Three-peat ultimate frisbee champs

BYU’s statistics department skill in frisbee is BYU’s best kept secret.

Since being admitted to the graduate statistics program at BYU, we’ve been invited to join the departments spring term intramural team. Professors, graduate students, and their families form the team, and since half the team is over the age of 40, no team takes us seriously. Rachel and I signed up on a whim in 2021, and we’ve looked forward to it every year.

This might have been my last season playing for the team (which makes it sound way more serious than it is). We won three years in a row, with this last tournament being in the highest division. Here are some highlights from my experiences on the team:

• Every cheer we do has some nerdy stats theme to it such as “Lehman-Scheffe!”, “Jensens Inequality!”, or “Hamiltonian Monte Carlo!”. As I progressed through the program, I slowly learned what these meant, which was such a joy.
• Connecting with Rachel for passes and scores. There was one point that we made it nearly up the whole field by ourselves, and I threw it to Rachel in the endzone for the score. Whenever we connect for a score, us and the team (but mostly us) scream, “The marital connection!!!”
• Lisa Dahl bringing watermelon to games this last season. Increased my satisfaction of the game by at least 3x.
• Brian Hartman making everyone feel included. We would notice he would pass to those who get the frisbee less and would design plays for underutilized players to make a great catch. His signature design play was a play called “nuisance parameters”, where everyone would meet in the middle and then run all at once to one side, except for one person. He/she would run the alternate direction and catch the frisbee for the score. It worked every time.
• Everyone loving Bojangles. We started to bring her to games during this recent season for her to get some exposure to crowds, and she killed it. But the best part was everyone being so nice to her and playing with her. Shoutout to Audrey Morgan for watching her while Rachel and I were playing.
• The final game of this recent season. We were down 3-6 at half and out of sync. With some luck and grit, we managed to crawl back and win! I even made the game winning catch for us to win 7-6! The environment was electric, and we couldn’t believe we made such a crazy comeback.