Kaitlynne Roling ’20 stumbled into Ultimate Frisbee. It wasn’t her first choice of sport. “When I came to the UW, I wanted to try out for club soccer,” she says. “But I didn’t make the team. I went to the rugby tryouts, as well, because I wanted to keep playing a sport. Finally, I went to the Ultimate Frisbee tryouts, and they took me. It was all very happenstance.”
Happenstance has turned into a career. Roling plays Ultimate Frisbee professionally, as a member of the Seattle Tempest, a team that she helped win two championships in the last three years — including the 2026 Western Ultimate League title in June. See how happenstance guided Roling to a Frisbee career.
What brought you to UW–Madison?
I grew up in Madison, so it was where I wanted to go. Also, I had a scholarship — the Mercile J. Lee Scholarship, though at the time they called it a Powers-Knapp Scholarship. But I wanted to go to a big school, and Wisconsin was my home, so it was an easy choice.
How did you get interested in Ultimate Frisbee?
Madison has a rec league called MUFA [the Madison Ultimate Frisbee Association], and I joined a rec team the summer before college. And when I didn’t get onto the UW club soccer team, I went to Frisbee tryouts. The UW has two teams, Bella Donna, which is the A-team, and Atropa, which is the B-team. Bella almost didn’t take me, but there was a person I’d gone to high school with, and she said, “She’s an athlete. We should take her.” And that was it.
Your Ultimate nickname is “Buns.” Where did that come from?
In my freshman year, I had my hair in a bun a lot. I have a lot of hair. But also, at football games, [the Frisbee team] would sell food to make money. And one weekend, we were selling buns, and someone came by to take a picture, and I held up the tray and said, “I don’t want none unless you got buns, hon’,” you know, from Sir Mix-a-Lot. No one laughed. But Buns just kind of stuck.
Are there positions in Ultimate?
There are cutters and receivers. Cutters are like receivers in football, and handlers are like the quarterback. I play cutter.
How did you go pro? Is there an Ultimate draft?
We have tryouts. There’s a women’s team in Milwaukee called the Monarchs, in the Premier Ultimate League, and I made that team. I was technically on that team in 2020 and 2021, but that was during the pandemic, and it was a brutal time. Nothing was happening. I really only played for the Monarchs in 2022. In 2023, I moved to Seattle, and that expanded my view of the game, and I learned a lot. I played with a team called BFG.
BFG?
I think it’s from the video game Doom. It stands for Big F-ing Gun. But when I was captain, they said it stood for Buns’ Friends Group. Then I tried out for Tempest, and I made the team in 2024, and we won a championship. I took a break in 2025, because I had multiple concussions, but I’m back in 2026.
That seems like a lot.
There are so many levels of Ultimate. There’s also Team USA — I played Beach Ultimate Frisbee for Team USA last November. And I’m on a team in the [San Francisco] Bay Area. And I coach high school.
Ultimate seems like it fills a lot of your time.
Tempest is a pro team, but we don’t, like, make money. I get paid for a season, but it’s like $50. So I do have a full-time job, too. I work for the League of Conservation Voters, a national climate and democracy nonprofit. I do event logistics. And I do a lot of other things — CrossFit, yoga. They aren’t Frisbee-related, but they are in support of Frisbee. Frisbee isn’t my hobby; it’s my life.
