New Alumni pt 2 Hutch

Continued from the last post - Saying goodbye to the new alumi.

Alec "Hutch" Miller

I’ve played more ultimate with Hutch than anyone else. We were the same incoming class and were both A-team freshmen. He was always naturally a receiver and I was always naturally a handler so he has caught a whole lot of my swill over the last four years.

Hutch was a baseball player in high school and a good one at that so he was always very competitive. One thing that I noticed from our first year was that he was always quicker at picking up the “right” way of doing things. He always ran the right cuts while “God Dammit Pumba!!” was practically our captain’s motto our freshman and sophomore years.

Since then, there isn’t one thing I could point to that he does amazingly, he just does everything well. His method of breaking the mark was pretty consistent: he would pivot really really really fast back and forth for 4 seconds until the mark was thrown off balance or committed high or low and then he would take the other – this aways seemed weird to me, but it worked well for him. Another thing that was unique about his play was the fact that he made a lot of difficult looking catches. I don’t know if this was because all the other receivers were 6’3’’ so our throws were meant for someone with 8 more inches of reach or because we were subconsciously trained to throw trash to him because we knew he would catch it our because he was just making it look hard in order to milk the glory. He was a solid player and that’s all there is to say about that – the last point of nationals vs NC State, 14-13 us, our coach wanted to put me on but I insisted that Hutch play and was 100% certain that we would score. We did, and the last thing I did in my 09 jersey was give him a high five.

I think that Hutch enjoyed college more than anyone on the team. He was a party animal, he genuinely loved his studies, he was an intellectual, he laughed constantly, and he was always down for…well… anything. He greatly enjoyed the people he surrounded himself with. I can’t believe it when I write it, but I have spent 4 spring breaks with him in rented houses on the Texas gulf coast, Jesus Coast as we called it. We have been to an uncountable number of parties together (I don’t think he missed one Ultimate party in his entire career). He was a motivational team leader.

While we didn’t hang out that much outside of a Frisbee setting, I consider him a close friend who I could call on if I was ever in the Tahoe area. He was a great teammate who cared deeply for the good of the team (knowing that sometimes the good of the team included shot gunning 16oz of malt liquor in a hotel bathtub).

4 years, 3 drinking holes, 2 Nationals appearances, 1 very soiled dorm floor.

Oh, and by the way, Best Facile Hair On The Team.