Ultimate

Last weekend I went with my Ultimate Frisbee team to a tournament at La Rochelle. It was awesome.

I had to get up at 7 am on Saturday, which felt unfortunately like getting up for school. Then we had the 2 hour drive south to La Rochelle. Once there, we had an hour or so to change and warm up before our first match. Our first match was against the weakest team of the tournament, and we pretty well slaughtered them 13 to 4, if memory serves. That was great for us because especially us inexperienced young'uns were pretty nervous and adrenaline-pumped. The match helped calm our nerves a little and gave us the confidence to do better in the next matches. The second one was also a good match, and we won 13 to 7. The third one was against the top team of the tournament. At the beginning it was a total slaughter, with me and the other young'uns losing confidence and focus a little after a solid first two games. In the end we caught up a little, so it actually ended up being a messy messy game on both sides, where we lost 8 or 9 to 13, or somewhere around there. Our coach was not super happy, but he always knows exactly the right things to say to get us back in the good spirit of the thing and motivating us to do better instead of letting one bad match get us down. He's a great coach, and like all great coaches, simultaneously irritating and inspiring. He holds you accountable for your errors and congratulates you on things well done all in the same breath. He knows what to say to improve you -- whether what you have to fix is your wrist flick or your pivot foot or your mental attitude. (He's told me often that what I need most to improve my game is more confidence, which is completely true.)

Anyway, we had three matches that first day, from around 11 in the morning til 5 pm or so. In between matches, we watched other frisbee games, tossed a disk around, went for warm-up runs around the neighborhood, practiced our "upsides" (hammers) and scoobers and other obscure throws, and played "passe-à-dix" which is what Ultimate players do when there aren't enough players or enough field space for a real game (like Box Frisbee). You score a point with 10 completed passes between your team, and at that point the disk goes to the other team. Very simple, no endzones or anything. It's usually played in a quite small rectangle, so it's tricky because you have to have a good strategy and coherent cuts, otherwise it's just a mass of people on the field and you'll never complete a single throw. Oh, also usually for passe-à-dix we mark until the count of 5, not 10. Speed! So basically it was occasional frisbee matches, with frisbee and more frisbee in between matches. After our third game we showered and changed and headed out to a pizza restaurant where the service was very slow but the food was pretty good.

Then we went back to the sketchy grody hostel, where we all hung out until around midnight, when we all staggered back to our rooms and fell asleep. It must be mentioned that since I only paid 15€ for tournament participation -- that's for the room AND gas money -- the fact that it was a seriously sketchy hostel is forgivable.

We were originally 10 players, so I was going to be in a room with the other teenagers (the coach asked me well in advance if that was okay, which was thoughtful), but we ended up being only 9, so we had enough rooms for me to get one to myself, since I am the only girl on the team. That was nice, getting my own room, even though I was literally only in my room for the 8 hours that I was asleep, plus about 15 minutes on either side.

On Sunday we had breakfast at 9 and checked out of the hostel by 9:30. I was happy we didn't have the first match of the day – that would've been rough. Again we won our first game pretty well, though it wasn't our neatest game. It was 13 to 9 or something like that. Our second game was awful, though we won. We played against the team with a lot of teenagers and a lot of women, both of which are very unusual. Usually there's two or three teens per team and one woman per team. (I don't know why there's always one woman, but I've definitely seen a pattern there.) They were pretty darn good, fast and coordinated and all that. But our game was just MESSY and frustrating. So we won, in the end, 9 to 7 or so I think. It's usually game until 13 unless we run out of time (25 minutes per game) and then it's until the next odd number, or something like that (yeah, I haven't exactly studied the rulebook...). So clearly it was both a very close game and a game with a lot of drops if we ended up with a final score of 9 to 7.

But after that game we had a good three hours until the 6th and last match of the tournament, so we took advantage to decompress. I spent a good half-hour throwing hammers back and forth with a couple teammates. My hammers, formerly disastrous, are now starting to look like a actual passes! Right next door to the gym where the tournament was, there was a rock-climbing room. This led to all sorts of shenanigans, including practicing dives since there were mats stacked against the walls -- we could run across the concrete part of the gym and lay-out on the nice, squishy mats without undo harm, although that is why I currently have no skin on my elbows and knees. We also we played monkey-in-the-middle with some components of the circle perched on the rocks walls so we had to rely completely on our hands and our good balance to catch disks. Throwing is also pretty hard when you can't twist your body too much or you'll fall off the wall. And we played some passe-à-dix with the team we just defeated -- a nice friendly atmosphere that was good for deflating some of our competitive tension. (Our coach HATES to lose, and I think his attitude affected us a little. We got really into the tournament.) So our last game started off already with a great atmosphere, all of us laughing and in high spirits from all the shenanigans of the past three hours. We played a really nice clean game, well-thought out strategically and with a high completion ratio of throws. Nothing too risky. Well-organized stacks, not too much "brouillon" in the end zone, good communication between players. It was our best match of the six, a good note on which to end our tournament. We were hyper-focused at the beginning but even got a little silly towards the end, since we had a sizable lead, so we didn't end with as much of a lead as we started with -- I think it was 13 to 9 or so. The second to last point was just our coach and the four youths, though we usually never have more than two youths in per point and rotate. The last point was "les vieux," the oldsters. I say oldersters laughingly, because the oldest is 17 years younger than my father and my father still manages to play without complaining about his creaky old bones. So we got a little bit goofy towards the end, but nothing inexcusable.

So, end result of the tournament, we won 5 out of 6 matches and were 2nd place in the tournament, since there was one team that was significantly better than all the others (the one that slaughtered us while we were having a bad match) and won every match. Our team name, by the way, is Les Jets. This has a bit of a story to it because first of all, most Ultimate team names are in English, just because it's such an English-influenced sport. They even say "nice catch" to each other instead of "c'était bien attrapé." The first place team, for example, was the Raging Bananas, and one of the other teams was the Ré Flying Oysters. So the "Jets" partly is a headnod to the English, but also because of the immense amount of Vendéen pride around here. There is a bean called the mogette that is very representative of the Vendée. In any stereotype of the Vendée, or any joke about the region, the mogette will be mentioned. If you look closely at our team logo, you'll notice that the dot above the j in jets is in the shape of a mogette bean. So our battle cry when we put all our hands in the middle before a game works like this: our coach yells "Mo!" and we yell "Jets!" Get it? Mogette = Mo + Jets. Les Jets. Vendéen pride.

Among all the teams there was a good mix of skills just as our team is half inexperienced and half too experienced. There were always some athletic stars and some woman to match up with me, some old and some young, some skilled and some new-ish. Usually I'm not too impressed by the other women I meet in Ultimate, but there were three young ladies who really incredible this weekend. I have a ways to go to catch up with them.

I wrote one of my college essays about this, but there's something just so cool about losing yourself to an activity, whether it's marching band or theater or even APUSH or ultimate frisbee. It's just cool to be with a group of people where you all have that element in common -- where you never ask "well, what do we do now?" because obviously you go outside and play catch. There's a camaraderie that evolves, with French frisbee players even more than with Americans because that's the way they roll. They're so goshdarn polite that you can't get away with being shy and not talking -- the added formality in France means that they say hello specifically to you as they go around and give everyone the bise (same with saying goodbye) and they'll always tell you bon appétit when you start eating lunch and give you high-fives after every point and you are never ever ignored. Sometimes I don't appreciate this, but mostly it just builds a heckuva lot of team spirit. On Saturday especially I was in such good humor that anything could set me off laughing. On Monday I was sore all over after our two days of non-stop Ultimate, but I still went to practice on Tuesday night because I can't get enough of this sport and these people and the confidence it gives me and the fact that I'm finally doing something challenging and improving myself!

And then when I came home the first email I read told me that the University of Minnesota wants to give me a significant fraction of tuition in scholarships, so That was good news too. And THEN I went to school and history was really fun because we did theater exercises in English to build confidence speaking in English, since often the problem with foreign languages is as much one of confidence as of lack of knowledge. I know, it has little to do with history (besides that our last exercise was putting on a skit about the Blitz of London by the Luftwaffe in WWII), but our history teacher is so fantastic and our English teachers so terrible that I don't think it's a bad thing to use some of our history time to make up for the inefficacy of the English teachers. And I got to do it twice and skip math class, because the teacher wanted my help so we could both be walking around the room correcting peoples' accents at the same time. Fun stuff. And then I think I almost aced a physics test except that I ran out of time on the very last bit of the last problem. And then I got my last paper back in French, and I got 15/20, which is pretty darn amazing and you should all be proud of me.

In short, this has been a really good week.

Maybe it's too soon to say so, but I feel like this weekend was a turning point. I have a purpose now. Just as marching band was my heart and soul at home, so too can Ultimate be my passion here. These past few months have been aimless and boring, but now I finally have something to get me out of the house, something to work for, and something that's really my own. I didn't know anyone on my team before I joined, no host siblings to protect me or encourage me; all social interactions that succeed or fail are mine and all Ultimate improvements I make are my own as well. In a life situation where I have to be more dependent than I have been for many years, it's good to have something of my own. The fact that I'll have a weekend tournament every month or so and practices twice a week from here on out just makes me smile – I'll always have something to look forward to not too far in the future. I don't know if this'll turn out to be an unrealistic expectation, but I can picture in seven months looking back and saying, “Yeah, that first Ultimate tournament at La Rochelle – that was when I really started to have fun here. That was when I first found a reason to stay in France.”