Statement Regarding An Open Letter to Minnesota Ultimate

The Minnesota Ultimate Board thanks the signatories for representing their teams, teammates, and our state so well, for their commitment to the sport, and for taking the time and effort to reach out to us. We value their perspectives, and we are taking their message to heart. We also hope to continue the dialogue, and we are working with the signatories to plan a meeting in the near future to do just that. We're absolutely thrilled to have this level of engagement from youth players, and we want to spread the themes of this message to every constituent in our community possible. The signatories have granted permission for us to share their letter, linked above. We feel it is required reading for the whole community, and we strongly encourage all of our community members to give it a read or two. The Minnesota Ultimate board of directors is committed to gender equity and growing girls’ and women’s participation, but we need the community’s help to achieve our goals! After all, Minnesota Ultimate is only what our community makes of it. We are a single-employee organization which relies on the energy and goodwill of our volunteers to accomplish most everything that we do.

We also wish to use this opportunity to inform the community regarding how Minnesota Ultimate has been approaching the issues discussed in the letter, and what changes we are in the process of implementing as a result of our recent strategic planning process. It is encouraging that many of the changes we have been considering are the same provided in the letter. But we have also been provided with ideas we had not considered and acknowledge there is much more work to be done. We remain open to your feedback on everything we are doing, or should be doing.

Strategic Plan. Our recent strategic planning process culminated in this statement of our mission, vision, strategies, and objectives for the next three years. We are hard at work implementing this new plan, and hope the community will join us in ushering in the next phase of our organization!

Summer League. USA Ultimate has changed its eligibility rules for YCC, and summer league will not be the only path to eligibility for YCC this season. Even so, we are committed to making changes to our summer league to increase the quality of the experience for all participants. We are planning to startup two women’s leagues this summer - one U17 and the other 17+. We also plan to change our mixed league to a 6v6 league with a 3:3 gender ratio. They will take place on separate nights so players can play both mixed and single-gendered leagues if desired!

Girls' Outreach. We run multiple GUM (Girls’ Ultimate Movement) and LTP (Learn to Play) clinics each year (and/or Pop runs GUM clinics some years). Since March 11th, 2017, three girl-specific clinics have served 185 girls in Minnesota. New girls teams are also provided with $1,000 of scholarships and discounted fees in their first year in our programs. We also work hard to connect local community members to the resources which USAU provides for new girls coaches and teams. And we spend a lot of our organizer energy working with programs who don't have girls teams yet but do have open teams, to figure out how to get a girls team started. We also work hard to recruit new girls' coaches, and female coaches in general. For example, we have current and former Pop and Drag'n Thrust players on our board, and many of the athletes on those teams are also coaches in our leagues. We are also generally more flexible on our roster rules, late fees, and other administrative processes with girls' teams - all in the hopes of growing girls’ participation.

YCC Costs. Our tryout fees for YCCs are already cheaper for female players than male players, but otherwise YCC participation costs largely depend on which tournaments teams choose to attend in preparation for YCCs. Since we work hard to bring the YCC tournament to Minnesota every year, our YCC participants save thousands of dollars in travel costs each season over teams from around the country. Beyond these savings, we have not chosen to subsidize YCC participation on the whole, because it is elite level play, and we would rather direct our limited resources to lower the barriers for entry at more introductory levels such as summer league and our high school and middle school spring leagues. However, we do have scholarship funds available for all of our programs, including YCCs, and participants with financial needs are strongly encouraged to connect with us, or their coach, to access such funds. We never want money to be a barrier to entry into our great sport! And yes, we do have a program where YCC participants can earn a reduced fee by recruiting a volunteer for YCCs. There is no requirement that this volunteer be a parent, however. YCCs is a significant undertaking which requires an awful lot of volunteers to be possible, and we are always looking for ways to find more of them!

YCC Coaches. We have traditionally hired one YCC coach per team, and provided a modest stipend, equal across all teams. We have not had the resources to hire multiple coaches per team each year, so we have traditionally left it to the discretion of the head coach to recruit assistant coaches as desired. However, we are happy to announce that we were able to step up our coach recruiting efforts this year, and we are now more directly involved with the hiring of both head coaches and assistant coaches for all YCC teams. We have 6 coaches lined up to coach girls’ division YCC teams this season!

YCC Practices. Our U16 Girls YCC team practiced with the U19 Girls YCC team last year because they needed to combine to have sufficient numbers for practices (particularly for the benefit of the U16 team). We are really hoping that the USAU changes for YCC eligibility will help with better practice attendance since YCC athletes with busy summers may not be able to choose between YCC and Summer League. Also, the adjusted YCC age brackets from U16 to U17, and U19 to U20, should help bolster the numbers for our U17 teams, along with our exceptional growth happening at the Middle School levels of competition. We know it isn’t ideal for these teams to be practicing together, and we would love for that to be in the past starting this season!

YCC Mixed. Our mixed teams have traditionally been very popular, in part because of the coaching staff. We appreciate the letter signatories’ feedback on the experiences last season, and we are absolutely looking into it and working on ways to reduce dangerous plays and increase involvement of female players. We would like nothing more than those teams to be equitable and awesome experiences for all players! We do think these are also issues for the entire MN Ultimate community - likely the entire ultimate community. Again, we strongly recommend that all read the letter linked above and take it to heart.

Coach Training. In partnership with USA Ultimate, we run coaching clinics every year, and we follow the USA Ultimate coaching curriculum. We would like to see equity training included in the coaching curriculum, and we intend to propose to join with the letter signatories in requesting that USA Ultimate make revisions to the coaching curriculum accordingly. We also host our own coaching conference annually. One of the topics at the 2017 coaching conference was a panel discussion: "Recruiting and Retaining Female Players." We are making the video of that discussion public to generate more awareness and share ideas.

Amenity Equality. At our state tournament, the girls’ teams are typically closer to HQ and trainers, or where possible we evenly rotate. The National Sports Center fields are generally high quality, and we try to have water stations close to every field! When we've had a showcase field, we've always had more girls games than open games. We had the state finals in a stadium on a weekday evening after the tournament last year, and had both the girls and open finals played consecutively in the stadium, on equal billing. We'll do it again this year and reverse the order, and keep reversing each year thereafter. However, we do not run most of the spring tournaments occurring in the state prior to our State Tournament. To the extent they are not treating girls’ or women’s teams with equality, we would absolutely love to help our community advocate for change. We also hope to empower all players in our community to expect equality everywhere!

Having provided the above information about Minnesota Ultimate, we invite our entire community to continue this conversation. Please let us know how we can improve! In the coming days, we will continue the dialogue with the letter signatories and hope to incorporate their excellent feedback and suggestions into our operations as well. If you are a community member who is passionate about issues of gender equity and would be willing to volunteer ideas or energy to help us on this mission, then we very much hope to hear from you!

Minnesota Ultimate Board of Directors