Introducing Notorious C.L.E.

Cleveland, Ohio

Section: East Plains

Years as a team: 4

Region: Great Lakes

Record: 7-13

USAU rank: 58



Interview with Captain Abbey Geib

What is your team origin story?

It was me and three other people, two who don’t even play on the team anymore, wanting to make a women’s team in Cleveland after a two-year hiatus.

Who are your players?

Our players comprise of first-year college players up to experienced club players who have 9+ years under their belts. We have also had high school players pop by sometimes to pick up and practice with us. We had two recreational players play this year as well which was awesome! They learned a lot. Most live within 30 minutes from practice but some travel over an hour to practice, too. A lot of our team gets out together in our spare time to throw/workout. We have a lot of trouble with getting numbers to our practices and missing one person makes a huge impact to our small team.

What are three of your best moments from the season?

Our big plays (layout D’s, layout scores, big hucks) and the hype everyone felt from those brought us back from some very defeating games.

Our new players Maddie Fleming (OSU) and Karli Bigler (OWU) brought a huge culture shift to the team. They are so silly and fun, everyone just wanted to be around them.

Getting 5th at Regionals. I don’t think we’ll ever forget it. We had played Sureshot 3 times in 8 days and finally got a win out of the last one. It felt great.

What are three of your worst moments?

Losing all of our games at Chesapeake. Even though that was a fun tournament and it didn’t feel like we lost any games, it was still a blow to our egos. I heard a lot of our team say they’ve never lost every game at a tournament, so that sucked for sure.

Whenever one of our experienced players got frustrated to the point of yelling. No one wants to be in that situation.

Having to play a Universe line. I hate doing that to our team, especially with how new we are, we don’t really need it, and most of the time it didn’t work anyways. We should have just stuck with our team and worked together.

How do you put team goals in to practice? Did you achieve your goals this season?

We knew this year in particular was a building year. So although last year we came out wanting a Nationals bid, this year we can out hoping we would make it to Regionals.

Our goals were to just learn as much as we could at a higher level. So we had to assume everyone had the basics, even if they didn’t so we could learn more advanced concepts. It was tricky but we worked on it day by day. Our tournaments told us a lot about what we needed to work on (transitions, communication, defense) and we all went head first from there.

You had a lot of wins in 2017, but not as much in 2018. How do you keep up morale and motivation?

I had to keep reminding the returning, more experienced players that we weren’t the team we were last year. We’re way greener and that’s okay. We prioritized the team culture over winning, which helped us tremendously. It didn’t feel like we lost one game this year, even though we lost most of them. That was because we had so much fun together and everyone noticed our potential.

The season was perfect in the sense that our team had fun, but imperfect in the fact that we didn’t win games. I think in the future, if we want our team to succeed at a higher level, we need to maintain the culture but get on the same page with the commitment level and a commitment to getting better for the team.

Are the rankings something that you think about? Does it feel frustrating to be near the bottom of the rankings?

Rankings are definitely something we thought about on the inside, but the rankings didn’t really reflect our true colors. In those games we lost, our squad was only 14 people. If we were at full strength for every tournament, those numbers would have looked a lot different. We knew that, and kept our perspective on things.

What resources have been helpful to you?

Iris Javersak! Holy cow. She’s a Notorious alum who decided (with our full support!) to play for Rival this summer. Even though she was on a new team, she still came to every Notorious practice she could. She helped the new players by being an example and explaining things clearly and helped the experienced players by giving us a challenge.

Our experienced players really led the team this year altogether. It was a group effort and the various points of view helped us a ton.

Were you able to play in as many tournaments/games as you would have liked? Were you able to find the kind of opponents that you would like to face?

This year was really tricky because there were some tournaments that said there would be a women’s division, and then there wasn’t one. A couple of TD’s also got back to me like a week before the tournament. I didn’t even know it was happening anymore so we had to drop out. Communication is very poor at the classic level. It’s tough to get those games in.

Commitment is also tough because we have college nationals so late in May and we want to start the club season but don’t have the college players yet. Ahh! It’s so tough.

What do you need more of to continue to grow and succeed as a team?

Commitment, commitment to working out/getting down the fundamentals. A good team culture. A community who want women’s ultimate to grow. An elite club community that wants the bottom teams to grow with them.