Watching the frisbee disc soar in a perfect arc through the air, landing satisfyingly into the hand of his teammate, an ambitious young eighth grader, Andy Zhou, became instantly captivated with the game of ultimate frisbee. Even now, as a senior, Zhou’s love for the sport continues.
Just as the world was coming out of lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhou tagged along with his older brother to a McNeil Ultimate Frisbee game without realizing it would fuel a lifelong passion for the athleticism, camaraderie and sportsmanship the game would bring.
“I think my brother [motivated me] because he made me go to stuff even when I didn’t want to,” Zhou said. “In ninth grade I joined the ultimate club because my brother was a senior captain at the time. Then, I found out there was an ultimate club outside of school called YCC (Youth Club Championships). My brother went to try out and I was like, ‘Wait, can I go?’ He brought me to everything, and then I met people, so I had a reason to stay even when he was gone.”
As Zhou grew more immersed in frisbee, his brother Tony Cao was proud to see his skills developing, sometimes even past Cao’s own talents.
“There were some moments early on, where I thought, wow, Andy could be a takeover player. The defensive positioning, physicality and intensity he played with is something you see typically of a defensive starter on a competitive college team,” Cao said. “I watched him in Colorado run the full length of the field to track down a deep ball against the reigning back-to-back champions, Utah Swarm. The ability to track down deep balls was something I never had in my game.”
Through his brother’s encouragement, Zhou managed to secure a spot in one of Austin’s YCC divisions, the Under-21 team, which helped him hone his frisbee skills and even secure a highly coveted spot in another youth division.
“When I found out there was a club team, I went to a frisbee camp, Texas Ultimate Summer Camp, because it was more frisbee and it was fun,” Zhou said. “That’s when I was truly on my own and met people, not because they knew [my brother], but because I met them. There was a guy there who went to Brown that was the assistant coach of the Under-17 team. He was like, ‘We need you.’ So, I went to their first practice after that, and they said, ‘Okay, we really want you. If you do it, we’ll make you captain.’”
Soon after plunging into this first coaching experience in the summer after his freshman year, Zhou’s Under-17 team had to fight their way through an end-of-season YCC tournament over 1,000 miles away in Minnesota.
“On a normal team, you want 25-ish, that team, we took 12 people to Minnesota, won one game and got 18th out of 20th,” Zhou said. “That wasn’t really a setback, because I knew from the start that it wasn’t gonna be great. My frisbee identity wasn’t just based on the Under-17 team, so that failure didn’t bother me as much.”
By keeping his spirits high even through losses, Zhou looks back on his coaching experience as one that helped him become a better leader in other parts of his life.
“I was learning how to teach people,” Zhou said. “Whatever I did was acceptable, so I felt like I had to be a lot more accountable because there’s no one else to pick up the slack, and that’s just helpful everywhere.”
Zhou thus helped transform McNeil’s ultimate team from a smaller club into a committed team with a more consistent group of players who truly enjoy the sport.
“I think without Andy I wouldn’t be in ultimate frisbee today. He’s built such a strong and amazing culture here that it’s so fun to be a part of the club because I’m constantly growing not only as a player, but as a human,” junior frisbee player Cormac Edmond said. “He’s extremely patient—if it’s near the end of our season but there’s someone that’s just coming into frisbee for the first time, he will still find time to go out and teach them the basics.”
Through Zhou’s natural talent to help people on his team, he was able to feel more confident in his ability to help frisbee progress at McNeil.
“The McNeil team’s a leadership kind of pride, where you’re just creating something,” Zhou said. “Right now, I’m still focused on what I need to do here. I feel like once I’m done, then I can make sure that McNeil will get better. By the end of [this year], I’ll feel good that I’ve taken it from a club that basically didn’t exist to an actual team that can compete for state, because I feel like we can, eventually even without me here.”
However, in the summer before his junior year, Zhou experienced a real setback that threatened the work he put in to build his team—a concussion.
“I was guarding this guy at an adult tournament and we both went up to make a play. He fell behind me, and I fell back and hit my head,” Zhou said. “I wanted to stay in on the play, but they were like ‘You hit your head, you should go out.’”
Later on though, Zhou realized just how discouraging the after-effects of his injury could be.
“When I had to go to school I definitely felt it—it was the lights and the big sounds,” Zhou said. “You can’t do anything with a concussion; you shouldn’t do anything physical, you shouldn’t do anything hard mentally, so you can’t do sports or academics.”
After two weeks of recovering from the injury, Zhou came back to find his team had fallen apart in his absence, leading him to work harder to make sure the team could survive without him.
“I couldn’t bring the energy to practice. Since I was basically the coach, the practices sort of weren’t fun. A lot of people stopped showing up, so the team shrunk down in size, which wasn’t great,” Zhou said. “I feel like the core is a lot steadier now, [but] it’s never gotten up to 40 people at a practice, and the girls team has never happened yet. I nominated people to be captains this year, then I’ll show them everything I did so they can be ready to go next year—the whole year is training for when I’m gone.”
In time, the team was rebuilt, and the effort Zhou put into McNeil’s team was able to pay off, giving Zhou the motivation to keep striving for excellence in himself and his teammates.
“I do feel very satisfied about what I’ve done because you see rewards to it,” Zhou said. “At state, the top seven teams all had coaches except for McNeil who finished 5th. That was fun because we did it ourselves. There’s people I’ve coached playing now in college—I’ll see people actually do what I’ve coached after years of trying to be patient and I’ll be very proud.”
Now, Zhou hopes the time he took to not only learn how to play frisbee, but to coach it, will help him continue the sport after he graduates in May. His next goal is to play in a professional frisbee league such as the United Frisbee Association or USA Ultimate.
“Once college applications are done, it’s frisbee lock-in season,” Zhou said. “I’m going to start going to the gym so that I can get ready for a lot of top-team tryouts. The big one is the Under-20 national team, where you apply every two years. If you get invited to a tryout then you compete with 100 of the best under-20 players in the nation, and then they take the top 30 to 40 for the teams.”
In addition to his personal hopes for the sport, Zhou feels that his ambitions toward frisbee also stem from an appreciation for the possibilities the sport has to offer everyone, not just him.
“There was a senior girl my freshman year who made the UFA team for girls and played in Poland for the World Championship, that just sounds dope,” Zhou said. “There’s mutual respect because it’s a tight knit community, and then you get small sport vibes; most of the national championships aren’t in a stadium, but on a hill, so everyone lines up on the hill [to watch].”
As Zhou looks to build a future in frisbee, whether he makes it professionally or joins an elite college team, he feels that he will keep learning and having fun as long as he can play what he loves.
“I think frisbee is a great sport. It’s a way to meet people, have fun. Everyone that does frisbee isn’t in it for the money,” Zhou said. “There’s a problem with certain sports where people get really good so they can get into college and then stop, but everyone in ultimate frisbee is in it for fun.”
