Weekend Warriors

By Ryan Catanese

Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep.

It’s 7 a.m. on a Saturday. It will be at least another four hours until the average college student opens his groggy eyes and tries to rub the Friday night buzz from his bloodshot eyes.

Ryan Bleam, however, has beaten his cell phone alarm and is standing in the bread aisle of a supermarket. He is one of four customers in the store.

He smiles. “I always do that,” he says, reaching into his pocket and silencing his rumbling phone.

Bleam is not a construction worker getting a beat on the day nor is he a hunter beating the sun to his post. He is a student, a brother and a son, but above all, he is an Ultimate Frisbee player.

“Classes are just my excuse for being at college to play Ultimate,” he says only half jokingly.

He is far away from home; he and his teammates have traveled over four hours to come compete in a faraway tournament in which they will play a total of seven grueling two-hour games over the course of two days.

Ultimate Frisbee is a club sport at Bleam’s alma mater, Elon University, one of 21 teams on campus. The club sports program is over 850 athletes strong and encompasses everything from the equestrian team to the roller hockey team to the water skiing team.

Elon’s club sports athletes will most likely never get paid for playing their sport, will never be in a commercial, and rarely ever play to a crowd more than a dozen strong. All of these players will get a job completely uninvolved with their sport after college, and yet they practice night after night to be great at what they do.

“I could care less about how many people watch me or know about me,” Bleam says. “I work hard so that when game day comes, I will be ready when my team needs me. I just love this game.”

For the Love of the Game

Elon’s varsity sports travel in style. They arrive in charter buses, and if they can’t be driven home that night, they get placed in a nice hotel room.

The Ultimate Frisbee team, however, travels in a style all their own. After their last class on Friday, they run to their rooms, throw their uniforms and other clothes in a bag, and meet at the club sports complex. They cram five people in each reluctant driver’s car, hit the road and tear through the night.

Having been cramped in a car for four hours, when Bleam’s teammates arrive at the hotel, they are antsy and ready to get out of the car, but they can’t. Bleam calmly exits the car and walks into the lobby and checks into their hotel, always one with an exterior entrance, and checks into their four rooms for their estimated 25 players in attendance.

Since there are only four places to sleep on beds (hence the rule at the hotel limiting four people maximum per room) they roll out sleeping pads and bags wherever they can find a spot on the hardwood floor of the hotel room and try to get the best sleep possible for their four games the next day.

It is hardly glorious, but the hard work pays off for these underappreciated athletes. Ironically, Elon’s club sports teams are much more successful on the national level in their respective divisions than the varsity teams.

Elon’s club lacrosse team is currently eighth in the nation in the Division II Men’s Collegiate Lacrosse Association, and the club roller hockey has won the Division II National Championship several times since 2000. The club Ultimate Frisbee team, of which Bleam is the captain, is currently in the top 80 in Division I and has already played perennial national contenders Georgia, Ohio State and UNC Chapel Hill this year.

It’s an Investment

“I want them to eat something that will be good for them today instead of some greasy fast food breakfast they pick up on the way to the fields,” Bleam says.

He looks back and forth between the two bags and can’t decide.

As he stands in the bread aisle, contemplating the nutritional differences between raisin bagels and cinnamon swirl bagels, he explains his average sports history. As a kid, he played almost every sport, but took football and baseball the most seriously. He explains this, but is obviously distracted.

“I’ll just take both.”

Chris Myers used to be in the same boat.

“I played varsity baseball in high school,” Myers says, “but if you know much about baseball, you know not many coaches are looking for 5-foot 9-inch first basemen. I wasn’t big on the Greek scene, and I wanted something to be involved in, something to connect to. That is when I joined club baseball.”

Myers, now graduated, is the Assistant Director of Campus Recreation at Elon University. He and Peter Tulchinsky, the Director of Campus Recreation, seem to barely fit in an office, their collared shirts seemed to be strangling them.

For Myers, it is always great to see the club sports teams do well on the field, but what he values the most is what happens on the field. To Myers, these groups are more than just a sports team.

Almost all of the club sports teams are completely student-run. They manage their own finances, set their own game and practice schedules, they apply for tournaments and coach their own teams. The captains of club sports teams aren’t just players, they have to be players, coaches, and businessmen all at the same time.

This isn’t just pocket change that the captains are spending. Club sports gives out $54,000 per year to the various teams on campus, and some teams are given over $4,000 per year. The rest of the money is collected through player dues and donations.

“To me, the best experience is for the leaders,” Myers says. “They have to do all these things themselves, and this is a huge chunk of time that they are putting into their teams.

“To me, though, it is worth it. The more that these guys and girls put into their sports, the more they get out of it. It’s an investment.”

The success off of the field is what Tulchinsky values as well.

“Ultimate Frisbee is a great example. Here is a group of about 50 people [including the all-girls team] that, like us, might not have been big into Greek Life, who might not have found a place to fit in on campus a couple years ago. Now they have a strong group of friends that share a similar interest and they feel more connected when, a couple of years ago, they might have transferred.”

“Yes, we are a team, first and foremost,” Bleam says, bagging his bagels at checkout. “But you have to understand that it is so much more than that. We live together, we eat together, sleep together.

In many ways, they have grown up together.

So, you might find them on the fields late at night honing their craft, or you might catch them all together on weekends. If nothing else, they at least deserve some respect. They are ancestors of the purest sports players; they didn’t play for money or for fame.

They play for the love of the game.

So whenever you get tired of seeing prima donna professional athletes bicker over whether they get $80 million or $81 million, just know that there are Ryan Bleams in this world, working hard for their sport, for themselves, but most importantly, for their team. They are the underdogs, the scoffed at, the disrespected. They are club sports athletes.

They are the weekend warriors.