Here are some memories of the early teams we played against. All memories are HIGHLY personal & judgemental, & will doubtless offend someone somewhere!

In my senior year of High School there was one college team....Princeton. The team was started by a CHS grad, and I believe they played against CHS at least once. I don't know who won. My graduating class started the following teams: Tufts (Jim Pistrang, Northern Valley RHS Demarest & Ed Summers, CHS) Clark (Steve Freeman, CHS) Rutgers (Irv Kalb & Geoff West, CHS) RPI (Joe Barbanel (sp?), CHS) Cornell (Jon Cohn (sp?), CHS) UNH (Jim Diehl, Passaic (Pascack?) Valley RHS)

The teams had distinct personalities... Tufts was the most fun (obviously!). We tried to get as many players involved as possible. Hardly anyone wore cleats, that would have been too, well, athletic. At all times we tried to be very cool.

Clark: Clark was an odd team...they didn't have much in the way of athletics there, and your typical Clarkie was an introspective psych major who wouldn't consider running anywhere! Steve's co-captain, Walter Belding, was known for his mood swings...he would get VERY bummed out, & go off & skip half of a game for no apparent reason. Still, Clark was fun to play against, & the games were loose & relaxed, even when the score was close. RPI: RPI was the home of engineers, nerds, computer jocks & republicans, or at least it seemed that way. Staying overnight there was dreadful...nothing going on but frat parties & beer drinking. On one trip the Carpenters were doing a concert & it was a big deal. For us cool Boston types, it was a lot like going back into the dark ages.

UNH: UNH was a serious party team. The first time they came to Tufts, they all showed up in a van with a keg in the back. Jim Diehl was about 6 feet tall, maybe 220 pounds. He played barefoot. In the snow. Once after I out-jumped him & caught one for a goal, he picked me up & carried me off the field, as if I weighed 10 pounds. We ALWAYS had fun playing UNH.

Rutgers: Freshman year, Rutgers was so much better than us it was scary. I think they beat us by a score of 30 to 5 or something. When they came to Tufts, they came in a bus! Still, I remember some fun parties when we visited New Brunswick. My sophmore year saw the beginnings of a LOT of teams. In the fall of the year (or maybe the spring) Tufts Ultimate was featured on the front page of the second section of the Globe. As a direct result of that article, we got calls from a bunch of schools asking how to go about starting a team. The New England teams I remember from that year were:

Yale (Dave Letwand, CHS and Jim Lovell, NVRHS Demarest)
MIT (John Kirkland) Hampshire (Andy Magruder (MacGruer?), Dave Dinerman, CHS)
Amherst College
Holy Cross
WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) (some guy named Lance)
AIC (American International College) (maybe Lance was here?)
U of Maine
CCNY

Hampshire: Actually, Hampshire first played in the spring of '73, my freshman year. They came to Tufts and played in the first of four consecutive Mothers Day Classic games against Tufts. I'm pretty sure that first Mothers Day game was Hampshires first game ever. Hampshire & Tufts liked each other. We (Tufts) were of course unrelentingly cool (surely you're not noting any sarcasm) and Hampshire was determined not to be out-cooled by anyone. The funny thing about Hampshire...there were NO other organized sports, so the Ultimate players were the jocks! Probably the fact that they played an organized sport, even if it was Ultimate, placed them in the more conservative end of things at Hampshire. We won that first game pretty easily, since their strategy mostly involved huckinng it long where I would catch it. (note: one of Tufts strong points in the early years was that we played a lot of new teams...we could usually beat them once or twice until they caught on...) More on Hampshire & the second Mothers Day Classic in a future posting.

MIT: One day in the fall of my sophmore year, as I was hanging out in the Richardson House living room, a very strange apparition came strolling up the walk. It was a guy, about 6' tall & quite physically fit, with a full beard and hair down to his shoulders, dressed in bleach-white coveralls, simultaniously spinning a disc on a finger in each hand (rotating in opposite directions, of course). This was John Kirkland of MIT, one of the most talented frisbee player in the world at that time. The first time we played MIT, we beat them easily, & John was VERY frustrated. His free-style skills were of no use, and he was not accustomed to throwing while being guarded. John was not a very good loser, & he & Steve Goldstein nearly killed each other by the end of the game. Still, John was an amazing player. he could pull longer than anyone I ever saw, and he could take those two rotating discs and throw two simultaneous forehand bullets (try it sometime).

Yale: Dave Letwand was a year younger than me, & probably the best CHS player of his year. He could leap very high. We played Yale on the New Haven common downtown. My strongest memory of that game is that Gary Smith's dad was there. Gary was a Tufts player, one of the founding members. His dad was a Tufts grad & a rugby player, who had a very hard time dealing with the fact that Gary wasn't following in his footsteps. I think the Yale game was the first time he saw an Ultimate game, and Gary was AWESOME.