S1-01 ∙ Choosing Colors

A year after my graduation and two years after Zac's, he sat down with current captain Eric Kuo and agreed to coach the men's team, the NYU Purple Haze. Had I been extended the same offer, I would have respectfully declined. I had just graduated a few months earlier, and it was much too soon to relive the frustrations that characterized my senior year. It was so fresh in my memory—another year, and another missed chance.

Zac and I had never made it out of our section. The NYU men never have. How a team with five or six players that now play for Nationals-caliber club teams did not make it out of a mediocre Metro East section puzzled the younger Haze players, but they shrugged and continued the trend. Our failures on Haze were attributed to circumstance one year, motivation the next. It was bad calls or seven games in one day or a much stronger section back then.

On the surface it seemed as though Zac and I had done all we could to carry the teams we captained. But several years later I would realize that we were unable to sufficiently motivate our teams. Never making Regionals could be blamed on a lot of things, but it was never something that could not have been overcome if we simply had more desire.

We first considered coaching the NYU women's team, the Violet Femmes, after a fall tournament at Haverford. The Femmes, in their short five year history had made Regionals before but never finished far from the bottom. I remember my freshman year when Karen Lee had founded the Women’s team and how difficult it was for them. She had to beg players who had never played before to come to tournaments so they could field seven, compete with the Men for already scant practice space, and deal with an administration that was stubbornly opposed to the idea of splitting an "unimportant club sport."

After Haverween, the Femmes captains had approached us with a plan to make Nationals in two years. It was this goal that was easy to say but came off as silly more often than not. Zac and I would always laugh at ourselves just for using the phrase "NYU at Nationals" or "game to go." We saw a Femmes team with no handlers, no concept of stack offense, no idea how to play man defense. This was a team where ninety percent of the players could not throw a ten yard flick and had only one player who had a game of Regionals experience.

However, we also saw players that were enthusiastic and team spirited. They asked questions. They never really had a lot of players, but they had enough now, more than they’ve ever had. Nobody was graduating this spring. Most of all, enough of them had the potential to be truly committed and to work hard.

But did they have the desire? These Femmes would never truly face the hardship that Karen did that first year, and just like Haze (minus Eric), they would never truly experience what it felt like to miss qualifying for Regionals when you should have. Effort and desire were slippery things, easy to speak of yet impossible to pretend to have. The goals were set so high, too high. It was like a jogger who had never been varsity aspiring to make the Olympic team.

It was a choice between Purple and Violet, a choice between a men's team that still brought bitter tastes to our mouths or a women's game that we had cracked jokes about and never truly respected in the past. Zac was on the fence and I owe an apology to Eric, because I pushed him over to the women's side.

When the decision to coach the Femmes was finally made, Zac and I tried to talk ourselves into how we could realistically achieve the two year Nationals plan. It felt strange planning for a two day event twenty months away, so vague and ethereal. Yet we had walked this road before, breaking down an entire season into one comprehensive goal. The uneasy familiarity and parallel with our past failures at Regionals spurred us to spend a lot of time discussing how we were not going to be a Haze repeat; how we were going to be different. We were quite naïve and clueless in those beginning stages, but least we knew what not to do.

The embarrassment and pain that bonded the '02 to '04 Haze teams allowed Zac and I to reach the same conclusion: we were not done with college ultimate. Coaching the Femmes gave us an opportunity to have what we always wanted: the sense of accomplishment, the fulfilling of true potential, and the feeling of leaving it all out there. It gave us another shot at no longer being defined by "almost."

That, or fail miserably again, only this time with a different gender. Heh.

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