Ultimate Frisbee (And Why You Should Play)
Being a girl of many talents, I run a small zine and play Ultimate Frisbee, among other things. Ultimate is sacred to me--so I feel it necessary to inform everyone possible what an incredible thing this is. You really must play. It's pretty simple, actually. All you need is from eight to fourteen people, a grassy field, and a nice purple frisbee. Nashville has a summer league right now; they play at Vanderbilt University monday nights. However, I'm on an independent team, the Mothers of Extension. I'll tell about us in a minute.
Ultimate is best played on a soccer or football field, preferably fenced in for scoring purposes. Officially, there are two seven-person teams, and if you really want to get structured, you can wear jerseys and have endzones and stuff. We will sometimes play shirts v. skins (fully clothed guys against bare chested dudes. Ironically, I always seem to end up playing on the shirts team.) The two teams--I'll call 'em X and Y--start out on opposite ends of the field, lined up against the fences. Someone on the X team throws off the frisbee as far as he can. Team Y catches/picks up the disc and starts passing it down the field, towards X's fence. When you touch the frisbee to the other team's fence, a point is scores and that game is over. The teams switch sides, and whoever made the last point gets to throw off. It's far more difficult than it sounds. Believe me. Anyhow, this continues until one side gets either 11 or 21 points, or until everyone is so utterly exhausted they just can't play anymore. That's when you visit Revco.
The Mothers of Extension were named by Kaldari, a current Mother, and Noel Rose, our.. um.. frisbee idol. Noel graduated and is now too good to play with the rest of us, but he's on the summer league at Vanderbilt. Anyhow, the team was semi-named after the Zappa group Mothers of Invention. There were originally just about six dudes at MLK that played during lunch every day. Then the rest of us finally realized how incredible it was, and became instant fanatics. I'm the only girl that plays, but haven't received any flack about it. People are realizing it's okay for us girls to play a sport where you have to play hard and you do get hurt. I play just as aggressively as the boys do, if not more so, because I'm smaller and have to. They aren't partial to me in any way. Admitted, occasional flirtation might take place every once in a while, maybe. Rarely. It's very playful, though. These guys are my brothers, I'm just one of them. Now, there are other girls (and dudes too) that don't play or anything, they're just cheerleaders or something. Since they've been deemed cool enough to hang out with us, we call 'em the Mothers' mothers. Mothers' mothers don't come to the games away from school, because they're not Hard Core like us. Besides, I'm sure they have better things to do than watch us fools run around like headless chickens.
As you might suspect, being a true Mother takes passion, dedication, and a little injury. On average, eight or nine people get hurt every time we play. We run into the fence. We slam into each other. We trip and fall. I got hit in the nose with the disc once. We also sacrifice other stuff. During school, we go without lunch so we can practice instead. We play in sweltering heat and humidity, and in extreme cold, when the ground is frozen. The Mothers were once suspended for playing at school during a rainstorm. Really, it's not uncommon to see one of us tromping down the hall barefoot (we always play barefoot), covered in mud from head to toe. We learn to take "war zone" comments in stride. In fact, I wear my dirt and scrapes proudly, because I'm one of the few that experiences the ecstasy of Ultimate Frisbee. If you're not in the game, you're just a spectator, and you're missing out. As one Mother, Kaldari, put it: "I feel more joy and sadness in one game of ultimate than I do in the rest of the day combined." We all love playing, and that love is even greater because of the tribal-brotherhood bond between us all. Okay.. so maybe I'm a little obsessed. But isn't every true athlete? I get such a rush when I give a battle cry and leap to smack the disc out of the air, or fly down the field to catch an impossibly distant throw, or clang the frisbee to that chain-link fence. It's pure joy, and it's worth it all.
--Susie Choate
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