My experience with Ultimate Frisbee has been very interesting. After four years of playing the sport, there are still a lot of things to learn about the sport, the players, and the spirit of the game. So far, I have played with three different teams for club and a few other random ones for hat tournaments.
The first ultimate frisbee team I have played for were the "Quad City Animals". We started out as a group of people just playing pickup at a park. One day, after playing a few games, we started to question if we could really be an actual Ultimate Frisbee team. We had the talent, we had the people. So why not go for it? As we all agreed, we had to figure out our team name. Truth be told, it wasn't that complex to come up with a team name like animals. I'm not exactly sure how we got the name. Our first tournament as a team was in Ames, Iowa for a huge organization called, "The Iowa Games". It was basically like the Olympics but in Iowa. Our team got ranked fifth out of sixteen teams there. There were other teams that were tied for fifth, but I found it really exciting to get fifth.
Now, regular tournaments and hat tournaments are not that much different from each other. The only difference is the registering process. For regular tournaments, you must register as a team with at least seven people on the team, and have extra players to play would be ideal to have for substituting on and off the field. To register for a hat tournament, you register as an individual and rank yourself fairly. Then, you get thrown into a random team with random people with a random color. Everyone gets to know each other on the team and plays together.
Ultimate Frisbee a lot of fun, and I strongly encourage people to play at a hat tournament someday because that's where a lot of friendships can be made. The last hat tournament I played was in Rockford, Illinois. That tournament was called, "Fowl Play". It was also the last tournament I got to play with an old friend of mine before he left for Texas (the guy in the hat in the picture).
