NORTH LOGAN – Numerous state championships have flowed into Cache Valley and north Box Elder County through the exploits of high school teams, some even competing on a national stage.
These accomplishments are notable in their own way, but there’s a special air surrounding the term “national champion.” One that none of the state title winners can quite live up to, but one local team now can.
Green Canyon’s Ultimate Frisbee team captured the title of national champions back on June 8, winning the finals of the 2024 High School National Invite. Last week several members of the team — coaches Paul De Morgan and Evan Poulsen plus two of the team captains, Nate De Morgan and Sam Nichols — joined the Full Court Press with Eric Frandsen and Jason Walker to discuss their achievement.
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Green Canyon Ultimate Frisbee national champs; Jerry Bovee issues statement about getting fired – July 8, 2024
The sport of ultimate frisbee is widely known, typically as a game similar to football with players advancing a frisbee up the field to try and cross into an end zone to score. Not as well known is its vast competitive scene which includes youth, amateur and professional leagues. Games between teams in these leagues contain far greater complexity than the backyard or neighborhood game of ultimate.
For starters, the teams (composed of usually 15 to 20 rostered players) have seven guys on the field for each side at a time. These seven are split into two primary position groups, “handlers” and “cutters.” The most prominent comparison for handlers is that of a football quarterback, slinging the frisbee around the field to the cutters whose natural comparison is the wide receivers QBs pass to. Nate De Morgan was GC’s top cutter with Nichols being its top handler.
In addition to specialization via positions, offense and defense become vastly more complex, with formations, dynamic styles and even specific plays.
“Our offensive set is a vertical stack,” Nate De Morgan explained. “The four cutters line up vertically down the field and can cut either direction to either side of the field to get open. But there are set plays that you could run out of that at the beginning of each point, or play. We have like four or five different plays that we would like to run typically out of that vertical stack, which was our normal offensive set.”
The vertical stack is one possibility among many. As both Nate and his father Paul explained in the interview, there’s a lot of different ways you can devise to advance the disk up the field and just as much complexity to the defenses drawn up to stop said advances.
That a small town in Cache Valley would be able to field enough top-level talent is admittedly a surprise according to Paul De Morgan.
“It does feel kind of amazing at some level that we’ve got the quality of team here, coming out of this valley and going up against teams from Seattle and Boston and D.C., Minneapolis, to name a few. It’s pretty cool” De Morgan said.
And yet, the Wolves fielded plenty of talent for their run to a title.
“Most teams have one to three really good players. And we are in that same boat,” Paul De Morgan said. “But we have the benefit of having our entire team that really understand their roles, have worked really hard all season, play incredibly good defense as a team, and do the same thing on offense. And so the other teams, they look across the line and they might look at us and say ‘Ah, they’re kind of a little smaller than us.” Edina’s got five guys that are 6-4. Other than Landon (Brough) we’ve got mainly shorter guys. We just play so well as a team, it’s pretty exciting to see them go out there and win this championship.”
Although the team bears the name of Green Canyon High School, it’s made up of players throughout the valley. Nate De Morgan, for instance, attended Logan High School (and recently graduated). It’s also a club team as ultimate frisbee is not yet an officially sanctioned sport by the Utah High School Activities Association.
A lack of a high school league does present some challenges, namely the problem of who to play. Even more pressing is finding teams that are at GC’s level. Lone Peak, down in Highland, Utah, fields a team that is ranked nationally but the next closest teams of the Wolves’ caliber are thousands of miles away, either on the west coast or back east across the Mississippi River.
The easiest solution, one that doesn’t require inordinate travel time and expense, is to simply play up a level. The Wolves find college teams including Utah State, along with any adult teams, to take on which present a far greater challenge than high school clubs. In the spring, Green Canyon will often head down to showcases and tournaments on the Wasatch Front to take on some of the better Utah teams, such as Lone Peak or West High School.
Even with these more competitive teams on the schedule, Green Canyon went undefeated and earned a bid to nationals, technically in two different ways. There are a number of ways to qualify for nationals, first by being the reigning champion, the two other main ways, of which GC did both, are to receive an invite from the nationals tournament panel or by winning one of five regional tournaments.
The Wolves’ finish in the previous nationals, third overall, along with a stellar performance throughout the 2024 season was enough to convince the invite panel to hand GC a ticket to nationals. Even with that invite secured, the Wolves didn’t let up as they won the Spaghetti Western 2024 tournament — beating out the other 20 teams that included three nationally ranked teams (aside from Green Canyon) to essentially double-qualify (granted that fact means nothing other than maybe some bragging rights).
Getting to the tournament presented its own hurdles, making sure a team that had already made the trip to Stockton, California for the Spaghetti Western tournament in the middle of May could turn around and make it to Rockford, Illinois by the first week of June. Some flew the roughly 1,300 miles, others opted to carpool for a 20-hour road trip.
Awaiting the Wolves in the Prairie State were all the best high school teams in the nation, many of which were familiar due to meetings in nationals in years prior. The players eagerly awaited matchups with these teams, some of those being rematches from last year. Two potential matches stuck out. One with South Eugene, from Oregon, who the Wolves had downed in the Spaghetti Western tournament final. Also, Eastside Prep out of Washington, the at-the-time No. 1 ranked team in the country and the team to which Green Canyon lost to in last year’s semifinal.
Neither of those matchups were meant to be, though, as South Eugene and Eastside Prep both bowed out before the finals. Some of the upsets and disruption were likely due to non-ideal weather conditions. Wind up to 25 miles per hour and rain had a significant impact on the ability of everyone to throw and catch the disk. From the Wolves’ perspective, though, they saw it as an advantage.
“Our team is very deep compared to the teams. We had a lot more players that could actually throw in the wind,” Nichols said. “So we ended up feeling confident throughout the whole time because we knew that our fundamentals were just so much better than the rest of the teams.”
The championship came down to Edina, out of Minnesota, who entered the tournament ranked fifth and the Wolves. But like Green Canyon, Edina were undefeated on the season and had downed Eastside Prep in the semifinal. And unlike previous days, the weather cleared and was about as perfect as they could be. No rain, no high-speed wind. Just two sides and one disk.
Edina took a 3-1 lead in the opening minutes, breaking one of Green Canyon’s possessions to take the two-point lead. They even had possession with a chance to go up by what would have been a commanding 4-1 lead, but the Wolves clutched up and not only stonewalled that try, but also managed to tie the game back up 4-4. By halftime GC had pushed even further with a 9-7 lead. Following the break, the Wolves held their lead to eventually win 15-12.
After all the celebrations, handing out of medals and trophies and all other accolades, there’s an obvious question of what’s next for the players and coaches. For some, their high school careers are over, now just a memory. For others, next year is the next challenge with a title to be defended and a new set of stars to stake their claim in the ultimate frisbee world. Coaches like Poulsen and Paul De Morgan also have to consider coming back, especially now that Paul’s son will no longer be on the team.
“Paul and I haven’t formally had the conversation as to what our plan for the future is,” Poulsen said. “But I think there’s bright futures for Green Canyon ultimate. We’re sad to lost Sam and Nathan and the other seniors, and it’s going to be a little bit of a rebuild. But we have some really talented underclassmen I think can really propel the program.”
Nate De Morgan and Nichols both have pretty clear futures. On the one hand, they’re both going to be competing with Team USA for the WFDF World Junior Ultimate Championships held in Birmingham, England from July 20-27. After that, college, though Nichols will first be serving a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Lima, Peru. De Morgan will play at Carleton College next year. Nichols, upon his return to the U.S., will join the Aggies, attending USU and playing with its club ultimate frisbee squad.