17-05-2025
A Christian College Wanted to Be Great at Ultimate Frisbee—and Made Everyone Mad
Ultimate Frisbee is not a typical sport. The game, which involves passing the disc down a 70-yard field, is officiated by the players and governed by a doctrine that prioritizes 'the basic joy of play' above winning. When things get too heated, teams sometimes call a 'spirit timeout' to defuse the situation.
But something happened a few years ago that shook the sport to its hippy core. A tiny Christian college took over.
Oklahoma Christian University, a private school north of Oklahoma City advertising a 'world-class education rooted in Christian values,' has built a Frisbee powerhouse by offering scholarships to lure top players, many of whom already had a college degree.
OC's dominance—the Eagles have won two Division III national championships since their first full season in 2021 and are competing for another this weekend—has divided the world of competitive Frisbee.
'Are we going to have Russian oil tycoons owning Frisbee teams and world cups in Saudi Arabia for ultimate Frisbee?' said Micah Arenstein, a college junior who competes on Kenyon College's team. 'Or do we want to keep the smaller but really tightknit and beautiful community that we have?'
OC's takeover started in 2019 when the school established a scholarship program to persuade top talent from around the world to relocate to Edmond, Okla. The early recruits included four graduating seniors from the Air Force Academy, a member of the Dutch national Frisbee team and a former star at Texas Tech.
College ultimate Frisbee is run by an entity called USA Ultimate, not the NCAA, which restricts Division III schools from offering athletic scholarships. USA Ultimate also grants five years of college eligibility, meaning there is a universe of Division I athletes who graduate with an extra year of Frisbee services to dish.
OC pounced, scouring the world for athletes who might want to enroll as graduate students to extend their playing careers.
The strategy paid immediate dividends. It won a national title in its first season of postpandemic play and added a second the following year.
But it didn't win many friends.
'They take it so seriously,' said 21-year-old Isaiah Curtis, who captains a team of Claremont Colleges students called the Braineaters, named for a 1958 movie some alums planned to watch but couldn't because they had taken psychedelic mushrooms. 'They're varsity athletes—and all the rest of us are not.'
Still, Curtis said he supports scholarship programs because they expand access to college and improve the quality of play.
At last year's 16-team national championship tournament, OC garnered the lowest spirit score, an aggregation of ratings determined by each team's competitors in categories like 'fair-mindedness' and 'attitude.'
OC administrators see the Frisbee scholarship program as a cost-effective way to boost the school's enrollment and profile. Athletic director David Lynn said it's a relatively cheap sport to run and most of its players still cover some tuition and room and board, making the program profitable.
'It's not necessarily an unfair advantage,' said Gabe Cabrera, who designed OC's scholarship program to boost school attendance and innovate the sport. 'It's just indicative of your poor game planning and execution as a competitor.'
Cabrera dismissed naysayers as hailing from wealthy and well-endowed liberal-arts colleges, and said he has advised three other schools on developing scholarship programs.
Players on this year's roster came from places as far as Kenya, Japan and Luxembourg—regions usually far outside the university's footprint.
'People don't like to lose,' said former OC coach Garrett Taylor. 'If I'd have been in their shoes, I might have been saying the same stuff.'
This year, OC is headed to nationals for the fourth time in five years—hoping to cement its legacy as a top Frisbee school.
It also hopes to shed its reputation as the evil empire of the sport.
Inspired partly by the hit Apple TV show 'Ted Lasso,' Sammy Roberts, a former Connecticut recruit who is now OC's captain and coach, turned his attention to team-building. The school has largely stopped recruiting graduate students.
'We were kind of playing for each other, but we were really just playing to win,' said Roberts. 'And I don't think that was as much fun, if I'm being honest.'
But winning nationals will be difficult.
Davenport University, a small private college in Grand Rapids, Mich., has ascended to the top of the division largely by employing the same strategy pioneered by OC. It offers varying quantities of athletic scholarships to everyone on its 26-player roster.
Last year, its first year of competition, Davenport made an unexpected run at a national title but was edged out by OC in the quarterfinals.
The team has lost one match all season, against Division I's Michigan State University. They head into Nationals this weekend as the favorite—at least on the field.
Last year, Butler University's team circulated a petition calling for teams with scholarships to be forced to play in Division I—currently only required for schools with an enrollment of more than 7,500 students—after one foundational year at the lower level. That, it argued, would level the playing field.
NCAA-sanctioned Division III programs 'aren't allowed to give out scholarships to students to come play and then beat the crap out of a bunch of schools that don't have the same levers for talent acquisition,' said Butler coach Arthur Small.
The petition fizzled out.
'I understand that people are upset about the fact that scholarships are a 'hack in the system,'' said Collin Hill, widely regarded as one of the division's best players. Hill transferred to Davenport after finishing his Bachelor's degree at Berry College last year. 'But if Frisbee is going to be considered a legitimate sport, I think this is the way to go about it.'
Rivals won't have to worry about Davenport for long. Head coach Mike Zaagman, a self-described 'Frisbee apostle,' said the team will compete in Division I next year.
'We want better competition,' he said.
Write to Xavier Martinez at
