“Ultimate Frisbee just had this really competitive nature that I didn’t know it involved,” Flores said. “I really enjoyed it and found out that it was actually a very competitive sport that involved a lot of things that I love about sports. I love traveling to competitions and having intense training.”
Ultimate, created in 1968 by a group of high school students in New Jersey, is a non-contact, self-refereed sport played on a field about the length of a football field. Each seven-player team tries to score by passing a flying disc into its designated attacking end zone. No player can run with the disc.
It wasn’t that long ago that she knew nearly nothing about the sport, but Flores has since gained enough expertise to break it down for a curious reporter. That’s a testament to a dedicated approach to the game that involves video study and extra practice.
There are two main positions – handlers and cutters. Flores has developed into a talented handler, a spot she describes as “like a quarterback on the field who’s going to stay a little bit back, touch the disc more and look to throw deep.”
“The cutters,” she said, “are like your wide receivers running routes, but in a more continuous motion because play doesn’t stop like football.”
Flores said, outside of Hydra games and practices over the past four years, she’s gone to Carr’s Hill Field to throw on her own.
“I also love when a teammate goes and throws with me,” she said, “but especially during COVID when there wasn’t as much that you could do with other people, I learned that if you want to go focus on something yourself, it’s easy to just go do it with a couple of discs and a soccer net.
“I’ll throw 10 in the net, go retrieve them and get them back. Or if I’m working on longer throws, I’ll set up, throw them, mark out the yardage, see how far I was throwing them, and then walk down and throw them back the other way down the field.”
Hydra qualified for the 20-team college club national tournament three times in Flores’s UVA career, including this past spring when it finished in a tie for 13th place.
Flores, a team co-captain in 2023, was a candidate for the Callahan Award, Ultimate’s version of college football’s Heisman Trophy that’s given annually to the best player in the county.
“I think I benefit from being naturally athletic,” she said. “Soccer was always what I was really good at growing up, but I could typically pick up other sports pretty quickly. And I think my skill set from soccer translated well into Frisbee.”
An elite sense of field vision is what the U.S. coaches told Flores they liked about her game during the 200-person tryout for the mixed, open and women’s national teams in November. A month later, she was told she had made the 24-member women’s team.
