Sas Peters, a 66-year-old Amagansetter, won his sixth major Ultimate championship — his second as an over-50 great grandmaster — in the Sarasota Sunset tournament, “the most prestigious of the fall season,” last month. As he has grown older, he has persuaded the Ultimate Disc sanctioning body in the United States, USA Ultimate, to add three divisions of play, for over-40, over-50, and over-60 male and female competitors.
He played with Surly, a Minneapolis-based team that Peters said was “without question the best in the world.” It had tapped him, he said, as “the one out-of-region player they were allowed to add to their roster in Sarasota.” Surly, without Peters in the lineup, won the World Flying Disc Federation’s great grand masters’ championship in Limerick, Ireland, in July.
With Peters playing on offensive and defensive lines, Surly swept through six games in the Florida tourney, contested at Lakewood Ranch in Sarasota, to finish at 26-0 for the season. “It was an honor to be invited to join them,” Peters said.
“We had some incredible games and comebacks. You know, when you’re down by two or three goals near the end of an Ultimate game that’s played to 11 or 12, you’re essentially cooked — the odds are great that you won’t catch up — but we came back twice in those situations, in the quarterfinals and in the final, thanks to our defense and in particular to my old buddy Russ Adams, who’s all of 5-6 but can leap.”
Surly came back from 9-11 to beat Devolution 12-11 in the quarters, and “in the final, against the best team from the other pool, Hurt, from North Carolina, we came back from 8-10 thanks to three great defensive plays that caused turnovers to win 11-10.”
With the score knotted at 10-10, Adams, a teammate of Peters’s on the dominant New York City team, Cigar, which won a world masters championship in 1999, “jumped three feet in the air to snatch the disc from a guy who was 6-2 and dumped it off to his teammates, who worked it up the field for the championship-winning score. Russ was unbelievable. He’s the defensive star, even though he’s almost 60. He’s lightning fast, anticipates perfectly, cuts off the angle of his receiver, and makes diving steals. It’s one thing to block a pass, but another to dive and catch the disc. It’s like an interception in football, a much harder play.”
It was the sixth major championship for Peters, who has five world titles to his credit.
“All of these senior divisions, you know, began right here in East Hampton,” he said. “We’re in our 22nd year.” Held on the John M. Marshall Elementary School field, “our tournament, which has become one of the premier tournaments in the United States, is always the weekend before Memorial Day. We had the first grandmasters tournament in the country in East Hampton, and the first great grandmasters tournament too.”
Moreover, at Peters’s request, an over-60 Legends division was added to USA Ultimate’s sanctioned competitions last year. His Mid-Atlantic team contended in that tourney, which also was played in Sarasota, but finished fourth. “Frankly,” he said at the time, “we weren’t quite up to it. The Polo Grounds, where we played, is a giant, open space with the wind flying in off the water. You want short, short, short passes, not long ones . . . we made maddening mistakes.”
So far, he said, the World Flying Disc Federation, the European-sanctioning body, “hasn’t recognized a Legends division, but I’m talking with them.” He added, in signing off, that for the second year in a row his open-division team, a team made up largely of 20-year-olds, had won the Westchester County summer league.
