Ultimate hospitality

Missouri loves company. Well, perhaps love is too strong of a word.

Saturday and Sunday, the MUtants, the MU men’s Ultimate Frisbee club team, hosted 28 men’s clubs from around the country for the Missouri Loves Company tournament at Hinkson and Eppel Fields. Including the women’s division, which had 10 teams. MU club sports coordinator Christine Williams said about 800 people attended.

For those counting, that’s about 800 college students with nowhere to stay. In the world of Ultimate Frisbee, being the host doesn’t mean just on the field. Sometimes it means sleeping with the enemy.

“Usually, the captain of their team will contact our captain and ask if we have anywhere to house them, then he’ll ask us if we can or we can’t,” MU junior Bryan Esmond said, adding that the majority of teams stay in hotels.

“Sometimes it’s a trade-off,” said MU club captain Mike Houston, who housed the University of Michigan team. “If we go to a tournament up there, we’ll stay up there (with them) and just save us some money.”

Mostly, there’s little trouble involved.

“All Ultimate guys are pretty cool about it,” Esmond said. “They realize that we’re offering to let them stay there, so they’re pretty nice about it.”

Then again, as anyone who’s ever had company knows, it can get to be something of a hassle.

Esmond took in nine players from the University of Arkansas. The Razorbacks didn’t turn his place into a pigsty, but they were noisy.

“They got in pretty late on Friday. They said they were going to be there at 9, but they showed up after midnight. I was worried they were going to steal my stuff for a minute,” Esmond said, half joking. “Then I was like, ‘Wait a minute, they have to come back.’”

The University of Oklahoma group, which included 10 males, three females and three dogs, infested MUtant Justin Rethmeyer’s house like a mother-in-law on holiday. The group even left him with a broken shower door. Unlike most mothers-in-law, though, the OU club left early.

Not everyone had a complaint, however. MU graduate student Dan Gladish, who played for three years at Truman State University as an undergraduate, hosted his former team, many of whom were former teammates, and couldn’t have been happier.

“It was cool. It was just very fun to get to know them again, see how they’ve been, and to see how the team that I once played on has changed,” Gladish said.

Though he had never hosted an Ultimate team before, Gladish said that some teams make much better guests than others.

“It really depends on the type of team that it is,” he said. There are a lot of dynamics in it.

“For the most part, if you get a team of really cool guys, they’re fine. Some teams, like Reth’s team (the one Rethmeyer hosted), are just horrible.”

Housing arrangements aside, the club had many other duties, including setting up the field before games, selling merchandise and passing out food and water. Houston doubled as tournament director.

“If they ask for help, I help them out, but they’re pretty talented on their own,” Williams said.

Houston said there were some long hours involved.

“It’s a lot of work,” he said. “I was up at 5 yesterday and I didn’t go to bed until 1 or 2. It was the same deal this morning.”

Houston and the rest of the MUtants were also responsible for devising the brackets and scheduling the games, which went as planned until noon Sunday, when Oklahoma’s early departure put the tournament in flux.

With one fewer team, someone was missing an opponent. To remedy the problem, the MUtants, who had a 1-4 record at the time, sat out a game to keep things running.

The team, not exactly heartbroken by getting the break, happily improved its record to 2-4 and spent approximately an hour spouting off movie quotes and debating everything from the merits of one team’s pink jerseys to what the English language was derived from.

By the time the event was over, KU had taken the championship and the MUtants finally got a longer break. Missouri Loves Company was their final tournament of the fall semester.