European Championships are dear to my heart - for a decade they have always been my coaching target as the pinnacle of ultimate in Europe. This is the first time in a while that I have been at Euros as a spectator so here’s some short thoughts on the experience from my view.
I’ll have some more detailed thoughts on the open and women’s finals…at some stage. There’s a lot of work to be done there.
The Good
Pitches
Couldn’t ask for more. I’ve played on some absolutely terrible pitches at Euros and Worlds, these looked up there with the best. I cannot believe the grass pitches were playable after the rain we had on the first couple of days but they held up tremendously. Being able to rest and rotate the pitches because there was so many spare also made a huge difference and a luxury I don’t think I’ve seen before - certainly not on this scale. The last major benefit was having the astro available as a backup. Nobody wants to play on astro for a full week but being able to use it allow the grass to dry out was, again, incredible.
Warmup Space
One of the usual challenges I find at tournament is needing to adapt warmups constantly due to space limitations. Not the case here, with only half the pitches ever in use.
Accommodation
OK - I didn’t stay in accommodation myself but it’s perfect for what I would want at a European championship.
Weather
After the showgame I didn’t think I’d be writing this but it was actually OK most of the week. Slightly inclement weather really helps Ultimate as a spectator sport I think - it was noticeable during the week that teams quite often went on 3 point runs of downwind hold, upwind break, downwind break. The wind wasn’t strong enough to ruin the game but it was enough to reduce offensive efficiency just enough that leads didn’t feel too secure.
Streaming
I still get a little bit sad when I want to show someone the semi-final or final from women’s in 2019 and can’t because fanseat. Ulti.tv are amazing. Whatever about charging for live streaming - which I think is short sighted - having VOD of games locked behind a paywall forever is terrible. Love ulti.tv.
Ulti.tv evening show
What a cool idea and fair play to the ulti.tv team for extending their workday by another few hours. I appreciate these, but I hope it doesn’t burn out the crew.
Live Scoring
The live scoring on the website was incredible, fair play to the volunteers and organisers. It was good enough that it was quicker to get out my phone to check the score of a game rather than look for the scoreboard on the sideline. Actually almost too good - I couldn’t look at it while watching a stream because sometimes the website was ahead!
Volunteers
Always looked to be doing an incredible job i.e. everything kept running smoothly despite the challenges that came up.
Reactions to seeing a corgi
Never gets old. Thanks to everyone for being nice to Russ, even when he was muddy and rummaging through your stuff looking for food.
The Bad
Weather
It changed enough that I can include it in both categories! When it got bad it was miserable to be out in, with some particularly heavy rain showers arriving when nothing was forecast - the Shannon weather radar being broken didn’t help in predicting what was coming.
Website
I still have no idea where to find the pitch maps online. Not a good experience for spectators.
Food
I didn’t think the food options on site were great. A minor point since it was easy enough to get food elsewhere.
VAR/Spirit Discussions
This isn’t just about the open final (more on that soon), that final was just one example of an increasing trend to lengthen every discussion. Particularly on streamed games, a lot of trying to watch the replays instead of well positioned teammates telling players they were wrong.
A suggestion: allow only spirit captains to watch footage. Players involved can continue discussion while the spirit captains look at video/photos and see if they want to overrule their teammate.
General understanding of the word ‘probation’
OK, not everyone speaks English and that’s fine, but at least find out what it means before making assumptions.
Timeouts/Halftime
We can't seriously have 4 timeouts per half AND a halftime. It is so dull. Ban the midpoint timeout completely.
Formats
I griped enough about the women’s format in particular before the tournament, and it shook out similarly to what I anticipated. I don’t think these formats of Pool - Power Pool - Bracket are good. The initial pools are small and seeding from 4 years ago isn’t accurate, so we just end up with power pools that also aren’t well seeded. That seems to defy the point of power pools. A couple of specific examples:
Netherlands women finished 5th overall. They won their inital pool on a 3 way tie, carried their pool play loss into the next pool where they also came up against Italy and were knocked into the lower power pool. They won that comfortably but were put on course to meet the Germans in quarters, gave them their closest game until the final (and only team to stop them reaching point cap), the won out for 5th overall., finishing with an 9-3 record. Basically - there’s no way they should have been sent down to the lower pools.
Mixed Division had massively lopsided power pools with 5 of the top 6 teams ending up in the same power pool.
I’d like to see a similar format to U24 Worlds with bigger initial pools. Starting with small groups of what is essentially badly seeded teams just carries that bad seeding through to the next stage. Larger groups would be better for reseeding teams at the start of the tournament.
It really feels like the tournament starts out with wanting to be a week long tournament, then making a format that will fill all those days. There were too many games for the number of teams at the tournament - most obviously in women’s where some teams matched up against each other 3 times.
Suggestions for the Future
A lot of these are going to revolve around the same point - how do we get the best players playing the tournament.
Shorter Tournament
The tournament takes up a lot of money, and a lot of time. As an amateur sport I think we should be aiming to run the tournament as efficiently as possible. I don’t want to squeeze it all into a weekend, or anything crazy like that, but eliminating unnecessary games as much as possible to allow fewer days would be a good goal.
U24 Clash
I don’t think the close scheduling of these two helps either tournament. Notably France didn’t enter U24s, but we also saw other countries prioritise U24s over Euros. I’m not questioning those choices, would rather there didn’t need to be a choice like that.
Mixed/Single Gender Split
This isn’t to take away from the great teams in all divisions at Euros this year, but wouldn’t it be amazing to see all the best players in Europe in the same division? I started thinking this watching World Games last year where we saw lots of players who wouldn’t normally play mixed all competing for the one goal.
The Mixed division was really good to watch this year, think about what it would have been like with a full strength Belgium, Czech Republic and Netherlands added to it? It would have been wild from start to finish.
Similar for the single gender divisions, from a biased perspective how cool would it have been to have a full stength Ireland women trying to retain their title while adding the full Ranelagh contingent to the open team? All the best French, Italian, etc players added back to their already strong single gender teams? Fun.
Could we dream of something like:
2025: Mixed
2027: Open/Women
2029: Mixed
2031: Open/Women
Probably impractical but I can live in hope.
EDIT: Also I think having the divisions at the same time can rob players of the chance to experience different divisions, and also makes ‘camps’ of mixed vs. single gender. All frisbee is good frisbee when it’s good frisbee regardless of division.
Woow, especially the idea of separate championships for the divisions sounds tremendous. Indeed, last time World Games was very special. Imagine a European Mixed Ultimate Championship with all the countries you mention, that would be a blast. (On the other hand, less players would be able to have the experience of an EUC and preparing for it, so that’s a downside.)
Love the idea of splitting mixed. Would also be good to get more separation over the various age brackets to get the best at every opportunity on the pitch.