West Lebanon
With a focused approach, Princess Layout — as the Dartmouth team is known — pecked its way through a 16-3 regular season before sweeping two regional tournaments to earn the No. 2 overall seed in the Division I college championships late last month outside Cincinnati.
Dartmouth lost just once during pool play before charging through the championship bracket, winning by at least six points against Michigan, Stanford, British Columbia and Texas to secure the crown.
“We never really think about the opponent or even the score of the game; just take it one point at a time,” said Yum, who played at Johns Hopkins University. “To look up at the end of the Texas game and realize what we’d just done was just kind of like, ‘What just happened? Did that really just happen?’ It was pretty unbelievable. I still don’t believe it.”
Athletic, 6-foot-1 cutter Jaclyn Verzuh scored 33 goals with 24 assists and 14 blocks during the tourney and earned player of the year accolades from Ultiworld, a news and media outlet devoted to the sport.
Angela Zhu, a senior tri-captain, had 11 goals and 35 assists and was named recipient of the Callahan Award, which honors organized ultimate pioneer Henry Callahan and is issued to the nation’s most valuable player as voted by players and coordinators.
Caitlyn Lee — like Zhu a handler, those who do most of the throwing — had 19 goals, eight assists and was named Ultiworld’s breakout player of the year.
Dartmouth’s other co-coach, Laura Bitterman, knew Princess Layout possessed the wherewithal to go all the way this season. She also realized any championship campaign requires more than expectations.
“We have a lot of exceptional players, there’s no doubt about it,” said Bitterman, who is teammates with several of the Dartmouth players on the Boston Brute Squad elite women’s team. “You can have all the talent in the world, but you have to step up not only on the big stages, but all season long. These girls did that.”
After reaching the national quarterfinals each of the last two seasons, Dartmouth lost about a half-dozen players to graduation. Recruiting efforts last fall yielded just 13 newcomers to the team’s inaugural practice, but 10 rookies stayed on. That allowed Princess Layout to field a roster of 22.
“When I first started here, we had enough players for a ‘B’ team. The last couple of years, we’ve had about 22-25 players on one team,” Yum said. “As far as the recruiting, there have been some years where 30 (prospective) players showed up and only eight stayed on. So to have 10 out of 13 rookies stick around was actually pretty good.”
While players bought in to Yum’s focused approach, they also had clear long-term aspirations for the season.
“Our goal was always to win nationals,” said junior tri-captain Julianna Werffeli, who’s played ultimate since she was a sixth-grader at University Prep middle and high school in Seattle. “We knew we were going to have to work to make it happen, but that it was a good possibility if we were willing to do that.”
Staying dedicated to the game wasn’t always easy at Dartmouth, where wintertime practices were from 10 p.m. to midnight inside Leverone Field House. They moved to Sachem Field in West Lebanon once weather permitted.
Sarah Colon, a senior and tri-captain who began playing the game for the first time with Princess Layout freshman year, admitted there were challenges.
“In the middle of the winter, once classes kick in, it can be hard for some of the new players (to stay dedicated),” Colon said. “One of my roles on the team was to kind of keep everyone’s spirits up.”
Dartmouth blasted through its first two tournaments, going 7-0 at the Florida Winter Classic in January and 6-0 at the Stanford Invitational. Princess Layout beat British Columbia, the host Superfly and Texas during the tournament, all precursors to championship bracket matchups two months later.
“I think beating those teams gave us some confidence, but it was kind of a windy and muddy weekend out there,” Yum said. “How teams perform in those conditions isn’t always indicative of how they might play in different conditions.”
Dartmouth went just 3-3 during the Northwest Challenge in Seattle in late March, while Verzuh — who missed much of the 2016 campaign while injured — sat out the tourney with a minor ailment.
Verzuh returned in time for April’s Greater New England Conference Championships in Rhode Island, where Dartmouth needed to place in the top four of eight schools to advance to the regional finals. Princess Layout beat teams from the universities of New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont to win the conference.
To earn a berth at nationals, Dartmouth had to place first or second out of 10 schools early last month at the New England championships in Amherst, Mass. Princess Layout swept again, earning a decisive 11-2 win over Ivy League rival Harvard and beating Tufts in the tournament final, 15-3, as part of a 5-0 weekend in which they won every game by at least eight points.
“Even though we were winning by a lot, I don’t think we ever let it get to our heads,” Colon said. “We never really looked at it like, ‘OK, we’re dominating. We should win.’ ”
The success didn’t stop at nationals, though Dartmouth did suffer a surprising 15-10 loss against Oregon in the third game of pool play. It bounced back with a 15-2 win over Florida in the pool-play finale before sweeping rematches against foes from previous tournaments for the title.
“We had mostly the same starting seven this year, which I think helped a lot,” said Zhu, who will join Werffeli, Lee and coach Bitterman on the Boston Brute Squad this summer. “We were already familiar with the system we run and were capable of making plays that other teams weren’t.”
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.