This is an essay I wrote to help me deal with everything swimming through my head this week. The last two parts were cross posted on the Ultimate Peace Blog
Part I
I began playing Ultimate, like so many of us, at summer camp surrounded by other supportive non-athletes. In high school in the mid-90’s a group of us played a very loose version of the game in the park on weekends.
I spent my freshman year of college at Wisconsin, never once hearing the word “Hodag,” and never finding my place there. During the subsequent year, while living back with my parents and working on mind numbing office jobs, I got my first Ultrastar, and unbeknownst to me, my first connection to my future Ultimate family. One of my closest friends growing up was a student at Carleton College, and he returned home one break with a 1997 CUT disc with the familiar CUT logo in Discraft’s “Red Triangle Prism” color in the background and a silhouette of a layout in the foreground. I still have that disc today, although it has long been retired from use. » Read the rest of this entry «
