Our Take on UOAgate and Some Exciting Announcements

Alright, we’ve been holding off on speaking our piece when it came to this whole catfight between the UPA and UOA until everyone who wanted to talk to us had spoken with us. Apparently, the New Hanover County Parks and Rec people have nothing more to say and neither does Gerics. Although, it appears that he’s still stewing on the whole situation. He’s just doing it elsewhere on the internet.

UOAgate – A Timeline

So, our fiancé brought up to us that this whole mess is pretty confusing, especially if you don’t know what is going on/the cast of characters. We realized that was definitely the case with our coverage. So, we’ve decided to take a step back, zoom out and clear the whole situation up a little bit.

• Mike Gerics announces he’s received word that he’s been suspended by the UPA for a full year, blames George Mason.
• Shippensburg Ultimate’s coach, Jonathan Hoffman, lets us know that the sanctioning for this weekend’s 8s has been revoked. Initial scorn points towards the UPA.
• UPA releases public statement. Which includes blame shift to the former 8s organizers about sanctioning being gone.
• Speculation now swirls about any hope for sanctioning to return.
• Gerics enlightens all to the requirements of sanctioning coming back. He believes the requirements to be asking too much.
• We receive a brief and mostly uninformative e-mail from New Hanover County Parks and Recreation department. However, it does include pictures of the damaged field and a list of those affected by the damage.
• We speak to the UPA and to George Mason about their respective roles in the whole mess. Neither have much to say, however we discover GMU has nothing to do with the incident.
• We are now waiting to either be contacted back by Gerics or to hear more from NHCPRD.

Hopefully that will help clear up everything that’s been going on.

The only way we see more information getting added to this is if Gerics decides to talk to us about his side of the story, if NHCPRD returns our e-mail after our initial contact on Friday or if the UPA decides to open up the process by which one gets punished into Double Secret Probation.

UOAgate – The UPA and George Mason Speak

For a timeline of UOAgate, click here.

We just spoke with Chuck Menke, head of communications in Boulder, and a George Mason representative. While appreciative of them both calling us back, we were a little disappointed to hear that the UPA and George Mason had no further comment on the whole situation.

“For right now (our public statement) is going to be our public comment on the situation,” Menke said. “Outside of the public statement that we just made, we don’t have any plans (to make any further statements). We thought we addressed the matter as well as we could.”

The George Mason spokesperson took a similar approach. Telling us the following.

“The only thing I really wanted to say is that George Mason talked to everyone and we will not be getting involved with this message board banter back and forth,” he said.

Furthermore, it appears that GMU is even less involved that most would have originally thought, including Gerics himself.

“No official complaint has been made to the UPA,” GMU said. “I spoke briefly with them but I was told they cannot do anything with my situation until I file a formal complaint. I have not done any of that yet and I’m still deciding on whether or not to. I’m trying to work the situation out with Mike on the side, separately, not through the message board.”

The spokesperson wanted to very clear on one point.

“The incident that happened with George Mason, is unrelated to Mike’s suspension,” he said.

It appears at the moment, that most of this is probably going to fizzle out while only minor issues, such as Gerics having some more animosity towards the UPA and the missing sanctioned games for upcoming 8s attendees, will linger.

We’re still hoping that Gerics e-mails us so that we can get his side of the story and we’ll be sure to let you know when we hear back from the Parks and Rec department. Until then, isn’t the Ultimate world a strange one?

UPA Public Statement – http://www.upa.org

UOAgate – What We Know So Far

A photo of the aftermath of the February 13th-14th UOA 8s. Photo courtesy of Tara Duckworth.

For a timeline of UOAgate, click here

You didn’t think that we were actually going to go through with this whole “UOAgate” thing did you? If we’ve learned anything from professionals journalists all over the world, it’s that this is the only way to possibly handle this situation.

Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to speak with just about anyone regarding the situation. We reached out to the UPA, Gerics, George Mason Ultimate and New Hanover Parks and Recreation Department, of those four, only George Mason Ultimate and NHPRD have contacted us back.

Unfortunately, we were at work when GMU’s representative called us. However, he seems willing to conduct some kind of interview and help us all get to the bottom of this.

The entire UPA offices seemed like they were cleared out by 3:00 this afternoon. We probably shouldn’t be too surprised by this, considering these are people who are professional Ultimate frisbee-type people. It would be a little ludicrous to think they would still be in their offices at 3:00 on a Friday.

We e-mailed Gerics and he has yet to respond. Perhaps we can get his whole side of the story from RSD but we’re hoping that we can have a little bit more in-depth/mature discourse if we’re talking to him one on one.

Anyway, the above picture and the one below were provided to us by Tara Duckworth from the NHPRD and she says that they are pictures of the damaged fields after the weekend of play. This is her full e-mail to us.

I am attaching pictures of the field conditions after the tournament.  Unfortunately, these fields are heavily used by  youth and adult soccer and adult league ultimate.  All of these leagues are now displaced for the early Spring season due to the damage.

Here is the other picture she sent us.

Photo courtesy of Tara Duckworth.

We’ve got some follow up questions in to Tara and hopefully this will help us figure out NHPRD’s role in this whole mess. Although, we wouldn’t expect to be hearing from her or anyone else in the department until the weekend’s over. Hopefully, between now and then we can get in touch with Gerics or George Mason.

We’re going to keep from offering our opinion on the situation at the time being because we feel that there are large pieces of the puzzle missing. Here are some questions that we’d love to have answered, be it by Gerics, the UPA or anyone in the whole world.

• Was Gerics warned to leave the fields in playable condition, if so, why did he let play continue?
• What kind of vote/trial/process was taken in order to determine that a year-long suspension was a punishment that fit the crime?
• Does the rocky relationship between Gerics and the UPA have anything to do with this quick and harsh punishment? Or is this a precedent that the UPA is setting? (In terms of, if you’re operating under the UPA’s name you better mind your P’s and Q’s/keep your pants on (Ego? Zing? Too Soon?))
• What sort of retribution was the NHPRD looking for when they contacted the UPA?
• Where does George Mason fit into all of this?

The list could go on for quite some time. For now, it’s clear that we may never get to the bottom of this, but that certainly won’t stop us from trying. Ultimate’s only investigative journalism team, at your service!