Spanish Beach Ultimate is growing strongly. Each year there are more teams and now they also allow Portuguese teams to enter in their national championships. If they continue their growth like they have in the past, they will be the country to look out for at the 2011 World Championships.

The Spanish Mixed Championships 9-10 May, Lanzarote

Every year BULA plants a Beach Ultimate seed around the world to help the sport grow. It does so by organizing/promoting one special Beach Ultimate tournament per year in an area that has potential.

In 2009, the BULA BUTT moves to the beach of Monster in the Netherlands for the 2nd edition of Monsterball. Last year's edition, organized by Ultimus Prime in The Hague, was a wild success - great competition, teams from 4 countries, and a rockin' party.

With BULA's help Monsterball is going even bigger this year: 32 teams, 8 fields, an under-17 division, and an even bigger, better party.

It is going to be a Monster BUTT! :-)

Check it out: www.ultimusprime.com/monsterball.html

Since last year BULA has been using the WFDF rules with a BULA appendix. This allows all players worldwide to have the same basis to play with (with the exception of the US that uses the UPA rules)

If you want to know how good your rules knowledge is, check out the Rules Quiz at: http://rjhberg.googlepages.com/WFDFQuiz2009.xls

This quiz is in Excel. I recommend you "Enable Macros" when opening. That way the answers can be revealed by clicking on the "Answers" button. If not, you can use the "unhide" function to reveal the answers.

Happy quizzing!

For years we have been thinking about creating a European Beach Ultimate League. However that is not as easy as it seems. There are lots of tournaments in Europe but that is one of the reasons it is hard to organize. Beach Ultimate is still relatively small and players usually only travel to places 1-2 times year. There is a core of players that go to many hat tournaments but 'traveling teams' are few and far between. In addition, adding a series of tournaments will take away from other tournaments as well as dig into the finances of the players.

One interesting thought it to create a ladder league like there is in the UK (www.regionalultimate.co.uk) with one final tournament.

How would that work? I'd love to hear from Beach Ultimate lovers what they think...

The Beach Ultimate community is getting ready for another edition of the largest international Beach Ultimate tournament in the world: Paganello! 120 teams, big parties, new contenders (will the Boracay Dragons make it to the finals?), and lots of other fun things to do. We all hope that the weather will be a bit better this year. Last year's finals were cold and windy.

Here is one report on the tournament from the US:

Disk brings twist to Holy Week in Italy

When most people think of visiting Italy for Easter vacation, rarely do they stuff their suitcases with 40-ounce beer bottles, Spandex and oversized Uncle Sam top hats. But in the case of the American Gladiators, a Chicago co-ed Ultimate team, this is packing protocol. More...