Former Lady Griz picks up Ultimate

Laura Cote inside Dahlberg Arena was lightning in a bottle, a player defined by her endless energy and smile. She perhaps will be best remembered for everything the box score couldn’t count; the floor burns, the fist pumps, the heart.

So it was no surprise to see a kindred spirit on display Wednesday night at Playfair Park, as Cote transplanted her athletic prowess from the hardwood to her new challenge – learning how to play Ultimate. She was a human grass stain on a windy night, diving and falling all over the field, and even though she slapped the ground when she failed to score a goal early in the contest, Cote cracked a smile shortly thereafter, shedding light on her modest try at a new sport.

“I just have wanted to pick up a new game,” said Cote on starting to compete in Ultimate, only a month after wrapping up her stellar basketball career in the NCAA Tournament.

“I didn’t know if I would be able to play something competitive again for awhile, so it’s been great.”

Cote’s four week journey through Missoula’s hottest alternative sport all started with another former Lady Griz star, Skyla Sisco, who has been encouraging Cote to play for several years. Sisco is a former WNBA player who competes on the Mental Floss Flycoons, the city’s nationally recognized team.

Through watching her on the basketball floor, Sisco says she has always known Cote would be an ideal fit in the city league.

“I didn’t even know her that well,” says Sisco of the recruiting process. “I loved watching her play, she just has always worked so hard, and played with so much heart, giving it 110 percent all the time. And she loves the competitive atmosphere, so I knew she would be great for Ultimate.”

“She’s always been one of my favorite people to play against,” says Cote of playing against Sisco’s exhibition basketball teams her freshman and sophomore seasons. “She’s the type of person athletically and personally that I like to be around.”

While Cote is learning to harness her athleticism into a new sport, she is doing so on a sharp learning curve that includes picking up complicated rules, defensive schemes and throwing fundamentals.

“I’m still learning how to throw,” Cote said with a chuckle, then added, “There’s been a lot of teaching before and after practice.”

In her first-ever game, Cote’s team ran up against Sisco’s city league club.

“Obviously, she was one of the best women out there,” said Sisco. “She had an innate ability to read the disc, and I think that comes from years of playing basketball.”

Johnny O’Conner, a Flycoons’ veteran and organizer of Missoula’s Ultimate spring league, has watched Cote play this season and believes that she will be able to adapt to learning the sport.

“When you have a person like Laura, who’s just a spectacular athlete to begin with, when you watch them and see some little spark in their eye right at the beginning, you know because of their love of athletics they’re going to be able to pick up the complexities of the game a lot sooner,” O’Conner said, adding that Cote’s strong leadership at UM will translate well to Ultimate’s ‘Spirit of the Game’ philosophy, a concept founded on the sport’s self-governed nature as well as a strong team interaction.

That will only come with practice, something that Cote won’t be able to do until she finishes her academic duties in order to graduate with a physics degree in May.

But for the first time in four years, Cote isn’t putting her athletics on display for season ticket holders at Dahlberg Arena, and with overseas basketball out of the picture, Cote says she will continue to try her hand at Ultimate this spring and summer.

“You’re not playing for a crowd, you’re just playing for you, so that’s a fun aspect of it,” she says. “My team is great, I’ll play as long as they let me.”

“She’s exciting to watch, she’s an athlete,” said O’Conner, who says he feels good about the prospects of Cote’s Ultimate future. “It’s super fun to watch somebody who has never played the game before to grasp the sport, and it kind of makes me smile to look at her and say, this is someone who can be really good.”