Slowly but surely the Asia Pacific is waking up to Beach Ultimate.

Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines have been on the forefront for many years, but Singapore started with a Beach Ultimate tournament last year and now Hong Kong is doing it too.

This is great news for the 1st Asian Championships Beach Ultimate that will be held in 2009.

In the meantime, if you are in Hong Kong on Sunday 7 September, go play!

Some communication went on recently about the size of tournaments. Of course size doesn't matter, but we all still want to know who has the biggest.

According to Tony Leonardo:

Last year Paga had 48 open teams, 32 mixed, a gaggle of womens teams and juniors teams. Paga is 5 on 5 and team sizes tended to be larger than 4-on-4 Wildwood by about 5-6 people per team. So maybe team sizes of 15 and multiply that by 110 and you get 1650 or so Wildwood had 300+ teams this year, but lets estimate that about 50 of those teams double up and play in 2 divisions. So lets say 250 teams with about 9 peeps on each, so 2250 folks, all of them, coincidentally, teenagers from Philadelphia and North Jersey.

Potlatch this year had 104 teams i think, team size about 20+ so that puts them around 2100? Potlatch is the largest grass tournament in the world, i am pretty sure so Wildwood could be the largest (and fattest) tournament of all?

What about World Club Championships? Is that bigger? Of course that is not an annual event but I wonder how big that one was last time. Anybody know?

Erick Fix, a humble handler, cameraman and editor from the North East has used his talent to craft an adrenaline-pumping highlight video of Wildwood. He is calling on you merry folk to make a difference in this crazy mixed-up world. He works for an internet fitness video website and causally asked if he could put together a video for the Wildwood tournament that occurred a few weeks ago (see our coverage here, here, and here). The bosses shrugged and agreed. Little did they know his master scheme to dominate the site with the power of our glorious sport...

Now he is reaching out to the global (Beach) Ultimate community with his plea: his video needs to get more hits than anything else on the site. Currently, the highest rated video on the site is a bodybuilding video....for the love of god...a bodybuilding video. In the name of all that is round and plastic please send this link (http://www.myfitnesschannel.com/on-location.asp?video=27) to all the players you know and watch the great video every day. If not for yourselves, for our sport...

I had seen Ultivillage before and thought it was interesting, but not something to write about on this blog. Ultivillage is a mostly North America focused, grass Ultimate video website. Registered users (a few months ago they had 8106 registered users) can buy DVD's, watch Ultimate TV, and participate in forums.

However, their coverage of the World Ultimate & Guts Championships last week brought international action to people around the globe. Some people had to stay up late, some had to get up early, some had to skip work. All of them enjoyed the live coverage of what was happening in Vancouver. Our friends from Blockstack.tv were the commentators and suddenly it felt much less "North Americany". It felt nice and global (like BULA :-).

The quality of the live broadcast was not always perfect, but perfect enough for me and Sofia to be excited seeing the Open final between US and Canada. We loved it and we did not have to pay for it. It was billed as a $7 event (payable by paypal I think) and I would have paid the money (I saw other games for free and decided it was worth it), but somehow I was never asked for payment. Bonus! :-)

Perhaps a live broadcast is something BULA can have at the ACBU (Asian Beach Ultimate Championships) in 2009, or the World Beach Ultimate Championships in 2011. Ultivillage is bringing Ultimate to the fans, perhaps now they see the international interest they are interested in bringing the beach along... :-)

The collaborative nature of the internet is starting to work its way deeper into the fabric of (Beach) Ultimate. Open Ultimate (www.openultimate.com) is another example. You will find two primary uses for openultimate.com:

1. Locating resources that will help you in coaching Ultimate; and
2. Creating a private online course for you and your team that will help you to create, manage, and disseminate resources to your team, including activities such as journal writing or discussion forums.

The name "openultimate" was chosen because the creator (Dan Cogan-Drew) wants to encourage coaches and players to share their resources (good books, DVDs, websites, blogs, etc., as well as lesson plans and/or drills that they have found useful). They've started it off with an initial assortment to "seed" the ground for continuous and robust contributions by the world- wide Ultimate coaching and playing community.

For any who are familiar with Blackboard, you will find this environment to be very similar. It's built in a free open-source equivalent known as "Moodle". If you are interested in becoming a "site editor" (like a wikipedia editor), or have other contributions to offer, please contact Dan at dan.cogandrew@gmail.com