Ultimate Frisbee Mondays started yesterday. Now I was pretty excited for this as I haven’t played the sport since college (which scarily enough has been 3 years now, almost as long as my actual time in college), but I was completely unsure of what to expect. So I show up at the field in my sneakers and shorts ready to play a game of pickup when the rest of the players show up and start to put on their cleats. “Uh oh,” I think. Then one of the guys put on some socks that go half way up his thigh. At this point I’m a little concerned, because as I stated earlier, I haven’t played since college. So we warm up and everyone seems to throw a disc pretty darn well so I’m really starting to get nervous. We divide up the teams after counting by 2s like a middle school gym class and end with 4 on 4. Now if you’ve ever played ultimate Frisbee you know that a game with a total of 10 players or less can be pretty tiring, and by the looks of some of the guys that were playing, people were going to get tired. So after 15 minutes of play, sure enough players start dropping like flies.

Now let me inform you a little more about this sport. It turns out that there exists an actual offense and defense that to me is completely foreign. When I played in college we just sort of ran around until we got each other tired. The guys that I was playing with yesterday ran an actual offense and defense, which left me pretty much clueless. So I just ran around and tried to get the others tired.

So with the apparent lack of inshapeness with my team other than me we struggled to keep up. About the only advantage I had out there was that I could run faster and jump higher than anyone else. Or course nobody knew that I was a semi-pro volleyball player in training (or would like to be anyway). When it came to actually playing the sport I seemed to be a little lost. But with my apparent inshapeness I was stuck covering the only other guy that was inshape out there except he was darn good. He’d dart and dodge all over the place leaving me, well lost, but still moving all over the place.

In the end I was pretty darn impressed with all the players there and their ability to play the game. If I were to give them a little advice however it would be to possibly get on the mindset that they will have to run around a little more than once a week to be in shape to play in tournaments come this summer. Maybe I can’t provide offensive maneuvers, but I can provide a little bit of stamina.