The Gunn Control defeated Berkeley, 13-10, Sunday to win the California Boys Division I Ultimate Frisbee State Championship at Granite Regional Park in Sacramento.

Control is based at Gunn but counts students from other local high schools as team members.

Control opened with a 3-0 mark in pool play on Saturday, beating Head Royce School, 13-0, in the first round and topping Casa Grande, 13-2. Gunn finished pool play with a 12-3 win over Bentley Upper School.

A 13-5 victory over Foothill in crossover play gave Control the No. 2 overall seed heading into Sunday’s championship round.

Gunn downed Bellarmine, 15-4, in the quarterfinals and beat Alameda Community Learning Center, 14-6, in the semifinals.

The team is coached by John Ortberg III and consists of Colin Babian, Cara Burks, Itay Chang, Brandon Chin, Hudson DeGroff, Samuel Eck, Ronan Eltherington, Darby Felter, Cameron Fiske, Skylar Fong, Colin Grant, Evan Kandell, Bernie Koen, Keenan Laurence, Anita Mokkapati, Rafi Moskowitz, David Nio, Benjamin Pratt, Zachary Rosner, Alain Saal-Dalma, Michael Tao and Ryden Secor.

By Palo Alto Online Sports

By Palo Alto Online Sports

By Palo Alto Online Sports

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10 Comments

  2. Too many concussions in Ultimate.

    Kids are better off playing other contact or collision sports that have adequate protection.

  5. Paul: nah B, jus’ facts

    “26.58% of men and 24.79% of women reported that they had sustained at least 1 concussion while playing ultimate, with 45.58% and 43.10% of those men and women, respectively, reporting multiple concussions.”

    ——————
    From: US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

    Concussion Prevalence in Competitive Ultimate Frisbee Players

    “Results:
    There were 553 male and 234 female respondents included in the analysis; 26.58% of men and 24.79% of women reported that they had sustained at least 1 concussion while playing ultimate, with 45.58% and 43.10% of those men and women, respectively, reporting multiple concussions. A total of 67.81% of men and 78.21% of women stated that they would remove themselves from play after sustaining a given concussion, although 45.99% of men and 37.62% of women indicated that they had returned to play in the same game or practice.”
    ——————

    What sport were you thinking we were talking about? Women Soccer? Hoop? Boxing? Lacrosse? Rugby? That evil oblong-ball game?

    Just remember this study when they come to take another sport away – when they start with one…

    Congrats to the Control.

  6. @ Steph,

    While most every sport has chances of its athletes getting concussions, no doubt football, soccer, or ice hockey first before non-contact sports like Ultimate. Here is bit of an Oxford research on Sport Concussions:

    Certain sports such as collision (e.g., American football, rugby) and contact (e.g., soccer, basketball) sports have higher rates of concussion than sports that involve limited contact. Among collegiate student athletes in the United States, men’s wrestling (10.92 concussions per 10,000 exposures), men’s ice hockey (7.91 concussions per 10,000 exposures), and women’s ice hockey (7.50 concussions per 10,000 exposures) had the highest rates of SRC (Zuckerman et al., 2015). Regarding overall numbers, this same study reported that men’s American football and women’s soccer resulted in the greatest total numbers of SRCs. Among adolescent (i.e., high school) aged athletes, rates are highest in American football for males (6.4 concussions per 10,000 exposures) and in soccer (3.4 concussions per 10,000 exposures) for females (Marar, McIlvain, Fields, & Comstock, 2012)

    Also notice that the sample size here is larger (10,000) compared to the article you mentioned above that had 553 males and only 234 females. The smaller the sample size, the greater the percentage of incidence will be anyways.

    Another simpler statistics website details:
    High school football is consistently shown in studies to be the sport with the greatest proportion of concussions (47.1%) and the highest concussion rate (6.4 concussions per 10,000 athletic exposures).

    -Prevacus, Florida State University’s website
    This again is for a larger sample size.

  7. @Bob: c’mon, now you’re just pasting stuff from websites – the last one from a doc who suffered a terrible concussion outside a football stadium from being punched by a vagrant (see: “dr. v’s story” on his website). They are not a non-profit, but a bio-pharmaceutical company, selling the promise of a ‘cure’ (again from their site: “Prevacus is in the early stages of novel drug testing…”)

    How can you call Ultimate a “non-contact” sport when a study of 800 participants show a quarter of them had concussions? I’m not saying it’s worse than other sports (though a quarter of 800 participants!!!) just that they need to change up some things, like most other sports have already done.

    Here’s a link to a study on the Journal of Neurosurgery site: http://thejns.org/doi/abs/10.3171/2018.1.PEDS17640

    This is even smaller: a study of a couple hundred orthopedic and neurosurgery department *chairs*

    —–

    High prevalence of prior contact sports play and concussion among orthopedic and neurosurgical department chairs
    CONCLUSIONS
    The high prevalence of youth contact sports play and concussion among surgical specialty chairs affirms that individuals in careers requiring high motor and cognitive function frequently played contact sports. The association highlights the need to further examine the relationships between contact sports and potential long-term benefits as well as risks of sport-related injury.

    repeat: The association highlights the need to further examine the relationships between contact sports and potential long-term benefits as well as risks of sport-related injury.

  8. @Steph

    I agree with you that safety measures need to be taken, i was merely addressing your previous comment that kids are better off playing other contact sports which have also reported to have high percentages of concussions. And yes, i have copied information about statistics from unversity’s websites because they are more accurate than my own opinions.

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