Toulouse, Frisbee, and More Mixed Feelings about Leaving

This weekend I went to the Ultimate Frisbee Championship of France in Toulouse. It was amazing and I wrote a 3 page email about it to my parents but hadn't planned to post anything on my blog simply because most people aren't interested in frisbee. But my father thought I should post it anyway, so since I am fond of him here it is. Feel free to ignore if this doesn't interest you, or just scroll to the bottom where I talk about France and leaving and feelings and things.

It takes 5 hours to drive to Toulouse, and we left at 8pm. I was the only one who showed up at our coach's house at the appointed time, 7:15, so I played with his enormous fat cat for 45 minutes while we waited for everyone else. Which meant that we finally got to sleep at around 3am, what with stopping for dinner (even though we brought sandwiches, we took our time) and checking into the hotel and all that.

In the morning I left the company of my usual team, the Jets, and got introduced to my team for the weekend, the Miss Sunshines. This competition is considered the women's Open of France, which doesn't really exist because Open in Frisbee means that there's no age or gender divisions and is consequently the highest level that exists. It is actually the women's Coupe, but it is colloquially called the women's Open anyway because it's the highest level. However, the real national Open competition was happening right next to us, and that's what my usual team was participating in, but since I am the only girl and not big and fast and skilled enough to play in Open Division 1, they found me a girl's team from Paris, the Miss Sunshines. I hadn't realized that it was the women's Open and had thought that I was playing in an age bracket (20 and under, like usual), but the girls were mostly between 25 and 35 years old, and I was the youngest by 3 years at least.

They were really nice, and we had a good mix of handlers and middles. Our first match against LiliPUC was badly played. We could have won but we didn't. We didn't have good timing, we had people cutting at the same time or not cutting at all and a lot of drops. Saturday it rained cats and dogs at Toulouse and was freezing, which certainly didn't help our game. The second match was against Yaka, who are the French champions every single year. Surprisingly we lost by a smaller amount to Yaka than to LiliPUC because they had a bad game and we started to mesh well. The whole weekend we had an amazing defense going on, it was just our offense that was less intense than necessary (and too many drops). This is the first time I've done an all-women tournament, and the major difference I noticed is that you have to have a lot more stamina because since women are not as fast, we have a smaller margin of error, and since we aren't necessarily more accurate with the disk, there are more drops. So we have an hour long match that often ends in scores like 6 to 8, while the guys have an hour and a half with a 15 minute break at halftime that ends in scores like 15 to 17. It's more frustrating because we end up with way too many turnovers per point and it's less fun than the short victorious points you often get with big fast guys. Nonetheless, Yaka was great fun to play against. After losing to them we played the Sesquidistus from Strasbourg and beat them soundly in a good clean match. I had 2 or 3 horrible throws that my coach would've yelled at me for had he been there, but I'll blame it on the rain.

That night we actually didn't go to a hotel -- we went one of the girl's grandparents' house just outside of Toulouse in Merville. It was very large (fortunately, since there were 14 of us) and we put in a team effort for shopping, making an enormous quantity of pasta bolognaise, doing dishes, making the beds, etc. They had redone the attic fairly recently and turned the entire thing into bedrooms, so there were enough beds for everyone, all 14 of us. We had to get up at 6 am the next day to clean the house and pack everything up, since the grandparents weren't actually there and so we had to close it back up. At the end we took a picture in their backyard next to their cherry tree to send to the grandparents and thank them for their hospitality, so this is my only picture of a team I will remember fondly:

Our first match we lost just barely against the Monkeys -- you'll see in table below of our scores that we beat them overall in the competition because we beat some teams that they lost to, or our total number of points added up was greater, or something. I'm never quite sure how the scoring works, but it does seem logical to me that in the overall score we came out ahead. Then we played the F'airs and lost as well, although it was also close. The Jets came and cheered me on for that one, which generally does make me play a lot better, although I think it's less a question of being cheered on and more a question of being watched by people I respect very much and not wanting to mess up.

Our last match was against the BTR team that hosted us at Toulouse, and was by far my favorite. We had really gelled as a team and were playing at our top. The younger players and I got to play more 3 or 4 points out of 5 instead of the every other point we'd started out with, because 2 handlers had knee and ankle injuries and the older players were starting to wear out. I always appreciate that, and was really in top form. The weather was nice -- Saturday had been rainy and so cold it was almost hail, but Sunday there wasn't a cloud in the sky, it was hot, and I got sunburned. There was much less wind so we pulled off a lot of longs. Just about every single point worked the same way: I started in the back of the stack, cut to the front and then took off for the long, while another girl started in the front, feinted for the long, and cut to the front. She caught the disk, returned it to the handler, and the handler whipped off a long that I caught in the endzone. We pulled this off several times, and I caught 6 out of our 12 points from that match. It was pretty exhilarating. I also did a beautiful dive, not my first dive but the first that was both impressive and successful, catching a curved forehand that was a little too strong and a little too low in the far corner of the zone. I caught it in the zone and rolled out and surprised myself by not dropping it. But I was bummed out that no one from the Jets was around to see that point, because it is the crowning moment of my Ultimate career so far. And I am really proud of my skinned knee I earned while doing it.

So at the end we finished 6th out of 9, which is pretty darn respectable considering it was the championship of France, which still just blows my mind every time I realize I actually participated in it. I am happy to have put up a wicked defense against Yaka, the best women's team in France. Here's the results:

I finished by watching the last 2 matches of the real Open, which were pretty stunning. I have never seen players that good, ever. Probably because I haven't watched a lot of high-level Frisbee, but still. There was one woman who played with the team from Bordeaux, and she looked like a tall skinny guy with a ponytail -- very fast and very lacking in female figure. I guess that's why there are so few women who can play in Open tournaments, if you need to have the physique of a guy to keep up. The best match was the grand finale between Tchac and Friselis. Tchac won 15 to 11, but it was a magnificent match. I don't like watching sports too much, but that was art. I guess when you like the sport you're watching, and you're watching a higher quality of game than you yourself can play, you can appreciate it.
The Jets were happy just to not have finished last, because they expected to finish last and the coach promised to pay a round of drinks if they didn't finish last. Even though they didn't do as badly as was expected, they still came home with slightly long (or at least tired) faces because it's tough on a morale level to lose so many games in a row even if you knew what you were getting into. At least they didn't get resorted into Divison 2, which means they can still play in the highest level tournaments.

I was sad to say goodbye to the Miss Sunshines, because I had a really great time with them. They were fun and into their game and talented and really really nice (as frisbee players usually are, but I appreciate it even though it is the norm).

So that was my last tournament in France. And probably my favorite, even though I didn't play with the Jets, or even spend very much time with them. We just played really well and I dig it. There are pluses and minuses about playing on a women's team. Like I said, it takes more stamina and can be frustrating with the number of turnovers per point. And the game is generally less exciting because there are fewer longs and much more tight-knit, laborious passing that takes forever to work its patient way up to the endzone. But on the plus side, it's nice to be faster than average and to be a valued middle/long, instead of someone who does middle/long because I'm not good enough to be a handler. And it was really nice to see some incredible lady players, when I previously have not met very many in a sport that is almost always co-ed, but is still dominated by men. Next year I hope I can play on a women's team and on a co-ed team, because they are actually fairly different styles of gameplay.

I have also decided I will go to the Netherlands at some point. There are a lot of international people who play frisbee, especially the LiliPUC that practices right next to an international university in Paris and so collects all the international students. I talked with a lady from Vancouver and a girl from the Netherlands. Apparently pretty much everyone in the Netherlands speaks excellent English and they seem chill and interesting. Not that I can judge by one girl I met at a frisbee tournament of course, but if they're all like her I would have a great time.
I was astonished at the number of Americans I heard just walking around the frisbee fields. Several teams had one or two or three Americans! Frisbee is certainly a sport that would attract international students, but I didn't realize it was so normal to have an American as a team mascot (as the Jets affectionately call me).

This Tuesday was great too, as I spent it goofing off with the guys from my team. We are all in good spirits at the moment, exhilarated by the approaching end of school and the tournament and the fact that I can count the number of frisbee practices I have left on one hand and therefore have to make the most out of every moment with these people I've come to love. After practice I was eating a yogurt and paused with my spoon halfway to my mouth, a sinking, sick feeling in my stomach. I suddenly realized just how much I'm going to miss my friends and my team and my host family and frisbee tournaments and the roots I've painstakingly grown here in the Vendée.

I still remember the first time I felt sad about the prospect of leaving instead of excited: a few months ago my coach started talking about organizing frisbee trips to the beach in summer, and even having tournaments on the sand. And I regretted the fact that I wouldn't be there. But this was different. This was a sucker-punch to the gut, a realization that not only will I have some fond memories of France and not only painful ones, but I might actually... miss it? Wow. I experienced the same feeling today in the car coming home from school with my three little cousins, a sick knot of apprehension in the pit of my stomach. I don't want to leave my cousins and have them grow up without me. When the littlest one is my age, he won't remember me anymore, and that kills me, considering how he's been an important part of my life this year and vice versa.

The other piece of news that factors into this rumination is that I got my end of the year practice tests back. At the end of the year, French students pass the Bac, a difficult test that determines if they get their diploma or not. This year the kids in the science track will take exams in French and History/Geography, the two subjects that they don't need to take next year to concentrate on science and math, their more important subjects. In French the average was an extremely low 8/20 (normally it should be between 10 and 12 out of 20) and I got a 5, which was no surprise – sure, my teacher grades me nicely because she knows I'm American, but I don't expect a grader who doesn't know me to successfully guess that I'm an exchange student and thus give me a break when I use inaccurate terms or vague sentences or go off-topic. But in history I got a 13, which is pretty good, especially the 9/10 points I earned for the Cold War essay topic. What this means to me is that I could, if I wanted to, stay. I could stay and take the Bac and this year I'd get a low score because of French, but I'd more than make up for it next year with math and physics, and possibly even get honors or high honors if I could pull off a perfect score in math. (The French math program is not very difficult.) I could go to the University in Nantes and live in an apartment in the city, and have a lot of the things that I missed living in the countryside. I could have a bachelor's degree in 3 years, which is a year or even two years faster than I'll have it in the US. I could actually do that; I'd just have to fill out some paperwork and make it happen. Obviously this possibility is not one I'd follow through on. I miss my family and friends and country and language, and I'm excited to study at Madison next year. But my results on an anonymous test compared to French people made me realize that I could stay, and realizing that this possibility even crossed my mind makes me feel like I did okay for myself here. It was hard, but there were some moments so rewarding that I'll actually be sad to leave.

I'm not going to lie. My feelings are really, really mixed. My first months here I associate with the stomach pain and insomnia of homesickness, with anxiety and loneliness and the fear that I'd made a terrible mistake. And even now life is not perfect. Life has simply attained a level of normality that I had at home: some moments are bad. High school is boring. Sometimes I'm sick of everything. Some moments are good, even euphoric. But I actually have a life here, and dammit I'm glad I'm going to miss this. I'm so glad I'm not leaving with a bad taste in my mouth.

10 days until I see my parents. 17 days until I leave my second home.