Many of us have had the experience of being stuck with only 4 players showing up at practice. And what do you do...? You play Double Disc Court (DDC)! It is a great game and lots of fun.

Now the first European Beach DDC tournament is a fact: DDSea-spot on the Westende Beach in Belgium will take place 28 June. Check it out: www.gentlesite.be/seaspot

Wow! Ffindr.com is something that the disc community needed for a long time. A central depository of tournament info, leagues, pickup games for DDC, (Beach) Ultimate, Freestyle, Disc Golf, etc... They work with volunteers around the world to make sure as many disc events are added and the amount of listings they have already is enormous. I have yet to see anything that comes close.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Using Web 2.0 technology anyone can setup a filter to display what they are interested in. Only interested in Ultimate in the Iberian Peninsula? No problem! What about DDC worldwide? Any disc event in Africa? Just 3 clicks away! And still this is just the beginning. You can save filters as an RSS feed so you can immediately see when new events that you are interested in are added.

As if that wasn't good enough, the real beauty comes when you then have webmasters integrate these feeds into their own websites. This is what BULA did. We created a filter to select all upcoming Beach Ultimate tournaments worldwide. Next we saved the filter/RSS feed and then, using some fairly straightforward coding, this feed was integrated into an existing page. Check it out: beachultimate.org/tournaments.html. The same was done on the Portuguese site: bug-p.org/teams.html and I am sure many more websites will follow.

Ffindr.com is like a pot of gold for anyone playing disc sports. Whether you are a player, a webmaster, or a tournament director. You can only gain by going to ffindr.com to add your event, select your event, or promote your event.

Thanks Christian. What you did was long over due!

Dutch Beach culture is mostly limited to holidays and 'strand jutten' (picking up things that wash ashore after a storm). The Crunch Hut tournament in Hargen has been the only Beach Ultimate in Holland (although this year will be their 14th edition!) and until recently the Netherlands never participated at a BULA Beach Ultimate World Championships.

However Beach Fever has struck Holland. They participated at the European Championships Beach Ultimate where they just missed the chance to go to the semi finals and suddenly there are two new Beach Ultimate tournaments planned:

The Texel Beach Tournament 21-22 June: Texel is the biggest island of the Netherlands and it's about a 100 km. north of Amsterdam. The tournament is going to be an open tournament and you can sign up at their website.

The Monsterball Beach Classic August 30-31: This tournament is very close to The Hague and the base of the tournament will be the Bondi beach club.

Hup Holland Hup!

Well the 1st European Championships are behind us and we are left with great memories! The local organization did an exceptional job in pulling this off. It looked and felt big. For very little money everyone got a great player package with a beach chair (with beer holder), lots of flags around, stands for spectators, a great beach, VIP's, parties, etc... It was the most impressive BULA tournament ever!

Soon the ECBU website (www.ecbu2008.org) will have a guestbook where people can leave links to pictures, comments, etc... Until then, here are some of my pictures on Facebook, as well as the final results:

Classification
Pos.	Open	Mixed	Masters
1	Switzerland	Germany	Germany
2	France	Spain	France
3	Belgium	Czech Rep.
4	Spain	Portugal
5	Netherland	International
6	Austria	Belgium
7	Czech Rep.	Denmark
8	Ireland

For the Spirit of the Game award, the new WFDF/BULA SOTG scoring system was used. This system gives 1 point for a normal game and 2 points for an exceptional game. The teams are rated on 8 criteria so a score of 8 is normal and a score of 16 is truly exceptional. After all the games were played, the average score per team was calculated and this was the result:

Spirit of the Game
Pos.	Open	Mixed	Masters
1	Ireland (11.5)	Portugal (11.0)	Germany (11.3)
2	Switzerland (11.4)	Germany (10.3)	France (10.0)
3	Belgium (11.4)	Belgium (9.9)
4	Czech Rep. (10.8)	Denmark (9.8)
5	Austria (10.6)	Czech Rep. (9.7)
6	Netherlands (9.2)	International (9.6)
7	Spain (9.2)	Spain (9.1)
8	France (8.7)

I want to thank all the players, organizers, the volunteers, sponsors, and the city of Le Pouliguen for making this happen. The next National Championships will be the World Championships in 2011. Next year we will send out requests for bids.

BULA and the World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF) have launched a revolutionary new Spirit of the Game scoring system. The system is designed to quickly and accurately determine the SOTG winner while teaching what Spirit of the Game really means.

Maintaining the Spirit of the Game is key for us and having a system that correctly teaches this is very important. It allows for further growth of the sport while keeping the Spirit intact.

The new system got its foundation from the system that BULA launched in 2006. However the system was improved thanks to feedback from the community and the work of Chris Schneider, Christian Jennewein, Dan Engstrom, David Raflo, Kolja Sulimma, Momme Butenschön, Natalie Visser, Patrick van der Valk, Paul Bernier, and Rue Veitl.

Scoring is based on judging Respect, Fairness, Positive Attitude, Emotional Management, Rules Knowledge, and Physical Contact. Teams are also asked to reflect on their own Spirit as that is only fair. To make it easy to adopt we created 3 similar documents:

1. One SOTG scoring sheet on a page
2. Two SOTG scoring sheets on a page
3. Two SOTG scoring sheets plus a goal scoring sheet on the same page

The system was tested at the European Championships Beach Ultimate last weekend and the feedback has been extremely positive. We encourage all tournament and league directors to use this system and get feedback from your players and see what they think about it. We would love to hear what players around the world think of this system. Let us know what you like or dislike!