Maybe you remember the story in March: Three members of the Carleton College men's Ultimate team died when the car they were in crashed just outside of Northfield while at the start of a trip to California for a tournament. We won't go deep on the details, so if you want to read them go here.
Despite being a small school and academically intense, Carleton has traditionally fielded one of the top Ultimate teams in North America, competing and beating schools that you would normally associate with major-college sports. Carleton has won three national titles, the most recent in 2011.
This is what the team looked like in the early days, around 1980:
This is the 2009 national title team:
This weekend, Carleton's men's and women's teams will compete in the national Division I college championships in Ohio.
The men are in a bracket that includes Oregon, Florida and Rutgers among the 20 teams that qualified, Central Florida and Colorado are among the teams in the Carleton women's pool.
Ultimate used to be called Ultimate Frisbee and those who know about Carleton shouldn't be surprised that it is very good at something that's very different from the sporting norm. (Here's a guide to Ultimate, if you want a quick lesson on the sport.) Some of the games will be shown on the internet, including ESPN3. The schedule, from which you can get to another page that has video information, is here.
We could write more, but know that we couldn't match the words of Linda Eckert, the mother of a current Carleton player, who wrote about a conversation she had with her son Conor, an Ultimate player who visited the roadside memorial in Northfield before the team left for Ohio.
