Ultimate: World Ultimate Championships 2024

I’ve been home from Australia for a week, which has given me a few days to catch up on sleep and another few days to catch up on my thoughts. If I was smarter I would have written more about the training schedule and process leading up to worlds, how everything worked with my job and with the club season and with my finances. But I didn’t, so all I have to offer is what happened during my two-week stint in Australia.

Brisbane

I caught a direct overnight flight on Friday from Vancouver to Brisbane, which took sixteen hours and consumed two full days due to the timezone shift (as an aside, timezones are my least favourite thing as a software developer, and now I also hate them in real life).

The team stayed in Brisbane for just under a week to practice together and to acclimatize to the harsh Brisbane winter, which is indistinguishable from a nice Vancouver summer. The training camp week was quite fun, and we had plenty of time to be tourists: visiting a koala sanctuary, going to a local climbing gym, riding the ferries on the river, going to a BBQ at the botanical gardens hosted by the local Brisbane mixed team. I liked the city a lot, from the university campus to the bridges to the strange birds everywhere.

Other highlights include the endless and excellent coffee shops in the city. I cannot express how much I enjoyed the coffee shops. They were all so cute and they all had such good coffee and they were truly everywhere. There was not a single day in Australia or even really a single moment where I was without the option to purchase some sort of delightful flat white.

Travelling to the Gold Coast was almost as delightful as the coffee shops. It turns out Queensland has excellent public transit, and we took a train with one connection, which took just under two hours.

The Queensland government also was doing an affordability measure where all transit was 50c a fare. Also they have really excellent river ferries that we took to our practices.

As this is turning into a public transit post, let me also mention that they found my lost phone, which I left on a bus bench, and I was able to get it back before heading to the Gold Coast. So really, rave reviews for Brisbane all around.

Surfer's Paradise

I’m not sure whether it’s better have worlds somewhere fun and beautiful, like Surfer’s Paradise, or somewhere heinous like Cincinnati, mostly because all the fun things you’d do while travelling somewhere beautiful — exploring on foot, hanging out at the beach, drinking and eating at fine restaurants — is not what you do when you’re playing a tournament. The shuttles took us to the fields in the morning, we played, we came back on the shuttles, we did our recovery sessions, and then the sun set at 5:30pm since it was winter. I went to the beach twice the week we were there.

Our apartments on the Gold Coast were extremely excellent, probably one of the nicest places I’ve stayed at all, let alone for a frisbee tournament. It was a stark contrast from sharing a twin pullout couch in Aurora, Colorado, at our last TC tournament. We had a full panoramic view looking towards the ocean and in the morning, the lorikeets would come fly around the balcony. Also, there was a washing machine! Luxurious beyond belief, in other words.

The Tournament

The actual tournament was a ton of fun as both a player and a spectator. It's amazing to play two games of high-level ultimate a day considering the usual schedule is three or four games per day crammed into a two-day span. I wasn't even sore until day four.

We had two friendlies before the tournament, against Singapore and Great Britain, and then we played through our pool over the first few days before moving to pool crossovers and then bracket play. Everything was going well until Colombia stomped us.

Colombia’s a hard team to play because they’re so quick and they have so much chemistry together. On defense, even if we got a block, between the wind and the poach defense set they run it was hard to get any momentum. My line had been connecting well up until that game, but we didn’t manage to convert a single turn.

After that, we had power pools, where we eked out a universe point win against Australia. The power pool game was filmed and is online for anyone to judge, but from my perspective, they were definitely the worse team for physicality we played all tournament, with a lot of late blind bids that injured our players. They were fine in the bronze medal match, so not sure what was in the water for that particular game.

Hot Take Digression

In the spirit of transparency I still think my layout block attempt early in the game kicked off the violence — my old coach told me that there’s no way to cleanly layout around the outside shoulder, and he’s right, but I went for it when I saw the throw go up and then tripped the Aussie girl too, so definitely would take that one back if I could. Again, in the spirit of transparency, I also think the spirit scores for that particular game are pretty funny. We rated them a lot higher for injuring our players than they did for some of our players allegedly saying rude things to them about injuring our players.

I don't mind that ultimate's self-officiated and that we do spirit scores. I think both are kind of great, actually. But I think there needs to be more player protection, especially since this is an amateur non-contact sport and there’s no real avenue to address overly physical gameplay, especially in WFDF. Some of the other games at WUC were also highly physical, way more so than ours, and there should be a system where players causing injury have to sit out or are otherwise penalized.

I’m also inspired to this transparency because I watched the video the Colombian coach posted about the physicality in the gold medal game and I highly approved of the sombre piano music and putting it out there on social media so all us terminally online losers have something to talk about. Anyways.

Back to Frisbee

We lost to the USA team for our second power pool match, which kind of sucked. Unfortunately they were just good and we didn’t play well. The power pool game didn’t matter overall, but it was still a dire warning of things to come.

The quarterfinal game against Germany, though, was a ton of fun: we were playing at the main stadium at sunset, under the lights, with the flags flapping in the wind and the German supporters leading chants. Even if they were cheering against us it was a very cool atmosphere. I’ve watched so much film of the Germans that I kind of feel like we’re friends, a feeling they probably don’t share.

And then semi-finals the next day against the USA also sucked and they beat us fairly handily. Not much to say about that. Playing o-line and d-line are challenging in different ways, but it’s always a bit of a dagger to the soul when you don’t touch a disc during an entire game because you aren’t able to generate turns playing on d-line.

Finally, we had our bronze medal game later that day, which is unfortunately one of the ones that friends and family watched since it was free on youtube. Again, not much to say other than it sucked; it sucks to come fourth, it sucks when the opponent has a full home crowd, it sucks when you don’t feel like you played your best.

After that I got the delightful experience of opening Instagram to distract me from my sorrows only to immediately see a BE Ultimate reel of me getting skyed by a German player on a huck.

Look at that idiot getting dunked on! Oh wait...

So overall: a very fun experience, with two very sad games to end it, and don’t buy anything from BE Ultimate.

What Now

After completing the insane journey home (tournament party → Lime bike ride to the apartment → climb 40 flights of stairs since roommates stole the apartment key fob at the party → uber straight to the airport at 6am → sixteen hour flight (watch all the Lord of the Rings movies + Gladiator) → skytrain home at 8am the same day) I was right back to work on Monday.

A week later, some of the wet noodly-ness and jetlag has disappeared, which is good because regionals with Traffic is next weekend. However, it’s genuinely a blessing to have some more competitive ultimate to focus on coming out of a disappointing tournament performance.

If we make Nationals, that’s in October, and then World Games tryouts is this year. I’m going to try out but if it isn’t my year, this is going to turn into a ski touring blog pretty quickly.

Bonus: Travel Casualties

I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with me this year, but here is the damage from the Australia trip:

• - visor flew off and drowned in the Brisbane river
• - phone was almost lost forever except for the kind mercy of the Brisbane transit lost and found
• - singular shoe fell out of bag, was unfairly mocked by everyone until I recovered it a day later from the lost and found, had to walk on the sidewalk barefoot
• - accidentally washed my passport when I got home

This adds to the running total:

• - expensive swimsuit thrown away by housekeeping in Corvallis
• - booked the wrong dates for US Open (why would a tournament start on Friday?!)
• - left glasses in work trip rental car
• - replacement glasses stolen twice (!!) from apartment lobby immediately after being delivered

It is a difficult and harrowing life I lead, and I am an innocent victim of ferries, washing machines, strange apartment thieves, etc etc. I would say I have too much stuff, but based on my current trajectory, that’s not going to be a problem for long.