was consistent with all of my other experiences coaching Shredding, the first several hours can be a bit rough as I’m focused initially on breaking players out of bad habits so that I can replace them with good, sound fundamentals and a solid philosophical infrastructure.
When Johnny and I got back to our hotel room Saturday night, we were concerned with how rough it went and whether or not we’d be able to turn the corner the next day, Sunday.
When we woke up the next morning, the outside temperature was 31 and it was not forecast to even hit 50, but we went on out to the field to get started. Sunday was spectacular, especially AJ, who really hit his stride and was completely destroying the game. AJ is the first player I’ve ever seen that I thought to myself, ‘someday, this guy could eventually take shredding further than I ever could’. By the end of the day, there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and excitement over my offensive system between all the coaches and players and we all drove home, convinced that we had ‘moved the chains’ and that I would soon be coaching the ‘Cats my offense.
This was followed up two weeks later, with this official offer letter from the AlleyCats owner, Tim Held:
In the end, Tim and his organization reneged on virtually the entirety of this agreement. I had been clear with everyone involved, throughout the entire interview process, that teaching the team shredding would take the entire spring training schedule to accomplish (and half the season to integrate it facing ‘live bullets’).
So it was in that context, and in the context of the email about the ‘unique, once in a lifetime opportunity’ that his offer was written and received. So I agreed to it (in spite of the fact that I was concerned that it lacked giving me the control I had requested in order to fully teach my system effectively)
The first Super Practice Weekend was the weekend of March 2nd and 3rd this year. I was not present and I was asked not to come.
The only session that I did attend was a four+ hour tryout session in Nashville (that I referred to as Shredfest IV) where the majority of attendees had no shot at making the opening day roster and more or less made my job of teaching my system simply less efficient. I mean, a lot of these guys were winter league caliber players who couldn’t even throw the disc properly. Most of those players shouldn’t have even been there. This certainly wasn’t anything approaching what I had come to terms with and agreed to with Tim about.
Additionally several of the team’s best players were not present for that event so at no time was I ever given the opportunity to ‘Teach the Team Shredding”, per Tim’s agreement with me and what I was expecting when I accepted his offer.
Throughout the time between when I received and agreed to Tim’s proposal to the end of the Nashville session, I received virtually zero support from the organization and it was obvious that the coach and the senior players had absolutely no intention of honor the agreement Tim and I had in place. WTF was going on. I was getting one story from Tim and a completely different story from their coach.
To be fair to Tim, I’m sure he was blind-sided by all of this more than I was. In my early discussions with him, I had relayed Johnny’s advice to drain the swamp, but Tim thought his organization was immune to the systemic bigotry that’s rampant throughout Ultimate and he wasn’t able to get his mind around the fact that his team was not what he thought it was. He had to find out the hard way that his coach and top players would be so divisive and prejudiced against me.
I’m sure if Tim had to do it all over again, he would have done things completely differently. He really wanted this to work out, but he was in way over his head in terms of dealing with the amount of insubordination and disrespect going on behind his back. What he came to realize was that he had completely lost total control over his own franchise (or more to the point, he never had any to begin with—the inmates run the asylum in Ultimate and always have).
I honestly feel bad for Tim. He had no idea what Ultimate was before he purchased a franchise back in 2012 and he was just looking for the next thing to do with his life. Poor guy, he thought Ultimate was a sport. The AlleyCats wouldn’t be running the offense that they are running this year had I not reached out to Tim on October 7th, so this is just flat out wrong, on so many different levels.
In all of my conversations with the AlleyCats coach, it was quite clear that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about and had no business being a ‘professional’ Ultimate coach. I think he was better suited to be a Middle School P.E. teacher.
Throughout the entire process, he undermined me at every opportunity and did nothing to help me succeed.
This wasn’t going to detract me from maintaining my end of the agreement to teach the team my offense, but it seemed incredibly strange to have this guy constantly sabotaging my efforts. I just assumed that my boss, Tim, had my back and that I was going to be allowed to do what I had agreed with him to do, which was to train his players in the ways of the Shred Master.
But it wasn’t meant to be. There’s no way in hell that Shepherd was going to allow it.
I’ve been down this road far too many times. I know the drill and I know how this ends. And let’s be clear about something, no matter what nonsense Shepherd gives as an excuse for the AlleyCats to have broken their agreement with me, we all know what the real reason is.
The reason was that my name is Frank Huguenard, the racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, white supremacist, neo-Nazi bigot.
What a crock of shit. I’m none of those things. Have any of you even watched my films? I make documentaries on spirituality and meditation and my life is devoted to providing self empowering, life affirming tools and techniques to help people find peace of mind in their lives.
My conversations over the past few calls with Shepherd have been completely off the rails insane and it’s a extremely difficult for me to be able to effectively express just how either deranged or deceitful he was in those calls, but I can give a couple of examples to attempt to convey the insanity.
First, Drew claimed, with no knowledge backing it up, that there is a 90% overlap between Felix Shardlow’s Hex offense and my offensive system of Shredding. This is a totally bizarre claim, because Shepherd doesn’t even know what my offense is so there is no way for him to know the difference between my offense and Hex, whatsoever. I purposefully withheld most of my system of Shredding, because it’s too advanced to be teaching beginners.
You can’t slap a snowboard on a beginner and send then send them down a double black diamond run and hope everything is going to work out. There was a lot of work that we needed to accomplish before we got to shredding. I needed to lay the groundwork and teach the basics and fundamentals first and we never even got the chance to get that far before I was summarily dismissed.
We only were getting down the bunny slopes of my offense before we severed ties. We had barely covered the entry level lingo and theory and ran a couple of drills, then scrimmaged so for Shepherd to make this claim that Shredding and the Hex offense are ostensibly one in the same is preposterous.
Felix has stated, along with Florian Gailliegue, that their Hive website explicitly has excluded any discussion or mention of Shredding as it’s significantly more advanced than their offense that they promote on their website and they don’t know Shredding well enough to speak on the subject. Florian suggests that there is maybe only a 10% overlap between Shardlow’s ‘Hex’ offense and Shredding and I think that’s even being generous. Try 5%. Shepherd only made this claim so that he could explain to Tim, “Hey boss, you told us to run Frank’s offense this year, so we’re running Frank’s offense”.
Total scumbag.
A week or so prior to Shredfest IV in Nashville, Tim literally asked me to accept that he was not going to honor his agreement with me and then he proceeded to ask me to help teach the AlleyCats the Hex offense. When I declined he turned around and accused me of “not being a team player”. When I turned him down, he then asked me if I would write some sales and marketing copy for him. True story.
You seriously can not make this shit up.
The other example of Shepherd’s derangement and/or deceit was when made the case to management that I’m an incompetent coach, in spite of the fact that they filmed the gig in Nashville, as well as Shredfest III in Indianapolis. Anyone can could easily see that it’s the other way around. In just 3 hours, I had the group playing better as a unit than they’ve ever played before but listen to what Shepherd had to say about my coaching.
“Frank, the reason you’ve never been successful in getting a team to learn Shredding is because you’re not good at coaching your own offense. You were disjointed, disorganized, incoherent, directionless and lacked mental clarity; that you had a 'deer in the headlights' demeanor about you, that you were constantly contradicting yourself and that you’re incapable of coaching a group of 30 players your offense”.
Translation:
“While all the other teams fucked you over, we’re going to do something different, we’re going to fuck you over and we’re going to steal your offense and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it so fuck off.”
Pure insanity. And this coming out of the mouth of a completely incompetent coach.
I crushed it at Shredfest IV. I can say this objectively because by the end of the day, all the players were saying the same thing by commenting about how playing against the offense was like playing against a runaway freight train. This is a consistent experience that I’ve also had in the past when I’ve had the same opportunity to teach people my system. To insinuate that I’m an incompetent coach, and especially that I’m not capable of coaching my own offense is completely ludicrous.
The AlleyCats came within one point last year away from losing to the Mechanix and giving them their first win in eight years.
Just watch their half-time exhibition with Pittsburg Thunderbirds at an Indianapolis Colts half time game a few months ago. The coach behind this complete atrocity is claiming that I’m an incompetent coach. That is rich.
Throughout the process, in spite of the fact that I repeatedly was giving Tim concrete evidence of his coach’s blatant insubordination and unprofessionalism, Tim kept reassuring me and encouraging me to trust him and trust the process.
In the end Tim admitted that he fucked up and I’m sure that he truly feels bad about the way in ended but his hands are tied. He did really want this to work. I’ve been led to believe that what happened was is that he faced a mutiny of his senior players and his coach if Tim brought me on to teach my offense.
In other words, Tim was blackmailed by his own franchise into breaking his word with me. But why? What have I ever done that was so horrific that caused the coach and players to act out like this and for Tim to break his agreement with me?
“Frank, the entire Ultimate Frisbee® community can’t tolerate the way you think and we all think that your a sexist, racist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, antisemitic bigot.
We actually don’t have any evidence that you’re any of those things but we’re pretty sure you are, because that’s what everyone thinks.
We’re not going to honor our agreement to have you teach our team your offense that is also based on you thinking differently,
However, we’re going to justifiably steal your offense and use it anyway, because your a loathsome human being.
The definition of the word bigot is ‘lack of tolerance for non-like minded thinking’.
The Ultimate community is the embodiment of bigotry, it always has been, all in the name of Good Sportsmanship Spirit of The Game. At some point, it just became fashionable to hate Frank Huguenard and at this point, you don’t even know why.
You are the very thing that you’ve accused me of being and I’ve enjoyed my part of the process in exposing all of your petty hypocrisy. I’m the guy who has revolutionized this sport is the guy you hate the most.
What the Ultimate community still can’t get their mind around is that it had to be someone like me who was the player capable of revolutionizing the game. Everyone else just thinks the same. It simply couldn’t happen any other way.
By the way, for what its worth, any teams playing against the AlleyCats this year are going to want to play a match-up zone defense against their offense, in whatever form it takes. Match-up Zone is the best defense for it; man on man doesn’t work very well at all. If it’s windy or inclement weather, any normal zone will work well.
The UFA (dumbest name ever for a pro sports league) has something that they’ve named an Integrity Call, where anyone on a team can do the right thing and correct and overturn a bad call, even if it hurts the team. It would be nice if some in the UFA made an Integrity Call against the AlleyCats, it wouldn’t be inappropriate.
I do have one thing to say to you Drew. Go Fuck Yourself. Seriously. Piece of shit.
Epilogue
So that’s it, that’s why I consider myself the Galileo of Ultimate Frisbee®. My crime? I discovered an explosive new paradigm for playing the game that literally breaks it and in the process, it also makes a laughingstock of the entire goofy ideology and its corresponding closed-mindedness.
I’m neither whining, nor am I playing victim. In fact, the true victims here are the millions of people who’ve played Ultimate over the past 55 who were all learning disabled as a result of a framework that literally induces functional retardation, all in the name of “fair play”. Guess what, Ultimate Frisbee ceases being fair the moment I step unto the field.
I’m a happy man, very content in my life up here in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
But I wanted to set the record straight and also let everyone know that whatever offense the Indianapolis AlleyCats are running this year. It’s based on the system of Shredding that I showed them and that I’ve developed over the past 40+ years.
Watch a little bit of this video here and listen to Kobe talking about Phil. I couldn't help but relate it to my own, personal journey in Ultimate. Listen for maybe 60 seconds or so (maybe rewind it a minute or two for context):
Maybe you can just call me Neo. Let’s see what happens. With the AlleyCats running a poor imitation and limited subset of my offense this year, I will have at least been successful in finally infiltrated the ultimate frisbee mind virus with my own antiviral inoculant that I refer to as Shredding.
Here’s what AJ has said about Shredding (paraphrasing) “It’s a completely different sport when I’m shredding. No longer am I just a role player, relegated to a rigid assignment in the stale old conventional system. Shredding is the opposite of all that, it’s completely liberating and it empowers me to be more improvisational, dynamic and creative”.
“Yeah, but Frank’s a racist"…….”
Shredding is destined to set the game and the people who play it free. In the end, what the community is going to come to realize is that the fundamental framework for Ultimate is fatally flawed and I seriously doubt that it can be fixed, to be honest.
That’s why I invented Dischoops. You should play it, it’s unbelievably fun.
Johnny and AJ both independently have made the same prediction, which is that Ultimate will come to have two distinct eras. The pre-Frank [very boring, stale and stagnant] era, and the post-Frank [dynamic, graceful, exciting and entertaining] era where Shredding completely takes over the game.
It should, Shredding is vastly superior on every level to anything that has ever come before it.
Obviously I left out a lot of things in this article that would paint me in a more negative light. I’m human, just like everyone else. I’m no angel and I never claimed to be.
A big part of being human is individual improvement, personal healing, spiritual growth and self discovery. When you place a fixed label on someone, you don’t allow them the opportunity for change and for progress to happen (at least within your own perception) so drop the labels and just let people be.
Dr. Seuss wrote a really great book about this, you should read it. Sooner or later, you will all find out that we have just been being played by people who just want to divide us and keep us from realizing that we’re far more alike than we are different.
Ultimate’s SOTG ideology asks you to put labels on people, can you not see that?
There’s an old expression that a leopard can’t change its spots. We all know what the expression means, but I don’t think it’s true for a second. I’ve personally seen 10s of thousands of people change, for the better.
I think that it’s really amazing being Frank Huguenard. Why me? Why is it that after nearly 60 years, I’m the only player in the history of the game who has figured this shit out? I am a fiercely competitive and extremely innovative person and I developed a system for offense that is so revolutionary, it destroys Ultimate. I think that’s incredible.
But this isn’t about me, and it’s never been about me.
It’s about you.
Anyone who doesn’t think this AlleyCats situation is fucked up (no matter how much you hate me) has some serious issues. This simply isn’t right. You don’t give your word and then renege for no good reason but then go on to use my revolutionary offense anyway. That’s completely classless.
The one person who has relentless and tirelessly worked to share his knowledge and love for the game, the guy who has beat his head against the wall for decades trying to penetrate the inertia that has kept this game frozen in time for so long is the guy who has been shat on the most. But, no matter how many times I’ve fallen down, no matter how many times the community has fucked me over, I’ve gotten back up.
Because I know I’m right.
Shredding is the future of Ultimate.
This entire article is what the Spirit of The Game’s ideology truly is.
The Spirit of the Game is toxic.
Who loses when I get censored from /r/ultimate? I don’t, the people interested in my ideas and knowledge of the game do.
Who loses when I get prematurely taken off of Being_Ulti? Not me. The people who felt for the first time ever that they had a voice do.
Who loses when teams break their word and decide not to have me teach my offense after they’ve agreed to do exactly that? Not Frank Huguenard. The game suffers.
The question is, Cui Bono?
Who benefits from this madness?
This idea of artificially leveling the playing field harms everybody, in spite of the fact that the underlying promise is that it’s being done for the Common Good. It seems like all ideologies seem to have this common good intentionality behind them, when in fact, ideologies always incarcerate the human mind. Because of this, anyone against any ideology is obviously sub-human and deserves to be treated as such.
Ultimate Frisbee® makes for the perfect case study of the inherent toxicity of not only this ideology, but all ideologies. If and when we can remove the shackles of this failed social experiment, you’ll be shocked to see how quickly and how significantly everybody’s personal skill sets improve virtually overnight.
Cui Bono?
Nobody benefits from this ideology.
The Spirit of the Game ideology is a lose-lose. Mediocre players and exceptional players alike all lose out in the end.
This situation with Gender Equity and so forth is completely the opposite of what the Civil Rights movement and advocates for tolerance and true diversity have always fought for.
Diversity is meant to be a celebration and honoring of our differences and a recognition that every single person has their own unique song to sing and to offer the world but how can we honor and celebrate our differences when we’re not even going to acknowledge that we have any? This is utter madness. DEI isn’t about diversity, it’s about oppressive tyranny, all in the name of fairness.
There must be fifteen scenes in Moneyball that resonate with me to my core, but this may be the best. Baseball hates Bill James, and Ultimate hates Frank Huguenard. Same same.
To be clear, my personal challenges with the Ultimate community didn’t just begin recently. In other words, and this is key, long before I was hated for being sexist, or hated for being racist, or hated for being antisemitic, or hated for being xenophobic, or hated for being misogynistic, or being a Neo-Nazi, or a White Supremacist, etc., I was hated for thinking differently. Don’t kid yourself that anything has changed. The hate is the same, the different excuse du jour is the only that that has changed.
For 40 years, this has consistently been my experience in Ultimate and I can only imagine that similar to how Socrates and Jesus were both treated.
And for those who read this as me comparing myself to Jesus and Socrates, I’ve got news for you. I’m not comparing my Ultimate Frisbee odyssey to the stories of those two amazing men, I’m comparing all the people who’d like to silence me to the fools who literally put Socrates and Jesus to death. Same same.
I will say, however, that the main thing Jesus, Socrates and myself have in common is that we’re all guilty of the crime of attempting to liberate people from their ideological belief systems. This is what Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is all about.
See, the thing about ideologies is that people become so identified with their ideologies that they perceive any attack on their ideology as an existential threat, a personal attack on their very existence. They literally feel an imminent attack on their lives and they instinctively act like they’re about to be eaten by a saber tooth tiger. Thus the hemlock, crucifixion and cancel culture.
I do want to thank Johnny and AJ for everything they’ve done to help me get this far.
We’re very close now people, to flipping this whole sport and I couldn’t have done it without these two fine, outstanding humans. It’s an honor to call them friend.
In closing, watch this short video below from 20 years ago, of me dribbling in the triangle weave, a drill that I invented the first day of my new team in October of 1989.
Look at the footwork, hand speed, balance and gracefulness in which I move. There’s never, ever, been anyone who has played the game like I do.
Not even close. And that’s just a small, myopic glimpse of how I legally run with the disc.
When I said I was the GOAT, I wasn’t fucking around.
There is no close second.
bleed mother fuckers.
Please Bleed
by Ben Harper
Make me feel like a beggar
Make me feel like a thief
Make me feel like a battle, that cannot end in peace
Make me feel like running, as if I've lost my nerve
Make me feel like crying, tears I don't deserve
Please bleed
So I know that you are real
So I know that you can feel
The damage that you've done
Who have I become
To myself I am numb, I am numb, I am numb
Is this really living
Sometimes it's hard to tell
Or is this a kind of gentler hell
Turn out the lights
And let me stare into your soul
I was born and bled for you old
Please bleed
So I know that you are real
So I know that you can feel
The damage that you've done
Who have I become
To myself I am numb, I am numb, I am numb
Never said thank you
Never said please
Never gave reason to believe
So as it stands I remain on my knees
Good lovers make great enemies
Please bleed
So I know that you are real
So I know that you can feel
The damage that you've done
Who have I become
To myself I am numb, I am numb, I am numb
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Those Mother F#$?%kers
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Are you retarded?
u sound mad tho