Twas the Night before Worlds...

...yeah I'm not going to do a whole night before X-mas thing, that'd be weak.

However, I am fairly stoked about this whole Vancouver thing and I leave tomorrow. I'm probably gonna write a fair amount while I am there. I'm stuck in Vancouver airport from like 2am to 530am waiting for a rental car so I'll have some time. I'm thinking of covering a bit of everything outside Open for the first few days. Catch Juniors, Women's, Mixed and Masters before bracket play, yikes thats a lot. Actually to be totally honest, I have never seen Furious or Sockeye play in real life so I might just have to watch Open the whole time. We'll see.

Anyway, so I was packing and I couldn't help but feel a little fearful. I'm sure I'm gonna sound wayy weak when I say this, but I've been looking forward to this thing for a long time. I can remember watching score updates online during the Finland games and I can also remember thinking, "Wow, what an incredible experience that would be to watch". So now I find myself 4 years later and I leave tomorrow. Holy shit, are you serious? I'm not even playing and I'm nervous.

Then I also thought, now I remember why I got into this whole nerdy fan business in the first place. I can actually retrace every step to the very beginning and deduce how I came to be such an avid follower of this game. In putting jersey after jersey into my suitcase (in the hopes of trading off a few) I couldn't help but walk down memory lane and I thought I would just talk a little bit about where I came from and how I came to write about our sport.

Infishiation

My story of ultimate begins with my first year of college. I was a total nobody in high school so when I got to college I went out for everything. Student council, Programming crap, all that weak shit and I hated it. I also had a long distance girlfriend who was a waste of space. Bottom line, I didn't do much cool shit freshman year of college outside school and work and I didn't make too many friends. I spent the summer alone in San Diego and I remember telling myself, "I need to find something fun to do".

Then came Sophomore year. A friend of mine from high school who also went to UCSD told me to try out for the squids. He had all these crazy stories about how they partied and it seemed like fun. I went out in Fall and wow, what a good time. The game was great but the people were just fun and I felt at home. My first or Fish year was pretty stellar. I partied hard with the guys, won the drinking award, went on my first spring break trip, just the works. it was a great time. However, as far as playing goes, I knew fairly early that I would never step onto the same field as our A team.

This is what Fall Quarter at UCSD was like. 100 guys come out at the beginning and they all get along. Very little drama but the team was MASSIVE and it stayed that way. Of the 100, about 40 are returners (from the A and B team) leaving about 60 tryouts. Now there were no cuts, just an A team and B team. The A team was called Ice and the B team was called Lite, after Natty Ice and Natty Lite. Of the 60 tryouts about 5 made the A team. These were called Ice fish and they were royalty on the team. Everyone looked up to these kids, even if they were shorter than you. Some of these Ice Fish included Kubiak, Wormser, and Chucky. They made the top 20-30 on the team and they were the hot shits.

If you didn't make the A team, you were on Lite, which was actually more fun than anything in the World. We were a huge team of partiers that loved to play and we were good. I was B team captain my second year and we were the best B team in the Nation. Every Fall however, the team would blend again and take 5 more Ice fish and maybe 2-3 sophomores. Needles to say, if you didn't make the A team by your Sophomore year, it wasn't gonna happen. This really wasn't a problem though because Lite still went to sectionals and regionals as well as a bunch of other tournies and we were more fun than the A team. However the take home is that very early on, I realized that I was never going to make Ice. No matter how hard I worked I couldn't make the team and considering that I had plans outside UCSD, I didn't really have the time or energy to even try. I still conditioned because I wanted to make B team captain, and I did. But I knew because I was too old that I would never get to play in those big time games.

This was OK though. I knew I wasn't a jaw dropping athlete which is fine, I have many other talents. However, I was relegated to sideline status come crunch time, because after all, we had a Varsity team to root for. I was there for epic games with Colorado and Santa Barbara. I can remember Beau's first year and our first trip to Nationals, but I was always the spectator. I was always a voice instead of pair of legs.

This wasn't too big of a problem, but I wanted more. The game had given me the good and loyal friends I had always wanted, but because I couldn't play for Ice I needed to find another way to appreciate the game. So I became a fan. If our A team was in the upper echelon of teams, then who was the best of those? What college teams were at the top? And then soon after I got into this, I realized that there was this whole league above college called Club and they were even better. Holy crap, talk about not knowing how far the rabbit hole goes. I was hooked.

The two teams that won nationals the year before I played were Stanford and Furious so I was like "Ok, those are the best, I'll root for them". I wasn't on any of these big time teams and if our A team wasn't contending for a title, then why couldn't I root for someone who was?

Being a fan in Ultimate however was tough. There wasn't a lot of information out there. Rob, the score reporter, bloggers, a lot of this kinda stuff didn't exist back then, or at least it was very cryptic and difficult to break into. I can remember the first time I heard about Paganello or Kaimana. I can remember reading Chasing Plastic and being one of the thousands of silent RSD readers out there.

Anyway, over the years, I began to pick up a lot of information. Stupid stuff that no one cares about anymore but I do. Epic stuff like Bart Watson going from Stanford to Cal and leading Cal to the Finals ahead of Stanford. Richter and Zip duking it out in the Finals in Corvalis. Callahan winner vs Callahan winner. Beau as a freshman, as a freshman!! He never was more amazing than his first year. Took the Ultimate World by storm.

Blogging? Really?

Then Nationals 2007 came around. I had moved to grad school a few years earlier but like I had in '05 and '06 I made the trip out to Nationals. It was just too much fun. Nationals 2005 I got to see Stanford play for the first time. This was when Nick Handler was still there and I saw him lead Bloodthirsty over Wisconsin on universe in pool play. I was so hooked, I was always coming back.

By my third trip out to Nationals, I had met a fair amount of people and had a lot of people listen to my drivel. On the drive back from Columbus after Wisconsin won it all, a friend of mine said, "Dude you should start a blog about all this crap". I was really hesitant at first, I mean come on, a blog? How lame is that? But the more I thought about it the more curious I was. I tossed up a singular post on RSD and I was off the races.

About two weeks in I get an email from Idris asking me if I want to be on Ultimatetalk. I figured, what the hell? Before I know it I get a decent following and then Club Nationals comes around. I know some folks there and I think to myself, "I wonder if I could email some of them and get some information and write about it?" Holy shit, I could do that. And the next thing I know I'm doing team write ups for the college season. Wow, this was getting pretty F-ing cool. I also got to write one of the most important stories in the sport and what I believe to be my best work.

The more I write the more I can't stop. 2008 was so epic too, I couldn't believe it. Arizona, Wisconsin, Stanford, Colorado, such great stories. And to top it all off. Worlds was on the horizon. Really?!?! Worlds? You mean that thing I followed online 4 years ago? Where is it this time? Vancouver? August? Hell thats doable.

I send out some emails. I start writing international stuff. I'm emailing the media personal at WUGC headquarters. Holy crap, this is getting cool but a little weird at the same time. I mean can you imagine the looks I get when I tell my co-workers about this little hobby I have? So I've got stuff on Australia and Japan written. I even got to do an interview with the captain of my favorite team.

But now, its tomorrow. Holy shit? Tomorrow? As in 24 hours from now I'm headed to an event I've thought about for 4 years? When I first got into Ultimate media I imagined a day where I could be in a stadium watching the two best teams in the World have at it. Standing on the sideline as Furious, Sockeye, Japan, hell I didn't care, compete for the most difficult title in our sport. I just wanted to be there. Like any football or baseball fan would want to be at the Superbowl or World Series, I just wanted to witness the best my sport had to offer and now you're telling me it's here?

Stay Tuned Folks

just my thoughts

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