Sunburn is the University of Arizona’s men’s ultimate team, and Savage is proud to be supplying them with ultimate jerseys, shorts, and more for their season. Check out Sunburn's Team Marketplace here, and their Q&A below.
Savage: Does your team have a hype song?
Sunburn Ultimate: Absolutely. Our anthem is "Praying" by Ke$ha. "Lost Boy" by Ruth B. is a close second.
Savage: What does your team do to celebrate a win?
SU: We do team shout-outs. Sit in a circle, pretend to stretch, and nominate people for top plays.
Savage: Who are some of your team’s MVPs?
SU: Chris Baker's parents. They've been bringing snacks and chocolate milk to every tournament for years. We all would have probably quit if not for the dried fruit. After the Bakers, we're all equals. That's how we operate. The vets step up and lead by example. The rooks work hard and learn quick. We have a lot of different guys on the team; there's no room for ego.
Savage: What makes your team unique?
SU: We're probably not unique at all. Ultimate is a great sport, we happen to love it.
Savage: Favorite place to play?
SU: Sitton Field. It's the best field at UA [the University of Arizona]. If all of our tournaments were there, we would definitely win Nationals.
Savage: What’s a team highlight from this past year?
SU: Santa Barbara Invite, Day 1. Frustrating losses to Washington and Cal. We're eliminated from bracket play. Last game of the day, about to play USC. Pilot tells the team not to worry, let's have fun, and we're going to win on universe point with a lefty scoober. First half, we go up a couple breaks. Second half, USC comes back. Universe point, we pull. Pilot gets a layout D on a handler reset. We have the disc ten yards from the end zone. Pilot taps it in, looks open side, looks break side, looks reset. Nothing is open. Stall eight, Pilot makes momentary eye contact with Jaron and throws a lefty scoober to the break side. Jaron slides to catch it and Sunburn pulled off the biggest upset of the season. True story, no hyperbole, absolutely crazy.
Savage: What does your team name mean?
SU: Well the S stands for special, the U stands for underrated, the N stands for... No it's not that complex. We live in Arizona. So we get a lot of sunburn.
Founded as a D-III women's team at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the early ‘90s, the Pursesnatchers’ team culture is based on equity, inclusion, embracing the weirdness, and growing together as players and people. “While our gender policies have grown more inclusive, our commitment to dopeness and that sweet, sweet disc-slanging has not,” team member Izzy Ryde tells us. We’re proud to be outfitting the Pursesnatchers for their upcoming season—check out their Team Marketplace (with ultimate jerseys, reversible tanks, hoodies and more) here, and our seven burning questions below.
Savage: What’s the story behind your team name?
Pursesnatchers: Our founder found a sign in an airport that read, "Beware the Pursesnatchers" and was inspired by the picture of someone sprinting away with a purse. She decided to steal the sign and just like pursesnatchers run after the purse, we run after the disc.
Savage: Does your team have a hype song?
PS: Not particularly, but Lizzo always gets us going.
Savage: What does your team do to celebrate a win?
PS: We celebrate each other and our teammates with a solid spirit circle.
Savage: Who are some of your MVPs?
PS: Our Snatcher MVPs are committed to the game, the effort, the leadership, and the continued growth of our team.
Savage: What makes your team unique?
PS: We are a team, not just a few star players. Our newer, less athletic, and less experienced players are just as important to the team as our captains.
Savage: What’s your favorite place to play?
PS: The High Tide fields in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina during spring break.
Savage: Tell us about a recent team highlight.
PS: We won a B team game against Tempest with almost entirely new players.
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STEM Ultimate coach Joe Norskov is the best kind of role model. The Knoxville resident is using Ultimate and his connections to help advance the mission of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. It’s a cause that’s been dear to his heart since he learned that a teammate was struggling with the disease. Since then, he’s made it his mission to help find a cure.
Recently, Joe was nominated as for the 2019 class of Rising Stars by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. As part of that, he’s raising money for the organization. At press time, he’s raised nearly $8000 toward his $10,000 goal. You can help Joe reach his goal by shopping this exclusive "Joe Norskov" jersey. Proceeds from this jersey's sales will be contributed to Joe's fundraising campaign.
Savage is proud to count Joe as a longtime customer, and we recently sat down with him to get to know him a bit better. Here’s what he had to say.
Savage: How did you get your start playing ultimate? What do you love about the sport?
Joe Norskov: My older brother attended University of Colorado in 2002, which I believe was two years prior to Beau Kittredge's first season. I mention Beau because the iconic Beau Jumps Over a Guy YouTube video was a moment in my life. While my brother never played for the Mamabirds, he attended lots of pickup games and brought home the sport to me. I tried and failed to get people at my high school interested, but luckily when I tried in college I had a senior co-founder who was well versed in student government. We started the team at my alma mater Maryville College in 2005 and were the bad news bears of D3 college ultimate. Crowning achievement: we beat Harvard's B-team at B-Easterns one year for maybe like 13th place (possibly lower). Many of those teammates became lifelong friends and 4/7ths of my groomsmen at my wedding were college teammates.
Two main things I love about ultimate: there's an inherent beauty of a disc in flight and the community is incredible. I gave a Pecha Kucha talk in May 2018 that outlines many of the reasons I believe ultimate can help society improve. Conflict resolution, accountability, and being able to laugh at oneself are incredibly important life skills. Those skills are common in ultimate players.
Savage: What's your involvement in the Knoxville scene? What makes it special?
JN: The Knoxville scene has given me a lot and I am just trying to give back. Analogy: If you ride on the bus for a while, it's only fair to take a turn driving. I am on the board for Knoxville Youth Ultimate as treasurer and run our winter goalty league as a board member for Knoxville Ultimate Club. This is the sixth school year I've been involved with youth and am the assistant head coach of L&N STEM Academy. We placed seventh in the nation last year at Cut's national invite tourney in Rockford, Illinois. For the adult club, I've been captaining summer, fall, and winter leagues for four years and have been running winter league for three years… Knoxville ultimate is a community that has been pushing for high level ultimate in all the right ways for years: youth and co-ed or women's ultimate. What makes the Knoxville scene particularly special to me is that I met my now wife on a summer league team five years ago.
Savage: When did you start taking an interest in fighting Cystic Fibrosis? Can you tell us about your friend?
JN: I met him playing ultimate in college and his name quickly became a verb on our team. Pulling a Chris Allen meant you made some ridiculous shot that most people couldn't, or otherwise performed far above average. His first year of playing he was just a cut above everyone as a natural athlete. At one cold tournament, we noticed his hands turning a little blue and we started asking questions. He explained he had this disease since birth that caused among other things poor circulation. Over the course of our years together on the ultimate team, I could see him declining a bit due to the other terrible effects of CF. Luckily in 2012, the drug Kalydeco was released and it worked really well for him. We were able to play summer league together with many of our old college teammates in 2015. Our dismal record didn't reflect how much fun we had.
Savage: Tell us about your Cystic Fibrosis Foundation campaign.
JN: My campaign is part of my nomination for the 2019 class of Rising Stars by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Rising Stars are outstanding young professionals in the Knoxville community recognized for their commitment to volunteerism and career achievement. My work with Knoxville Youth Ultimate was a major contributor to my nomination. As part of this award, I pledged to raise funds for the organization. I have happily doubled my initial goal and have since increased it twice. It is amazing to see such incredible generosity for such a worthy cause.
Savage: Have you found that the ultimate community is supportive of charitable causes like this?
JN: The local ultimate community has been huge. Friends of mine realized the opportunity and decided to make a Knoxville ultimate table at the black tie gala that will honor all Rising Stars. Many other people in the ultimate community have pitched in as well with individual donations. Other charitable causes in the past have included helping to fund Knoxville's youth teams when they traveled to their first national tournament (Knoxville high school women's team placed ninth last year at the national invite as well — they're awesome!), helping to fund medical bills, helping after a skiing accident, volunteering to clean up a local park of invasive plant species in exchange for field access, and many, many others.
Savage: Anything else you want to add?
JN: Before starting this fundraising campaign as part of receiving my Rising Star recognition, I was very averse to asking for help, donations, or sponsorships. This process has taught me that people want to help, donate, and sponsor if you ask. You just have to ask.
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Elon Ultimate's Big Fat Bomb is one of those teams Savage has been working with for longer than we remember. We love making ultimate jerseys for this crew, because they look so dang good wearing them. I mean, just look at them. Here, seven questions with BFB's Ethan Gould. {And here, Big Fat Bomb's Team Marketplace.}
Savage: What does your team name mean?
BFB: It's a heart attack of a sandwich at Paulie's Pub. What more do you need?
Savage: Tell us about a team highlight from the past year.
BFB: This.
Savage: Where's your favorite place to play?
BFB: Myrtle Beach. We are excited for Easterns Qualifier after going to D-III Easterns three years ago. (Savage will be there too as the official merchandiser!)
Savage: What makes your team unique?
BFB: Bomb embraces anybody. If you can breathe and you want to play ultimate, you're welcome on our team. We also have been playing with an unique side stack like Revolver.
Savage: Who are some of your MVPs and what sets them apart?
BFB: Everybody is an MVP if everybody plays their role and does their job. Team wins > individual wins.
Savage: How does your team celebrate a win?
BFB: Team "Big Fat Bombs" at Paulie's. We win tournaments and our bellies deserve a treat!
Savage: What's your hype song?
BFB: "Rise and Shine," J. Cole. ITS A BANGER.
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Ultimate fans everywhere have been buzzing about the trailer for a new documentary that promises to tell the untold story of racial, class, and gender equity in the sport of ultimate frisbee. We talked to The Sky Is Red documentary producer Julia Johnson about her background in ultimate and filmmaking, and the next steps for this much-anticipated documentary.
Savage: What's your role in developing The Sky is Red documentary?
Julia Johnson: I was approached about this project after Lili (Gu) and Brittany (Kaplan) had already been initially connected. They each had two different ideas about some type of video project, both about ultimate and touching on different topics that we now showcase in The Sky Is Red, including gender equity, the history of women in ultimate, racial equity, and class equity, and how all those things play together within the ultimate community as well as the part they play in the larger sports culture.
We pulled on elements from each and strengthened what already overlapped and took that frame of mind and found the stories we wanted to highlight and tell in this film. As the EP and originally the only producer on the project, I sit in on most of the creative story meetings, and have the space to provide feedback and provide input into any of the decisions as an equal third. Due to the nature of the filming schedule and the need for someone to take on all the logistics, that fell toward me and more of the creative work fell to the two directors, but now that we are off the road we are restructuring and all developing this project together. It is very much a development process despite having filmed most of it already, and it will be through the end.
Savage: Who else are you working with?
JJ: The two other main people on this project are Brittany Kaplan and Lili Gu. They are co-directing, and Brittany is also editing. Lili is helming any treatments or writing that needs to be done. The three of us are producing the film together, and I am currently an Executive Producer on the film also. We all of course wear many other hats as well in this process large and small. In terms of filming, we were very fortunate to be joined on the road by Tim Toda who was our DP (Director of Photographer) and Mia Greenwald who did production sound and has done all our graphic design as well.
Savage: What's your background in film and ultimate?
JJ: I began playing ultimate my freshman year of college at USC. My dorm mate dragged me to practice, and soccer wasn’t going to start for a few weeks. Let’s just say I never made it to soccer tryouts. I knew of ultimate frisbee as a sport from growing up in Atlanta and my brother played in high school, but it took me a while to connect my brothers “ultimate” to the “ultimate” I had started playing. After going to a few practices, I never looked back and jumped pretty full force into the sport and the community. I played four years at USC on the Hellions of Troy, including captaining, and I have played club with LA Reign, LA Viva, and San Diego Wildfire. I currently play for Seattle Underground.
I studied Film and TV Production in college along with business law. I learned pretty early on that production and specifically producing was where I wanted to land. I have worked producing a number of things from shorts to music videos to events to live TV, but this is my first foray into a feature film. I currently work on staff, full-time on a production team for an advertising agency in Seattle while continuing to work on TSIR on my lunch breaks and late into the night.
Savage: You raised nearly $77K on Kickstarter... Were you surprised by the response? What will this kind of budget allow you to do?
JJ: I don’t think surprised is the right word. I very consciously worked to manage my personal expectations during this process. Of course I was hopeful that we’d raise as much money as possible, but at the end of the day Kickstarter and fundraising in that way is not how projects get the money they need in totality. It is 100 percent necessary to get the project off the ground, and it is as much a way to gather a following and spread the word as it is to get liquid money up front. I am so thankful for every single person that has shown us love and sent us money they were able to donate. In fundraising and working on grassroots projects like this, it’s really important to trust in the work you are doing, but not to the extent of being too hopeful and thinking you’ll get money that you don’t get. I live by the motto “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”
We wrote this on the Kickstarter page but in order to get this film completed we need at least $600,000. For the 16-week tour alone we spent about $150,000. We would never have been able to go on the road like we did without the amazing support of our Kickstarter participants, and I do want to be upfront about what it takes to get a project like this through to completion. We surpassed our original set goal on the Kickstarter platform, and that was amazing. Deciding what that goal should be was a really hard part of a lot of conversations between Brittany, Lili, and myself. In the end, we settled on $65,000. It felt great to end up surpassing that goal, and I had to really be grateful for that without letting the idea that it was only step 1 of our financial needs cloud the success in our campaign.
Savage: Why do you think so many people stepped forward to contribute to this project?
JJ: It’s really easy to say that our project needs to be completed so people’s stories can be shared and that we as filmmakers are doing important work. I think it’s harder to recognize that this is just one vehicle that can help our community and the greater sports society on righting a lot of inequities and that it isn’t “the answer”. No one knows what is the “right” answer. We can all just contribute to the process in ways that we can, and at the end of the day, for me as a filmmaker, that means touching people through empathy and through sharing stories and experiences with an open heart and an open mind. I think people in the community believe in us and our project. I think they trust our team to approach it with the perspective of everything I said above and most importantly giving agency to the people who are sharing their stories with us and being vulnerable.
Savage: At what point are you in filming now? How is it coming along?
JJ: Right now we are doing a lot of production work that got put on hold while on the road. This includes the less glamorous work of production like accounting and contracts and more fundraising and planning. We will need to film a few more scenes, revisiting our main subjects and capturing the passage of time since we saw them a year ago, but the bulk of our filming is done. Once we get the funds, we will then be able to rendezvous as a group and shoot the remaining scenes with our subjects’ schedules.
Savage: When will the film be released?
JJ: The short answer is we hope to have it done and on the festival circuit by 2021. The long answer is that it totally depends on funding and a lot of other variables in and out of our control. All of the three leads work full time because we need to be able to support ourselves, and so while we devote as much time to this film as possible, we are very dependent on funding.
Savage: Anything else we should know about it?
JJ: You can check out our new website that we dropped with the trailer at skyisredfilm.com AND we are very much still appreciating and in need of monetary donations. You can head to our website to donate as well via PayPal or contact us at skyisredfilm@gmail.com for mailing checks or alternative ways to help, including connecting us with any other donors.
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