"I guess we lost; they say we lost," grumbled Stallings. "I don’t remember losses too well; I don’t like them."

After that initial state championship run, life started to get in the way for members of the MOB. People started having family and work obligations, and they just couldn’t afford to not work on the weekends because they would rather play ultimate for free.

"It’s a socioeconomic thing," explained Love. "You’ve got to put food on the table to eat. If Frisbee’s not going to do it for them, they’ve got to find a way to eat!"

Recognizing the need for players skilled with the disc, coupled with the growing concern of losing players to different facets of life, the MOB approached the Tourists and proposed a merger between the two teams.

"We joined up with them, and we became Coast to Coast," explained Stallings.

Coast to Coast, named for having team members from the east and west coasts, dethroned the Dukes as state champions two years in a row. Their crowning achievement, according to Stallings, was making it to the semifinals in the Northeast Regional Championships, placing them as one of the top 20 teams in the nation.

"This is how I’m doing the math - you can’t take this from me, and I don’t care how anybody else looks at it," declared Stallings. "You’ve got five regions, and the four teams left in the [regional] semifinals, at the end of the day, are the top 20 teams in the country."

Being one of the top 20 teams in the country was certainly no small feat, especially for a new team that was already giving fits to powerhouse squads like the Rude Boys.

"If you didn’t have the athletic ability to run the whole game, you were in trouble," explained Love. "The only difference between us and the Rude Boys was just skills. They just had better throwing skills and better strategy."

That strategy piece was where the MOB’s lack of disc skills was exposed. In the beginning, the MOB would sprint up and down the field, bringing to ultimate one of the most patented moves in basketball: the give and go.



Jerome Stallings (center)

"I’m going to put this out there: We invented the give and go [in ultimate]," proclaimed Stallings. "We couldn’t throw. So...we would treat it like how you would do the three-man weave in basketball drills, that’s how we moved the disc up the field. It became the give and go."

While this strategy gave lesser teams problems, the Rude Boys adjusted their defense to a zone to slow down the MOB. The MOB knew what they needed to do to break the zone, but they hadn’t mastered the proper throwing skills and weren’t used to staying patient and walking the disc down the field.

Still, the top ultimate teams knew they were in a war whenever they faced the MOB, and they let the MOB know how much they were respected in the community. In the 1999 UPA newsletter article by Adam Zagoria entitled, "The Untold Story of the MOB," Phil "Guido" Adams from the Rude Boys mentioned that if the MOB ever got the skills down, his team would be in trouble.

"I appreciate hearing those kinds of comments, but those guys were amazing," said Stallings. "We wanted to be like them."



While the MOB had the potential to dethrone the Rude Boys as one of the top club ultimate teams at the time, Coast to Coast ultimately broke down over a difference of philosophies.

"We were more like, ‘If we’re gonna do this, it’s gotta be like varsity basketball or football practice,'" described Stallings. "They were like, ‘Yo, let’s have a beer, then let’s go out and toss.’ By the time we got to the end, we were having issues on whose strategy was going to run the team."

In addition to philosophical differences, some discrimination issues began to creep up on the team that combined the all-black MOB and all-white Tourists that began to rub Stallings the wrong way. Stallings knew his MOB teammates were not great handling the disc, but he wasn’t going to let them get marginalized because of it.

"They [the other players] would look at them and say, ‘Aww man, you can’t throw that good. You can just get on defense.’ And I felt like, ‘No, you’re not treating these guys like that when we just crushed y’all over the last year or two!’"

Various clashes like these led to Stallings eventually walking away from the game.

"The fight got to the point where I was like, ‘Okay, this isn’t fun anymore.’"





Glenn Williams (center)

Praise from top teams coupled with philosophical struggles with the Tourists reflected the duality of the reception the MOB received from the ultimate community. There were some tournaments where teams would sarcastically describe them as a basketball team, while there were others that actively respected how well they played.