Math teacher John Groess recently returned to BSM from Australia, where he coached the USA Mixed National Ultimate Frisbee Team in the Ultimate Frisbee World Cup. The “mixed team” is composed of male and female athletes, instead of being a gender-specific team. Groess was in Australia for about three weeks and returned on September 8th after his team won the gold medal.
Before he coached the national team, Groess coached both middle and high school ultimate frisbee teams, as well as adult club teams. Groess has also been part of the coaching staff of the national team in the past, playing the role of selection assistant, where he helped select the members that would play on the team at tryouts. “The process of me becoming the head coach took seven to eight years because I had to work through helping with tryouts and helping with other parts of the national program to build my way up to becoming the head coach,” Groess said.
Ever since he started coaching ultimate frisbee, it was Groess’s goal to someday be coaching for his country on the national level. Groess has had a lot of fun coaching ultimate frisbee throughout his life and is excited that he finally reached this level. “Being able to coach the USA national team is a great opportunity to represent your country, but you also get to coach the best against the best competition, against the best that the other countries in the world have to offer,” Groess said.
During other matches, Groess spends time watching the other teams play to learn more about their playing style. He shares this with his athletes during practices and before games to help them. They will sometimes watch clips of other games and work on defending a specific team’s offense. “During the game is a lot of fine-tuning or just encouragement, because similar to soccer, during the actual gameplay I can’t do as much coaching. I have to just let the play happen,” Groess said.
Before going to Australia, Groess’s team first played in Colombia against other North and South American teams. They played Team Colombia, Team Canada, and more. Then they had a practice weekend over the Fourth of July before they went down to Australia.
The team’s hardest matches were against Team Italy and Team Australia, where they had to play in front of the home team crowd. “And then in the championship, Canada came out against us with a zone defense to try to slow down our attack,” Groess said.
Even though they played some tough teams, they emerged victorious, winning gold medals and a large trophy. “It was really fun and exciting because we knew how good the team was, but then there’s also sadness now because our time is done, and this team only comes together once every four years…to actually win a gold medal while representing Team USA is something I’ve always wanted in life, and that was crazy,” Groess said.