Growing up, Leah Roche was a soccer player. The Wilmette native played all the way through her junior year at New Trier and was ready to play club while at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. But that plan changed in the winter of her freshman year.

“Soccer inside is super not fun so I started playing frisbee and it’s huge at Carleton,” Roche said. “Everybody gets a frisbee when you come to Carleton.

“I started playing on a team that was really lowkey and I played that through my freshman year. A lot of my friends were playing frisbee so it seemed like something I could get good at quickly. It’s one of the few sports where you can start playing in college and play at a very high level.”

From that first day of frisbee grew a love for a sport that saw Roche just complete her collegiate career by being named the first-ever Division III Women’s National Player of the Year, all after helping lead her team Carleton College – Eclipse to its second consecutive Division III national title in 2017.

“This year we wanted to focus on our fundamentals,” she said. “We knew we weren’t going to play really pretty frisbee but we wanted everyone to catch and throw. Last year we had a really good top half of our team and underdeveloped bottom half, so our goal this year was to spread that out a little more because we lost a lot of top players from last year.

“I was pretty surprised in that I’m not the best player in D III women’s ultimate but I’m also lucky to have a really good team surrounding me. I was initially surprised and couldn’t really believe it. I was able to win the award because I got to play with such great players.”

Unlike, say men’s or women’s basketball, football, volleyball or soccer, ultimate frisbee isn’t an NCAA sport, so everything is run by the members of the club under the sanctioning body of USA Ultimate. Ultimate frisbee is such a big thing at Carleton, Roche says, that some students even come to the school just to play on the frisbee team. Carleton is the only school in the country to have teams at both the Division I and Division III levels for both men and women. 

Usually two main differences separate the teams: experience and opponents. The women’s Division I team, Syzygy, often has players who are more experienced and will face teams such as Stanford, Texas and Ohio State, while eclipse, the Division III team, will play schools such as St. Olaf, Williams and Wesleyan.”

“It’s not like an A and a B team,” Roche said. “Once you’re on a team, you’re on a team for however long you’re in school. I tried out for Eclipse my sophomore year and knew for the next three years I’d be on Eclipse and wouldn’t try out for Syzygy.

“You can move up (to the other team) but people don’t really want to because you’re on your team for a year and it’s all your friends. The positives are it’s not a lot of movement so you won’t lose a lot of your top players to the top team and you don’t need to try out for the top team every year. It creates a cohesiveness, team community.”

Roche, who plays the handler position, really burst onto the scene her senior year. After taking a backseat to many of the upperclassmen last season, she was looking forward to helping the team through a rebuilding year as a senior captain. That, however, didn’t end up coming to fruition as Eclipse, after qualifying for the National Championships by winning its regional, went 3-0 in pool play and moved to the championship bracket as the three seed. After easily dispatching st. Olaf in the quarterfinals, Eclipse defeated Puget Sound 15-12 and Wesleyan 13-10 to win its second title in as many years.

With her collegiate playing career over, Roche now embarks on a different journey, one that sees her in the journalism field. She’ll join some of her family next month when she moves to Minneapolis to get her career started in the public radio or nonprofit world. 

That’s not so say she won’t be giving up throwing around the disk anytime soon though.

“There’s a lot of ways to do that in both Minneapolis and Chicago,” Roche said. “In Minneapolis, specifically, there are club teams at a bunch of different levels, fall league and pickup. It’s pretty easy to play in most cities, you just have to find a good group.”

And what team couldn’t use a National Player of the Year on its roster?