While many people play organized sports while they grow up, it was never something I really got into.
I like sports and I liked playing them with my friends, but there was something about the travel or even the house leagues that just seemed a bit too intense. My problem wasn’t really with the drills, expectations or difficulty of the sport, but more how my teammates became much more competitive and serious about the whole thing.
My first attempt was with house basketball and all of those things came true. I like basketball a lot and enjoyed playing on the court, but as I entered high school, my teammates became much more self-centered and came down harder on me for any mistakes that I made. While kids generally are mean to each other, being the only guy not acting like he was trying to make an AAU team generally set me apart from the others and I stopped playing shortly afterwards.
I didn’t like their attitude on and off the court, so that was it for me.
Things were quite different with ultimate frisbee. I played a bit during recess in middle school and there is something much more light-hearted about ultimate frisbee. There is not a dominant professional league, there aren’t any referees in most levels to flop in front of and at the end of the day, you are still literally chasing after a frisbee.
There were never any higher expectations when I played; just how much effort and skill I personally wanted to use.
As high school went on, I knew and made friends with quite a few of the guys on the ultimate frisbee team. By the time spring rolled around on my senior year of high school, I thought, why not, and joined the team. My high school team wasn’t affiliated with the school and we didn’t have an actual adult as a coach, so things were low stakes already. Also, since no one played for any reason besides that they wanted to, it came back around where we really tried to beat our opponents and play our best frisbee as a team to almost prove ourselves.
So, nevertheless, it was actually fun. If I were trying to write an embellished memoir, I would go into how we were a ragtag group of outsiders, both at our school and on the frisbee field, which is expected when your team name is Banana Assault (the reason is lost to history), but I’ll spare you clichés.
We didn’t win any kind of title or tournament, we were a decent team that should have won a few games if we performed better, but it’s neither here nor there. It was fun and that’s what I think ultimate frisbee is always about. It’s enjoyed by all ages and is a popular college sport I think for that reason. The sport can just be what it is and not inflate egos that get in the way of that.
Ultimate frisbee is not my favorite sport, but I’ve enjoyed all the time I’ve spent with it.
