Hall of Fame Inductee Dante Anderson
GETTING TO KNOW DANTE Dante was born and raised in Toronto and went to UTS high school. Growing up he played hockey primarily playing Junior B for two years. At McGill University he earned his Bachelor of Commerce and began work at Deloitte in back in Toronto. In 1989, just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake, he made the move to California. There, he spent some time working for the Grateful Dead for a few years and then ended up at SEGA making video games, where he met his wife Sarah. Dante is still in California working for Seriosity, a game start-up founded by a Stanford professor, that builds game for the workplace to better engage and motivate workers. Sarah and Dante have been married since 1998 and have two children: Macy (10) and Max (21 months).
PLAYING CAREER Beginning Dante started playing Frisbee Football
on the McGill campus in the Fall 1982. Some American dude named Paul Stern said they were playing a real sport call Ultimate. We laughed. Next thing he knew, he was playing on the McGill team with Paul, Willie Herndon, Marcus Brady et al. They played in the Fall series in the North East region. The first game they played was against Paul’s buddies, the University of Vermont team. They beat them soundly and told them to bring cleats the next time they went down. In the summer of 1983 he met the legendary Toronto Disc scene at their Beaches pick-up Ultimate game: Bob Blakely, Les and Chris Lowcock, Peter Turcaj, and of course the legend, Ken Westerfield and many, many others. he played for McGill in the Fall of ‘83 and then in early 4 tried to put together a bid for the Worlds in Lucerne, Switzerland. They made it to Switzerland with the
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now-infamous 9-man crew and thus the first Canadian National team was born. The National team would have an enormous positive impact on the sport creating intense inter-city competition as the winner of odd-year National titles organized the World team. They finished a respectable 7th in that tournament and beat the higher-seeded, and better manned British team which earned Canada respect on the World scene.
World Dante played on the National team
1984 through 1992, was the team’s Captain in 1988 in Belgium. They won silver in Utsunomiya Japan in 1992. He played on the Canadian Masters Team in 1994 and 1996 winning silver both times. He also was a key member of the Guts team at the WUGC earning a couple of silver medals. These Canadian National teams played with good spirit, were friendly and were ready for fun, frivolity and friendship on the social side of the tournament; and yes, they often did try to ‘win the party’ with some success. The teams brought together great rivals and friends in a way that was good for the
sport. Back in the day Dante’s arch-nemeses were the Calgary leaders, Rick Collins and Grant Burns. “They are great guys and remain my good friends.”
Club After leaving the McGill team in ’84,
Dante helped establish and captained the Toronto team Darkside which won the first ever Canadian Nationals in 1987 in Ottawa. That team renamed Darkside Goes Metal took the silver in the Nationals the following year. The club team, with Dante as captain, was a regular participant in the US Fall series in the Central region and in 1987 advanced to the Regionals in Columbus, Ohio. In that year, the UPA was going to ban Darkside’s Regionals bid and ban Canadian teams from the Fall series everywhere henceforward because the Flint, MI team complained that they had taken their rightful spot. A reasonable argument as they had finished one position short of the Regionals cut- off. Dante petitioned the UPA to let Canadian teams continue to play by
Ultimate Canada Magazine —
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