I can't but shake the feeling that European women's Ultimate is not doing well. For years we had problems getting them to play, but they showed up anyway. However, this year there are 3 instances that make me think... hmmmm... are female Ultimate players becoming extinct?

1. The European Championships Beach Ultimate could not find 6 countries that could field 9 women to play in France this year


2. Wonderful Copenhagen Ultimate, spring's biggest tournament, will not see any women participating this year


3. Bar do Peixe, one of the most female friendly tournaments in Portugal, had more than its fair share of women canceling this year.

Are European female (Beach) Ultimate players an endangered species? I hope not! Look at what the alternative is:

Games are more fun if there’s something on the line like a cup of beer. Gatorade can be substituted for beer. Boxed wine can be substituted for Gatorade but nothing can replace common sense.

Cups on Sticks - Secure two three-foot durable plastic sticks into the ground a disc-and-a-fist length apart with plastic cups overturned on top of them. Set up another pair directly across about 30 feet away. Two teams of two take turns throwing a disc to try to either knock the cups off the opponent’s sticks (1 point per cup) or get the disc through the sticks cleanly (2 points). If you knock a cup off an opponent’s stick but the cup is caught before it hits the ground you get no points. However, it must be caught one-handed, as the other hand must be holding a beer. Game to 11.

Beer Box - Played 2-on-2 or 3-on-3. A small square demarcated by cones or shoes forms the box. The object is to catch the disc inside the box. You have to reset about 20 yards outside of the box before attempting to score. There are cans or cups of beer as the reset markers. To reset and begin play you must first take a three-second sip of beer at the marker. If you finish the beer, your opponent has to run to the cooler to get another one while your team gets a 3-on-2 power play. You score by catching the disc inside the box.

With permission from Tony Leonardo's book "Ultimate - The Greatest Sport Ever Invented By Man" (link to review)

You and a friend and a Frisbee...

“It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.”

-- Thoreau, Walden 1854

What is it about modern culture that makes authorities feel the need to impose a foreign language, way of life and religion on a people that live in communion, unashamedly nude deep in an impenetrable forest? In a culture where no one bothers to keep track of their age, the well intended, but genocidal policies of outsiders have been ravaging western New Guinea’s highland tribes, as they slowly succumb to alien modernization.

One force driving this aboriginal extermination is the frontiersman psychology. Sledding to the Poles, summiting Everest, rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, it’s all been done. We live in an age when uncharted earthbound exploration is virtually at an end, yet I partook in a particularly unique adventure; I taught naked Frisbee to natives who still dwell in the Stone Age. Someone had to do it. (More...)

Only a few people know the real story behind the game... Forget the hippy stuff, Ultimate Frisbee was developed around 300 A.D. in the Aztec province of Yucatan, near the city of Palenque. Ultimate Frisbee (in the Aztec Ul-ta-kool Fusz-bah, literally "gliding death wheel") was used both as a form of entertainment and to settle minor land or mineral rights disputes between Aztec tribes. The teams were typically comprised of slaves, widows, and orphans who played for pitchers of Ouaxchica, a sweet and refreshing Aztec rice drink.

The Aztec kings immediately recognized this peasant sport as a golden opportunity to ruin something good by making it a blood-sport. The "frisbee" was soon serrated and made razor-sharp; the losing team was fed to wild dogs, who were then drowned in lakes, which were then drained; and the frisbee fields were littered with small pieces of metal, chunks of diseased flesh, and swarms of killer bees. These innovations were undone in the 19th century by Lord Shelby Darrow, a noted Aztecologist, who is considered the father of modern Ultimate Frisbee, the step-father of Competitive Shuffleboard and the dead-beat dad of Ultimate Darts.

more... :-)

Beach Ultimate has long got its players from the grass Ultimate scene. There are beach tournaments galore but few leagues. However this is slowly changing. Portugal had the first national Beach Ultimate organization: BUG-P. However a second organization just got started: Associação Paulista de Beach Ultimate (APBU) in Brazil. No grass, just beach :-)

APBU is now organizing the national Beach Ultimate league March - September 2007. The first games will be on Praia do Centro in Peruibe. Here is a picture of the local team "Jararacas Beach Ultimate Team":

Where will the next 'beach-only' Ultimate organization come from? Spain? Italy? New Zealand? US? Mexico? Any bets?

It's pretty amazing that in one of the first stories ever recorded in a book, tossing a disc on a beach gets a mention...

"...and his men beside the break of the sea-beach amused themselves with discs..."

- The Iliad of Homer (Richmond Lattimore transl. Univ. Chicago 1967, Book II, line 773-774)

Thanks to Melissa Clarke and Chad Woods for bring this to our attention :-)

Frisbee inventor Walter F. Morrison test flies a re-issue of the Pluto Platter Frisbee disc Thursday, Dec. 28, on the beach in Carpinteria, California. The original Pluto Platter Frisbee disc, designed by Morrison, made its debut in 1957.

link

It is a common claim made by Ultimate Frisbee players that ‘anyone’ could play the game. However Andrew Thornton, a long time Ultimate player, has published research that shows that Ultimate players struggle over their (athletic) embodiment and identity. His research shows that although Ultimate players reject and limit identifications with dominant sporting ideals they also continue to embrace some of their qualities. This process of identification suggests that maybe not ‘everyone’ will be able to become part of the Ultimate community...

Interested in reading more? Here is the published chapter (.pdf) of his PhD thesis. This chapter was originally published in 2004 by Belinda Wheaton (Ed.) in Understanding Lifestyle Sports: Consumption, Identity and Difference, London: Routledge, 175-196.

If you want to know more about Andrew, here is the link to Andrew's homepage

Zeka, one of the Beach Ultimate players in Palmela (Portugal) recently got himself a new tattoo:

I think it is cool!

If you know of others that have (beach) Ultimate Frisbee tattoos, send them to patrick@beachultimate.org and we'll start a collection here on the site.

There is lots of stuff going on on the beaches around the world. In Portugal last weekend there was the 10th edition of the Bar do Peixe tournament, Wildwood in New Jersey is aiming to have 196 (!) teams this year, and in Belgium there are 2 new Beach Ultimate tournaments this year... We need more people writing reports, uploading pictures and videos...

Who wants to blog twice or 3 times a year on the BULA Blog? Contact me at patrick @ beachultimate.org if you are interested.

(This is a reprint of the article that appeared in 'Roar' the Paganello magazine)

You‘ve heard of Web 2.0? What about Beach 2.0?

The World Wide Web (the name almost sounds old) is, or was, a network developed and run by ‘techies’ (in the broadest sense of the word). To make anything available on the WWW you needed to have at least some knowledge about server configuration, FTP, and of course HTML.

A few years ago this started to change and it became much easier for non-techies to publish pages and communicate on the web. Blogs led the way… Simply put, blogs are like high tech diaries with picture and video possibilities. The big difference is that everyone can find and read them. (A type of exhibitionism that seems to fit well within the Ultimate community: a search on Google for “Ultimate Frisbee” + “Blog” revealed 1.000.000+ entries! :-)

The media took notice of the rising popularity of blogs and soon the term “Web 2.0” was coined. Yet Web 2.0 is much more than blogs. Take Wikis for example (or is it Wiki?). Wikis allow anybody to publish content on the web and others to collaboratively modify this content. Wikipedia - the people’s encyclopedia - is a huge success (the 18th most popular website in the world).

The recently launched Wikibook of Ultimate Games and Cheers (WUGC) is another worldwide collaboration. This time to create a digital book full of cheers, photos, games, and ”after game” tips. This was not possible a few years ago and will certainly have an influence on the evolution of Beach Ultimate.

I won’t go into why I think Beach Ultimate will evolve differently from grass Ultimate, but no one can deny it is a young sport and is still developing its roots. The very first Beach Ultimate tournament - Death on the Beach in Texas -was only 20 years ago. Paganello, the longest running tournament in the world, started a few years later in 1989... Two years later, the world wide web was born….

In “Beach 1.0” all tournaments had a website (usually run by one of the techies) as well as a mailing list. This was a great way to get the ball rolling, and I can’t imagine running a tournament without it, however technology has evolved and we have now entered the era of Beach 2.0. Power to the players!

Blogs, wikis, photo sharing websites, you name it… More and more players are publishing online and contributing to the growth of Beach Ultimate. Take for example “Vamos a Parlee Playa con Pedro”, a short film by the Mauvaises Herbes Ultimate Club. The video was created as a bid for the Parlee Beach Ultimate Tournament in Canada. After showing the video to the tough judges of the Parlee Beach registration and castration committee, they put the video on video.google.com. This was free and only a few minutes of work. Now players from around the world can enjoy Beach Ultimate silliness from Quebec City by simply searching for “Beach Ultimate” on video.google.com.

Gotta love technology… :-)

Here is another example: Using the free Google Earth download, and no programming, an online fly-over of the Guarujá beach in Brazil was created in less than 10 minutes. Now everyone can see where the World Championships Beach Ultimate will take place in 2007 :-)

The Beach Ultimate community is taking advantage of Web 2.0: almost half of the tournaments have published their Google Earth locations on the BULA site. It is really cool to see all the beaches where people play: the beach of Magic Maggia in Switzerland, Acapulco, Guarujá, New Zealand, you name it.

It will be interesting to see how Beach Ultimate will co-evolve with new Web 2.0 applications such as Flickr, 30boxes, Ning, and Platial. There are over 10,000 Beach Ultimate players worldwide, 52 tournaments, and a hand full of Beach Ultimate leagues. All of us play hard, play to win, and always have fun. At the end of each game, we get together with our opponent to celebrate the game just played. With new technologies, anyone, in their own creative way, can show how they feel about the sport, and share this with like-minded people. With the help of Web 2.0, Beach Ultimate can be a worldwide sport where the rules are clear and the spirit doesn’t get lost.

Share the joy and keep ‘em flying!

Here are the five oldest Beach Ultimate tournaments in the world:

• 1986: Death on the Beach, Texas (later became TBUF)


• 1988: West Palm Beach, Florida (later became Battle on the Beach)


• 1989: Paganello, Italy (oldest still running tournament)


• 1991: Wildwood, New Jersey


• 1992: Britannia, Ottawa

I just found out, to my great horror, that the UPA has trademarked the phrase “Spirit of the Game”. This must be the greatest oxymoron in Ultimate history!

Discraft resellers have already been told that they can not put the phrase “Spirit of the Game” on discs unless they have approval from the UPA. That is insane! Is this Ultimate? Is this the Spirit of the Game?

I have asked the UPA for clarification but so far they have failed to respond to my emails. Is this patent trademark worldwide? Can you actually do this? Take a phrase that has been used since the beginning of the sport and trademark it? What about the name Ultimate? Is the next step to trademark our game and we all pay the UPA for playing it? Or lets trademark the stall count: stall one™… stall two™… stall three™...

I can't believe this. I am shocked!
---

UPDATE: reponse from Sandie Hammerly (Executive Director UPA)

The Ultimate Players Association does own the US trademark registration on the mark “Spirit of the Game” (since 1997), as well as SOTG, Ultimate Players Association and UPA.

While I was not a part of the UPA when this process was started, I can assure you that the organization’s goal in doing this was not to keep players and organizers from using the marks, but to protect our sport and players from commercial entities and business who might acquire the mark and prevent us from using it unless a licensing fee was paid…or possibly not at all.

When organizers have asked us for permission to use the mark, to the best of my knowledge, we have never said no.

Did you see the news? The BULA beloved Flashflight disc got an award ;-)

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/PCWorld/story?id=1485159

"Really Useless Product Award: Nite Ize's Illuminated Flying Disc takes the prize. Imagine a Frisbee with LEDs that costs $20. Now if it only came with a built-in MP3 player… "

—Steve Bass (PCWorld)

I am a 'techy' and love gadgets... but Steve.... have some non-tech fun too...

Flashflights are great at night. Not every night, but when you are with a bunch of friends on a beach. Couple of beers (you can still do that in Europe ;-) and a Flashflight... I think it is worth $20!

And you know what? When you layout to catch the disc in the sea (a wonderful feeling you should try some time)... the disc still works. Something you can't say about most MP3 players...

Being Dutch and living in Portugal is probably not the same feeling as being a man in a woman's body but it is an interesting experience nevertheless ;-).

I grew up with Nordic Ultimate: grass, field shortages, rain, indoor season... The spirit was almost always great but when there were ever any spirit problems on the field they were dealt with more a 'rational' approach. Less 'passionate'. This is how grass Ultimate developed from the start. The first Ultimate evangelists came from the US, Canada, and Western Europe. The style of play, the way most Ultimate players behave (good and bad) is very Western, very Nordic. Intellectual hippy-jocks, someone ones told me...

Beach Ultimate will eventually have more Latino players than Nordics. It is inevitable. In Portugal we play 52 weeks a year on the beach. The lifestyle is more inviting to go to the beach and play disc. The future World Champions will come from the relatively insignificant Ultimate countries such as Spain, Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico or Portugal (no offense to all the already existing great players/teams in those countries!)

How will the spirit evolve? No doubt the beach puts players in a great mood. The sea is calming, that sand feels great to walk on, and it seems the disc was made for the beach... :-) Mix in the more relaxed attitude towards life and a bit of hot Latino spirit and what will we get? Will the future spirit of Beach Ultimate be like a Mexican spicy dish? A Brazilian samba? Or more balanced Chinese sweet and sour soup with distinct Ultimate overtones?