| In recognition of National Youth Ultimate Giving Week, Tristan Green, Director of the Ultimate Foundation, sat down with participating USA Ultimate Affiliates from across the U.S. to gain insight into their organizations, youth programs, and investments in the future of ultimate. Find your local affiliate, and donate today! |
Josh Feng serves as Youth Executive Director for the Atlanta Flying Disc Club (AFDC), overseeing AFDC Juniors, which governs and organizes youth ultimate playing opportunities in the Atlanta metro area. Feng shared his vision for expanding the sport by reaching new players of all socioeconomic statuses and backgrounds.
Can you share a little bit of history about AFDC and what you do?
AFDC has been around since 1989 providing a stable presence supporting ultimate in Atlanta and the southeast. AFDC has been a big organization for a long time. We did take a fairly significant hit during COVID, so we’re still recovering from that, but we are still one of the largest organizations in the country on the adult and youth levels. I’ve been in my position for just over a year now, and am currently the only full-time salaried person on staff here in Atlanta.
What makes Atlanta and AFDC Juniors so unique? What are you focusing on in Atlanta specifically?
Atlanta plays a big role in the national community. We take pride in our attempts to be more diverse, more accessible, and to reach different playing populations such as players of color and girl matching players; that’s something we continue to strive to do and have a history of doing. Providing a place for all players, both your traditional athletes and those who might not have connected with the culture of more mainstream sports, is an important role we fill here.
Looking specifically at youth programming, how does your organization introduce new players to ultimate and help them find a place in the sport?
Middle school is our entry level of play right now. We’re doing a good job of growing. We have 35 teams this year, up from 29 last year. We play five-on-five to get participants more touches and more playing opportunities. It’s worked well in terms of getting more youth to play but also lowering the barrier for new teams to start, and is also helpful for field space.
We’re also optimistic about our girls’ team growth. Last year, we only had eight teams in our girls middle school league and this year we’re up to 11. We also introduced a new girls B-division for the younger middle school girls.
We run the middle school season in the fall, and then we have the high school season in the spring. We have varsity and junior varsity divisions for both boys and girls. Over the last year, we were sitting at about 11 girls teams and 23 boys teams. We also host our High School Terminus tournament in the spring where a handful of teams from outside the region come and visit.
In the summer, we offer YCC programming. That’s our more elite, experienced programming for those players. It provides training opportunities for those who might not be in established school-based programs to experience the intensity of ultimate.
Those are our formal offerings. Since I’ve been here, which is slightly over a year, we’ve started implementing more non-school-based programming as well. We try to have one per season. We have a high school fall league during their offseason. We have a girls’ winter indoor league that we’re running in a couple of basketball gyms at a local school here. We also have a middle school summer league and will have occasional, one-off events or tournaments.
Can you share more about one specific new program, and how it’s supporting your mission?
One thing we’ve done for two years in a row is the ATL Turkey Bowl which is a four-on-four mini tournament the Saturday after Thanksgiving. There is a complete 50-50 gender split, so it’s a 2-2 playing ratio. We have middle school, high school and adult divisions so there’s play for everyone. We prioritize getting players from schools that aren’t established, to try and introduce ultimate to new players.
The 50-50 gender split is a very intentional choice to improve the experiences of the girl matching and women matching players. It’s intentional and strategic as we want to hold true to our values.
It takes a village to make all of this happen. Are there any groups that you want to shout out who have made a significant impact for youth ultimate?
I want to shout out our players, coaches, parents and volunteers who are either starting up new programs or working in unestablished programs. It’s a completely different mindset. There’s a lot of people in the ultimate community who don’t get paid to coach, or have to deal with a lot of behavioral problems or have to work with a difficult administration that’s fighting with them for field space. All those people are doing that work and not getting much recognition, not just in Atlanta, but everywhere. It’s difficult. But that difficult work, that’s how you reach the populations that aren’t already represented. Those are the people who are really helping the sport be what, in my eyes, we want it to be.
What are the main barriers preventing youth from participating in ultimate in your area and how are you working to address them?
This is ubiquitous among most communities but field access and exposure are two big ones. Ultimate is great but the fact is, in the general population, it’s a foreign concept. We’re trying to build that up. In terms of field access, you’re competing with all the other schools and sports, and those sports are more likely to have funding because they’re official state sports and recognized by the school districts. Sometimes we’re just priced out of fields.
Another thing that’s really key, at least in Atlanta, is the human capital of coaching. It’s very hard to find quality coaches, especially for the younger divisions. If you’re coaching middle school, you’re probably running practices at 3 or 4 p.m. and most of us work from nine to five, so having a pipeline of quality coaches that know and love ultimate and who work well with youth is hard to come by. It’d be great to have stipends to help encourage, incentivize or support them — whether it’s paying a PE teacher a bonus for coaching in our league or adding ultimate programming, or paying an experienced coach to help at a new program to make that less difficult.
What are your biggest priorities for the next few years?
The overall goal is slow and steady growth. We want, specifically, to make our sport more accessible, to create opportunities for new players and support new programs. We especially value growing the girls division and growing at schools that have a population of underrepresented people in our community.
Our long term goal is to have our ultimate community be more representative of the general demographics of our metro area. Every year, we are moving the needle a little bit towards getting more girls involved, getting more players of color involved, because ultimate is great, the benefits are great, and it should be more accessible.
For youth programming, what have you found keeps kids involved in ultimate for the long term?
Ease of access. Once you have players who love ultimate, you want to provide structure for them to continue loving ultimate. You might have a great middle school program with kids who love ultimate. Well, what happens when they go to high school? We have to make sure we have the right people in place, are organized, structured and communicating well to keep young people engaged and provide that support.
How does the USA Ultimate affiliate relationship support your work at AFDC Juniors?
The affiliate program lowers the membership costs for our youth, which is a really big help for us. USA Ultimate provides stability and structure for event management, score reporting and all sorts of stuff including resources like the How-To kits and the Learn-to-Play kits.
The fact that we have that support means we can provide more playing opportunities. YCC is a big one. There are a lot of ultimate athletes who want to play at a high level and take ultimate seriously. They want to play their best, so providing that infrastructure has been great.
Why is it important for the ultimate community to invest in the next generation of athletes?
Youth are the ones who are going to carry the torch. They’re our future stars, future influencers, future everything. The more resources we have, the higher our ceiling is for what ultimate can be. If we want to make the sport more accessible, investing in youth is the highest return on investment. If you’re investing in me as a 35-year-old, I’m probably already done playing. However, if we’re investing in middle school players, they could still be contributing to the community 20-30 years in the future.
