You should get out more

If you want to get a snapshot of ultimate in Australia, have a look at the registration calendar for the Australian Flying Disc Association (you'll need to log in to the website). There's something ultimate related on somewhere in the country just about every weekend and most weekdays. There are coaching courses, admin conferences, clinics, training, leagues and tournaments. There's much more to ultimate in Australia than the weekly league game that makes up frisbee for so many of us. And while it's great that so many people can enjoy ultimate as a casual and accessible team sport, it's worth keeping in mind that we're more than just a bunch of wierdos chasing a frisbee around once a week - we're wierdos with a website and a calendar.

Anyway, the story of this post is that it wasn't always that way. In 2003 I played just about every tournament I could get to (I was even part of a road-trip to Halibut in Brisbane for a weekend) which came in at something like 15 weekends of ultimate. Now, if you played everything within driving distance (i.e. Brisbane) you'd play 40-odd weekends of ultimate a year. And you'd be broke, tired and ridiculously fit.

Back in the day I could always rely on a regular posse of Canberra tournament goers to rustle up a team, some transport and some billets and I could just tag along with them to distant places and tournaments*. These days, however, the players who would normally make up that tournament posse are too busy training for club-level tournaments to get to other events. It's fine for them (and me, since I'm guilty of this) but it's a shame for all the folks who don't get a chance to get dragged along to some random tournament somewhere strange like Albury and get hooked on playing ultimate during the day.

That's why it's so great that new clubs are getting a foothold in Canberra. Clubs like Soma and Anunaki have a real development focus and have been going to a bunch of smaller tournaments around Canberra during the year. With the usual summer crop of hat tournaments coming up, hopefully some of the players driving these clubs get along to some of the great tournaments around the place. And hopefully you go with them. Because tournament ultimate is fun. You meet heaps of great people, get to play heaps of great ultimate, and go to heaps of great parties.

So have a look at the calendar yourself, find yourself a weekend where you're not writing ministerials about prohibited seeds or bleaching the fungus out of your socks, fill up a car with friends and go to one of the many tournaments coming up. It's cheap, suprisingly easy and much better than whatever else you were going to do. Besides, that fungus in your socks will just grow back.


* I do mean "rely". I once literally forgot to go to a selection camp for Worlds, and that's the old fashioned kind of literally. From then on there was always someone delegated to collect me from my house and take me to tournaments. Thanks Adam Mortimer.