I played in college and afterwards for several years, until my gigs began to take up too much of my practice time. I have never had as much fun in a team sport as I did those years playing Ultimate.
Tournaments were what it was all about. We’d drive for 5 or 6 or even 10 hours to go to a tournament. Kudos to the team leaders who organized 15-25 crazy, pot smoking, beer drinking wackos to get us to the tournament, complete with custom made team shirts (usually tie-dyed), find us a place to sleep if necessary, and get us all home again, usually in one piece.
Ah, the days of getting horizontal! Coming home with bloody shins, scraped elbows, cuts on foreheads that would form excellent new scars! Mudbowl was the biggest, best, baddest tournament out there, and we’d come home not only battered and bloody, but covered in brown loam. YES! IT ROCKED!
Age and injuries in other crazy sports (snowboarding, rock climbing, trail running, etc.) have taken their toll and I doubt I could do much that I did 20 years ago with the same flair, but DAMN I loved playing Ultimate!
I played many (many) years ago with the San Jose Klingons. At first it was fun, like the pick-up ball games I used to play after school. Later on, the ultimate games turned more serious, and the captain insisted that we run laps and practice coverage. That was it for me, I decided to stick with disc golf after that.
Our practices involved lots of drinking and smoking, but we also did drills and ran laps, practiced both man-to-man and zone defenses, offensive called plays, etc. I still loved it. Especially when we managed to do it right at a tournament and beat the snot out of another team.
The thing was, even when we lost the game, we always won the party later!
Ah, Ultimate… Cigarettes, beer, Tiger Balm, shin splints, sprained ankles, torn rotators, pot… miss it! Hubby used to play at CU Boulder, plus a couple of little local teams.