Ultimate frisbee is a serious sport, who knew?

It all began last week. I stepped out onto the field where there were people warming up to play Ultimate Frisbee. I walked over to be one of them. Little did I know how serious they are about their sport.

I’ve played Ultimate in high school plenty of times. After the swim season ended, ultimate was all we played during 6th period. The teams were about 20 on 20 and we played on a huge soccer field wearing some sort of a combination of Rainbow sandals, running shoes, metal cleats, and bare-feet. It was Fallbrook, give us a break.

Just as a quick note, I do deserve a small break for my ignorance. My idea of intramural sports was inter-tube waterpolo. Swimming around in a pool with plastic life preservers around your waist didn’t sound so hardcore to me. I guess intramural sports run the full gamut of intensity, and I picked an upper tier one.

I was in for a rude awakening Monday last week. Little did I know that we’d be actually practicing good throwing technique and things like offensive formations. Seriously, everything that a sport like football or basketball has in terms of strategy, Ultimate has parallels for it all. It was pretty evident last week that the majority of my team were freshman who had about as much experience as myself. The few retuning players we had were noticeably better than the rest of us. Our first game, we got beat pretty badly. By half-time the score was 7-0. Hope was not lost though, at the end, we had scored a few times for a final of 13-4. Not much of a catchup, but somehting nonetheless.

This Monday was a different story. From the get-go, we realized what our playing style is. We play it slow and don’t rush any decisions (we have a minimum of 10 seconds to make any decision at all). At half-time, the score was 7-3, which was better than the first game, but still losing. We played an awesome second-half in which I pulled the frisbee onto the next field. Embarrassing to say the least. But I scored, so maybe that makes up for it. By then end, the final score was 15-13, us. That’s right, we came back and went back and forth twice to grab the win. Victory is sweet, but even sweeter when you have to work for it.