Luckee Me

Having played Ultimate Frisbee since October now, I'm slowly realizing what it means to play here in Mainz. It helps to be talking to Alex about it -- he's been immersed in the Ultimate culture in America for a couple of years, so he knows a lot more about the sport than I do, and that kind of outside experience is useful for seeing how amazing the guys around this area are.

Feldrenner, the top Mainz team, is certainly one of the top teams in Europe, and they've done well when they've played at Worlds too. This is a team that used to run itself ragged on the field, giving everything but never making it to the championships. So they sat back, invented the Isolation strategy to truly minimize their running on offense, and then went on to win about seven of the last ten outdoor German Championships.

Alright, you don't play Ultimate in these parts without hearing some hushed whispers about their achievements. And I had practiced with some of them at the advanced training even though I'm far from advanced. But before yesterday, I had never seen so many of them, nearly all of them, in one place. Hustling around the field or watching from the sidelines, I finally got a real sense of how fortunate I am to even be watching these guys, let alone practicing with them.

Robert Pesch, for example, is arguably the top player in Europe, and he can play with any team in the world if he wants. And I got to scrimmage on his team. When you start playing a new sport, you never expect that during your formative first year you'll be getting training time with some of the best players in the world. That's one of the coolest things I've seen about Ultimate: it's such a fluid, generally informal system that anyone can potentially play with anyone.

Of course it's unlikely these guys were quite as happy to be playing with me as I was to be playing with them -- I had my moments, but I had many more mistakes. Heck, I dropped multiple passes from arguably the top player in Europe. But that's the other coolest thing I've seen about Ultimate: these are genuinely good, supportive people. Am I ready to practice with them? Maybe not. Do they whine and moan and get angry about it? Not at all.

It's really about improving, which means getting as much disc time as possible and with the best people you can, and it's about having fun. I don't try to intrude on their tournaments and there aren't many others at my lower level who go to the advanced training, which means they still get to have their fun and I get the best learning experience I could hope for. Hopefully by the next time I'm in Germany, I'll have gotten my skills up to the point where I can actually join them on the field of organized competition.