National Championships
This weekend, the 20 best college frisbee teams from across the U.S. and Canada are meeting in North Carolina to play in the national championships. They are held every year, with the location changing from year to year. Typically, there are no major issues or complications with the location of the tournament, however, because North Carolina recently passed the HB2 “bathroom bill,” which “blocks cities and local governments from passing antidiscrimination measures that could protect gay and transgender people.” This has caused major controversy across the nation and within frisbee circles. The question facing the college teams, should they boycott the national championships? Essentially what teams are wondering is if by participating in the tournament, if they are indirectly making an “argument” that they don’t care about the passing of the bill.
Result
USA Ultimate (USAU) has responded to the bill saying that they are unable to change the location of the tournament because of complications having to do with finding new fields and the costs of changing locations. However, they have decided to make the game frisbees unique. Instead of having the typical “National Championships” design on them, this year they will be rainbow colored.
For the most part, teams decided that it wasn’t worth boycotting the event and are all attending the tournament. Additionally, USAU has recently put out a list of all businesses near the venue that don’t support the law that was passed. They are encouraging teams to only frequent businesses that have declared themselves opposed to HB2.
Western Washington University
However, Western Washington University’s school board decided that they would not give the team any funding for their plane tickets or housing accommodations due to the HB2 law. As a result, the team, Chaos, was unsure if they would be able to participate in the tournament. After, hours of crowdfunding and fundraising, the team managed to scrape enough money to go. They are participating at the tournament as an “independent” team, not representing the University while still being a team full of Western Washington students.
It is unclear to me as what the right decision would be if I was in this position. While I understand why it’s important to stand up for what you believe is “right,” as an athlete myself, it would be truly amazing to see a whole team sacrifice a possible national championship, something they’ve worked all year for, because of a law that was passed in another state.