Following the clinic the team held last week, the Spartan ultimate frisbee team had its tryouts last Saturday to decide its varsity and junior varsity team lineups. Despite the inclimate weather over the weekend, the tryouts were still held at their scheduled time in the afternoon, with only a few adjustments made to the team’s tryouts. According to returning senior Brendan Sullivan, the tryouts went as planned for the most part, but were shortened due to the cold conditions the team had to play in.

“It was kind of tough with the weather, so it was a shortened tryout,” Sullivan said. “Normally, we have three tryout [sessions], but we only had two because of the weather.”

The tryouts were run very similar to how normal frisbee practices would be run. According to Sullivan, everyone worked on the basic skills necessary to play ultimate frisbee.

“We did different drills like basic throwing, defending, receiving,” Sullivan said. “Just a bunch of different running and passing drills, and then we did a bunch of scrimmages at the end.”

After completing tryouts and seeing the varsity lineup for this year, Sullivan is optimistic about the season, with most of the team from last year returning to play.

“We have nine returners overall, eight of us are seniors,” Sullivan said. “We have a lot of returning players.”

Along with most of the team returning for the season this year, Sullivan is also enthusiastic about the new players coming to the team whose skill he believes will benefit the team.

“We have some kids that played last year on JV, like Clayton Newburry,” Sullivan said. “He should be pretty solid.”

In addition to younger players joining, Sullivan is also excited about the players outside of FHC that will be joining the team.

“Since we’re a club sport we’re allowed to have other players from other schools that don’t have frisbee teams,” Sullivan said. “We have this kid from [Living Word Christian High School] playing with us, Spencer Hawkins, and he seems like a really good athlete.”

With everything looking well for the team this season, Sullivan expressed the team’s desire to improve upon what it was able to achieve last season and win the state championship.

“The team’s goal this year is to win state. If we don’t win state, we would all be very disappointed,” Sullivan said. “We got second last year, we have most of our team returning this year, so we should be able to win it. We definitely want to win it.”