MLU Fakes Online Store Hack As Splashy Transition To New Store Host

Major League Ultimate drew attention over the weekend after announcing that their online merchandise store had been hacked, before revealing that they were moving their store over to Disc Store, an established ultimate and disc golf equipment store.

MLU Executive VP Nic Darling confirmed what many suspected: there was never a hacking.

“We signed the deal with Disc Store a couple of months ago,” he said. “We were trying to figure out, ‘What is the most fun thing we can do to transition from our old store to our new store?'”

They decided, after a suggestion from Commissioner and Founder Jeff Snader, to “break the store and destroy it in an amusing way and have Disc Store come to the rescue.”

At first, many took MLU’s claims of a hack seriously — Darling said that there was an outpouring of suggestions and advice about how to remedy the situation before it became clear that it was a joke. He said that the league will be sending out ‘thank you’ gear packs to those people.

This series of tweets shows how the joke unfolded:

MLU is excited to be working with Disc Store as a partner. “It just ended up being that the monetary side of the deal combined with the logistics side was good enough that we really couldn’t turn it down,” said Darling. “Being able to offload all the labor and complications involved in customer service and fulfillment to somebody who does that as their core competency was very attractive.”

Disc Store will be a jersey sponsor on the Philadelphia Spinners’ jerseys and MLU will be putting together a video series featuring Disc Store as a key sponsor.

Specific details about the financial arrangement are not available.