First, I've been playing a lower level pickup game on Saturdays the past couple of weeks for a couple of purposes. One was to get some more Ultimate in - it's my favorite sport, and I want to play it as much as possible. Plus it'll help me get in shape for league. Two was to see if I could recruit some of the more serious players to the VotS league. Three was to intentionally expose myself to some, um, let's say "creative" play and practice not getting upset over it. This worked well. I still tend to get a little miffed when people do things that are "creative" and "violent" - like hand-checking you, putting their head down and running around the field with no regard for where people are - but w/r/t what you might be tempted to call "stupid decisions" or "bad throws," I had a lot of opportunities to have it happen to me, feel the anger and then let it go.
I was doing that last one because I volunteered to captain this league, and I've decided to try to take a chillier approach to things and see how it works out. I thought that would be exceptionally important as a captain, and so I wanted to get some solid Pavlovian action before league started to make sure I could endure mind-numbing Ultimate inanity without getting mad. So hopefully that helped a bit; we'll see. Three was at least a minor success. Two was a success as well, because I met a couple of players who were coming out to league and managed to convince a couple of others as well. Sweet. And one was nice, because I did get quite the workouts. I weighed myself at the gym the other morning (after a Wednesday Ultimate game) and checked in at a cool 190. So things continue to head the correct direction.
Second, I decided to make an effort to welcome people to the league, hopefully help them get their kinks out and introduce them to the game a week before we throw them into the lion's den that can be the VotS leagues. I had been talking with Jose, a bigwig in VotS, about how we seemed to do a poor job of recruiting / keeping new players, and that people in the community had a tendency to form cliques and not welcome newbies. In order to get people to come out and make a better effort, I sent this out to the vots listserv on Monday:
Who's Alfonso Acosta? Emeka Koren? Chris Coco? Damien Scott?I thought it was better to give a little motivational narrative than to just say "come to clinics," so that e-mail resulted. Lots of people showed up on Tuesday, young and old, and more than a couple said they were "pumped by that e-mail!," so that was cool. We did a little presentation on the basics of the game, partnered new people with old to go over a little throwing, and then played a scrimmage for the remaining hour and a half or so, stopping to point out various rules / infractions / strategies. Fantastic - I had actually gotten there early and played with the Sprawl guys (our local club team) for a bit, so by the end of the evening I was quite gassed, but we had a solid 12 new people who got a significant chance to play and learn in a not-really-competitive setting. Great.
Alfie is the guy who called me out of the blue back in 1996 to see if I wanted to come to a tournament with some Rice guys before I had even set foot on campus. Alfie and Emeka had gone through every single incoming freshman's info sheet and called everyone who so much as mentioned Ultimate. Emeka (a five foot five spitting image of Bob Marley, incidentally) even stopped by people's houses on a cross country trip, scaring the crap out of many a parent. Alfie drove us up to Dallas, showed us the art of crashing on sofas for weekend-long tournaments. Coco showed up during orientation and stopped by my room every day to "go out and toss" - he kept this up all semester long until I could throw an upwind flick like him. Damien (despite being easily the best player I have ever seen), took time out to attend B-team practices and talk about zone, or perhaps more importantly, demonstrate that yes Virginia, a disc CAN hold five beers.
I bring this up not to get everyone interested in the fascinating history of Rice Ultimate, but to point out that here I am twelve years later, and if I think at all about why I play or what Ultimate means, those are the guys that pop to mind. Were they recruiting? Of course. But they were recruiting to the team with open arms, welcoming new players, teaching people the basics of both playing and partying, and more than anything, going out of their way to make strangers feel welcome. And it *worked* - people not only came out to play and got better, they stuck around.
The clinics this Tuesday and Thursday are a fantastic chance to do the same for new players in the local scene. You can be somebody's Alfie, Emeka, Chris or Damien; you can be the person that someone will always remember as "that guy who took me aside to show me how to cut, how to throw a forehand, how to heckle." It's a great chance to share some of the basics and to get people hooked on the game - Ultimate is in a sense an implicitly great "product," but it becomes that much better when people make a conscious effort to welcome others into the fold.
So please, come out to clincs! Encourage players new and old to make it out. If you're new, just grab somebody and say "show me how to X." If you're old, show someone how to do X. If you're somewhere in between, do both! If nothing else, it's a chance to get those legs (or in Dave Abdoo's case, mouths) running for the upcoming league.
We've got a good scene; we all know it can be better. Let's make it so.
And even greater was that more or less all of them came back on Thursday. That night we had fewer vets because we were practicing at the same time as the Phoenix mens and women's club teams, but there were about four of us, which was nice because the newbies got even more chances to catch, throw, cut, etc. So a pretty decent success, and a good start toward the general atmosphere of League for the fall.
Inbetween those two fun experiences came the draft, but I'll save that for another post.
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