The future is female

Madison Radicals’ Robyn Wiseman leads the charge for equity in ultimate

by

Robyn Wiseman is in the middle of the field at Breese Stevens, surrounded by little girls, most of whom stand less than four feet tall. They hold Frisbees, ultimate jerseys and handmade posters for the Madison Radicals ultimate player to sign.

“Go!!! Robyn,” reads one.

In the press for autographs, Wiseman’s signature is quickly devolving into an R-squiggle W-squiggle #44. After the rush, Wiseman tears up and her voice, usually so steady and controlled, chokes. “Seeing all those girls in the stands was really powerful,” says Wiseman. It’s important, she adds, to show them that “as a player and an athlete, you can be valued for what you can do on the field.”

Wiseman has just taken the field for the first time as a professional ultimate player. On this sunny Mother’s Day, 2018, the former captain of Team USA, a Pan-American Championship silver medalist and three-time world champion, finally broke the gender barrier for the Madison Radicals of the American Ultimate Disc League.

She is one of nine women to make AUDL rosters across the country this season, as athletes in the sport pressure the professional league to do more for female players. Jessi Jones broke the league gender barrier by practicing with the Raleigh Flyers all season in 2015, but took the field only for a women-in-ultimate tribute game. In 2017, Jesse Shofner became the first woman to start for a professional ultimate team, playing 12 games for the Nashville Nightwatch. Shofner is not playing this season and announced in December that she was organizing a boycott of the AUDL due to issues with gender equity and accessibility.

Wiseman has become the local face of an international debate over what ultimate will look like in the future. Gender equity and accessibility are especially relevant in a game that emphasizes sportsmanship, spirit and co-ed play over a culture of “winning is the only thing.” The moment is not lost on Wiseman.

As she goes to join her family after the historic Mother’s Day game, a three-foot-tall straggler comes over with another poster to sign.

“Do you play Frisbee?” Wiseman asks. “When will I get to play with you?”

At practice at Breese Stevens it’s easy to see why Wiseman broke through the proverbial glass ceiling. She tosses the disc 40, 50, 60 yards with accuracy and ease, the disc sailing smoothly under the glow of stadium lights before it floats into the hands of a teammate racing down the green turf field.

“She’s a world-class player,” says Radicals Head Coach Tim DeByl. “She’s shown she belongs on that field.”

As a player, Wiseman’s accolades include world championships with Team USA and extended experience on the international club circuit. While playing for the University of Iowa in 2011, where she was a graduate student at the time, she was runner-up for The Callahan award, collegiate ultimate’s equivalent to the Heisman. She has honed her technical skills through meticulous repetition and her dedication to visualization.

“If you can picture yourself doing it, then you can succeed,” she says. “It’s as effective, if not more effective, than practicing on the field.”

Radicals teammate Colin Camp says Wiseman’s study of the game is a welcome addition to the team: “She’s been playing a lot longer than most of the people on the team. She sees things and asks questions we don’t even think about.”

While Wiseman plays the proverbial Jackie Robinson on the field, she is also a prolific force off the field.

Wiseman has won regional coach of the year three times as the head coach of Bella Donna, the UW-Madison women’s ultimate team. It’s just one of the many positions she’s taken across Madison to develop young athletes, including coaching the Madison East boys ultimate team and assisting in a women’s development league.

“She spent five hours last night organizing the women’s rec spring league,” says Pete Schramm, commissioner of the Madison Ultimate Frisbee Association (MUFA), the city’s premier recreational league. “When you have a world-caliber athlete taking time to help the sport off the field, that’s the kind of leadership and role model you want.”

That kind of involvement and leadership is crucial for the sport right now.

“People want to provide more opportunities for kids, especially, to grow up in a world where they are able to see more people who look like them, whether they are a woman or a person of color,” says Wiseman, who serves on the board of directors for MUFA and USA Ultimate. “It’s exciting to be the first female to play for the Radicals.”

Her work off the field is creating more opportunities for women to play the game and augmenting efforts to develop the next generation of players. Her Frisbee network is full of young athletes she mentors. She captains, coaches or consults for multiple teams in the Madison area. This summer, she and her husband, Dave Wiseman, who also plays on the Radicals, will host multiple international players in the extra bedrooms of their west side home. Not coincidentally, it’s outfitted with a gym and all the necessities of an ultimate Frisbee retreat center.

“There isn’t a sphere in the Madison Frisbee world Robyn has not touched,” says Mikaela Hagen, who plays for Heist, Madison’s elite women’s club team, which Wiseman co-founded in 2012. “She brings women into her orbit and helps them succeed.”

Madison West graduate Margaret Walker is one of Wiseman’s protegees.

Walker discovered ultimate when her brother brought the game home from college. At the time, there still weren’t many girls’ teams in Madison, so Walker played with the Madison West High School boys team while she was still in middle school.

When Wiseman met Walker in 2012 during a rec game, Wiseman saw a rare inner drive: “Marge was 12, playing against 35-year-old men, using throws even I wasn’t comfortable trying in a game.”

At 13, Walker became eligible for the Madison Ultimate Frisbee Association in what is now referred to as the “Margaret Walker rule,” MUFA’s minimum age requirement. That’s when Wiseman invited her onto a summer league team, part of a yearly tradition she started with Dave, to help teach younger players. (It’s also allowed Robyn to rack up numerous MUFA championships.)

From there, Walker flourished. “Robyn helped change my life not just as a Frisbee player, but as a person,” says Walker.

With the help of Wiseman and others, Walker went on to found West High’s women’s team, which qualified for nationals in back-to-back years. Walker then went on to try out for the USA U20 team, play for Heist, and help lead Cornell College’s women’s team inaugural season. “Now I’m as old as Robyn was when I met her,” Walker says, “and I still think, ‘When I grow up I want to be like Robyn.’”

Walker’s story, like Wiseman’s, is still the exception. And Wiseman and others in the ultimate community want to flip that equation.

While Shofner organized a league boycott, Wiseman took an alternate route.

“There are different ways of applying pressure to make change,” she says. For Wiseman, changing a “male-dominated space” means taking it on directly. At a recent spring practice for the UW-Madison women’s team, Wiseman was quick to call out a male athlete who wandered onto their field and heckled the female players: “No. Be respectful.”

“It’s about making space and having your voice heard,” says Wiseman, who intends to continue this work as a Radicals player. “I have the opportunity to make genuine change in the locker room by building relationships and having real conversations.”

When Wiseman took over as head coach for the UW-Madison women’s team in 2013, she began to emphasize that the game comes second to a player’s wellbeing. Now, when coaching the Madison East boys ultimate team, that means pushing back against what she sees as the entrenched, unhealthy habits of male sports. Wiseman sees an environment where boys aren’t given the tools to process challenges in their personal lives. Expected to bury feelings and compete, they sometimes shut down when they make a mistake or can’t figure out something right away at practice. “I tell them ‘it’s okay to show me you care. You don’t have to pretend. I know you care. I know you want to get better.’”

Wiseman was born in 1987 to Tom and Karen Fennig in Wind Lake, Wisconsin. Tom was a natural athlete, becoming a professional bowler while still in high school. Wiseman picked up right where her dad left off, playing every sport she could fit into her schedule as a kid.

At Muskego High School she resisted specializing in one sport and instead played three: basketball, volleyball and softball — but not ultimate. The first time she played, she gave a kid a black eye by accident with a basketball elbow pivot to the face. It was college intramurals so the emphasis on safety and “spirit” wasn’t present.

After heading to UW-Eau Claire for college in 2005, she played catcher for the women’s softball team for one season before she realized it wasn’t the experience she wanted. Suddenly, the lifelong athlete was looking for a new field to call home.

She was invited to a spring break ultimate tournament. There, under the shadows of the historic fountain and Spanish moss of Savannah, Georgia’s Forsyth Park, she fell in love with the game. “To be thrown on a random team with people and they were really nice, positive, and encouraging, I realized this was a good sport for me.”

She worked hard on learning skills and strategy. Teammates call her the ultimate “tryhard” for the amount of time she spends lifting weights in her basement, watching game film and mastering throws. She fancies herself a defensive guru and is gifted with the ability to memorize opponent tendencies while playing.

That dedication began molding her personal life. The stamps in her passport represent international tournaments she’s attended. Her network of friends filled up with ultimate players, including fellow Frisbee star Dave Wiseman. Frisbee couples are common and the two would play many seasons together before becoming life teammates in 2013. Dave joined the Radicals in 2013. As fate would have it, Robyn’s first point as a member of the Radicals would come on a pass from Dave.

When she tore her ACL in May 2016, while playing for Team USA, it was one of her hardest recoveries. Suddenly she couldn’t be an athlete. “I played a lot of Pokemon Go,” she says, laughing.

She took her recovery seriously and says she’s a stronger, faster athlete than before. It’s no surprise. Professionally, she works as a disaster recovery and mitigation specialist; she’s worked for FEMA, Wisconsin Emergency Management and the Association of State Floodplain Managers. Her master’s from the University of Iowa is in urban and regional planning. She will soon be heading back to a job with Wisconsin Emergency Management, dealing with disasters as they occur and helping communities get back on their feet.

Even with all she does with the sport, Wiseman insists that ultimate does not drive her life. It’s just what she likes to do. To balance a full-time job she’ll clip her on-call cell phone to her sports bra during practice, take time off work for tournaments or swap shifts with co-workers to do what she loves like anyone else. So, would she ever move to Colorado or the west coast to play with elite ultimate teams of the world?

“This is where I want to be. I like being close to my family, I like Madison as a city; this is where I want to raise a family.”

For many players, having women join the AUDL is long overdue, especially because ultimate has a strong culture of mixed play. The inclusivity stems from the sport’s hippie roots and “spirit of the game” mantra, born along with the sport in the midst of the civil rights movement.

In the beginning, anyone was welcome on the field, male or female. Referees were passed over in favor of an honor system. As the sport spent decades maturing on college campuses where players tended to be progressive-minded, ultimate retained its counterculture cred.

But the sport still had its blind spots when it came to fully including women and persons of color, especially on campuses that tended to be wealthy and white. Though open to mixed play, the sport is not devoid of sexism, which surfaces in the way women are treated on the field, in the huddle and on the sidelines

When AUDL, the first professional ultimate league, began in 2012 as all male and predominantly white, the equity gap became a bigger problem — at odds with what had been culturally acceptable in the ultimate community.

“We aren’t willing to expand the sport at the sacrifice of its ideals,” says Caitlin Murphy, a friend of Wiseman and player for Heist.

Take, for example, this. It’s a windless, weekend afternoon — perfect for ultimate. Wiseman and Murphy are playing a relaxed game of pickup in the park with some ultimate folks they’ve just met. A male teammate looks off Wiseman once... then twice... and then a third time. When the team heads to the sideline, Murphy has had it.

“I had to explain to him that ‘the girl’ who he wasn’t passing to is a professional ultimate player,” explains Murphy. “He couldn’t fully process that a woman on the field could be better than him.”

Wiseman is often the best player on the field. Yet in situations where men don’t recognize her, this world champion is considered just another girl. This happens to female athletes at all levels.

Women describe being told what they did wrong by male teammates and not “getting the benefit of the doubt” in an environment where earning the “trust” of male teammates is difficult — and losing it is all too easy.

In co-ed or “mixed” ultimate, this results in men not passing to women, not trusting women to make long passes, or not letting women attempt the first pass on a turnover.

It can also show up in a team culture. At best, mistakes by female athletes may be brushed off yet subtly attributed to their gender. At worst, women are blamed for team losses. Meanwhile, male athletes expect to improve — and have the guidance to do so. These slights add up to women receiving less support, hampering their development over the long term while reinforcing gender stereotypes. And this is prevalent throughout ultimate’s sprawling community of women’s, men’s and mixed teams.

Input from female players is also not always welcomed. “It’s a lot harder for women to be heard in the huddle,” says Josh Wilson, a captain for NOISE, Wisconsin’s elite mixed team.

In his years playing mixed ultimate on various teams, Wilson witnessed players disregarding female feedback on everything from game strategy to disc technique: “We’d have to tell players, that’s not the kind of thinking we want on this team. And try to change those mindsets.”

In the era of trolls, Wiseman’s actions on and off the field are now under the microscope, with some critics questioning her motives and her talent.

“I’ll be honest. It’s hard to not feel a lot of pressure,” she says. “As an athlete you always want to strive to be your best. But it puts some additional pressure on me to not only perform my best, but also to represent other female athletes in the Madison community… I don’t have the opportunity to have a bad day.”

Wiseman and the rest of the offense have just diced up the defense for three straight points. Coach DeByl is forced to call a time-out to regroup with the defense. On the other side of the field, the offense huddles up and Wiseman’s voice drifts up into the stands, defying the notion that women’s voices are hard to hear in the huddle.

Whether Wiseman and other women joining the AUDL will eventually lead to a fully mixed league, or an AUDL women’s pro league, is unclear.

“It’s hard to know where it’s all heading right now. Single-gender ultimate is still where the elite, top players want to play. And as a league, we want to attract the best players,” says DeByl. “That being said, there’s a lot of fun ideas around mixed that the league is interested in.”

Wiseman will continue to split time between the Radicals, Heist and French club team YAKA for the summer. This season has already brought Wiseman a Belgian tournament championship and Beach Ultimate National Championship (and Spirit Award Championship) in Virginia the weekend after her professional debut. Meanwhile, the Radicals are 6-1 heading into the second half of the season and will host AUDL Championship Weekend at Breese Stevens Field August 11-12.

With some luck, AUDL champion could soon appear on her resume.