Sun, Sand, and Sore Bodies

Over the last weekend, Kris and I traveled together with the rest of our Ultimate team to compete in the final round of league play in the ROK-U Spring 2016 season. Games were hosted on Dadaepo beach in Busan. Some of you may recall that Busan was the home of victory in our previous season in ROK-U. This time around, the Wonju Knights headed to the southern tip of Korea with the goal of doing our best and having fun. And boy, did we do so.

Like most destinations in Korea, Busan is a fair commute from Wonju. We sat for 4 hours on a bus and an additional hour in a taxi before we arrived at Dadaepo itself. We kitted up, warmed up, and mentally prepared for our first game. We knew that our games on Saturday would be tough, especially considering that the majority of our team had never played competitive Ultimate on the beach before. The most notable effect of sand (apart from getting literally everywhere and needing to be washed out for days) is that everyone generally accelerates and runs slower. For the players on our team used to using their athleticism to outclass their opponents, it was a challenge. For players like me who are slow to begin with, we enjoy seeing everyone else on our level for a little bit.

The adjustment wasn’t easy, and we lost our first game quite severely. We did not make too many mistakes, but the experience from the other team allowed them to capitalise and score from every opportunity we gave them. After the game was over, we picked our heads up, gathered ourselves, and prepared for the second game. This game was played against the team currently at the top of the league standings. We should have been destroyed. But we weren’t! We learned from our mistakes in the first game and made them work for every point they scored. We ended up equalling our highest goal tally as well, showing that we could break the defense of the best teams in the league. We still lost, but it was a game where everyone played their hearts out.

Immediately after the game and post-game celebrations and discussions were finished, our team all took off their shirts and ran into the ocean to cool off. It may sound like a simple thing, but it was one of the moments that I’ve felt closest as a team. That refreshing swim began an afternoon and evening filled with revelry, smiles, and shouting far too loudly along with music. I mean, look at those fools in the cover photo. Do we look like we lost two games? Not a chance. Because we know that the most important things to us are growing as a team, giving everything we have, and having fun. And we did that.

As the sun dawned on Sunday (far too early for us that stayed out rather late), with some of the team nursing hangovers, we returned to Dadaepo for our third game of the weekend. The effects of the night before were clearly felt, as players on both sides were slower and tired more easily than they would have been on Saturday. Once more, we fought hard. Once more, we were defeated. But our minds were not entirely in the game. We were saving ourselves for the second game of the day.

This game was played against the team just above us in the standings. They were also from the same region as us. We had even trained with them before. Needless to say, there was a tense atmosphere in the air. Both teams knew that this was going to be a good game. And it most definitely was.

It was a back-and-forth game, with good play and mistakes present on both sides. Every player on both sides was giving their all. Points were long and obtained through continued strings of good play – no cheesy full-field hucks here. Our team managed to pull to a 2-point lead with around fifteen minutes to go. We thought we had it. Then our opponents turned it up a gear. They passed quicker. They cut harder. They found something deep within themselves, and pulled it back to even as the last minutes of the game approached. On what would be the last point, both teams were screaming from the sidelines, trying to give their players on the field whatever inspiration and energy they could muster. With one last break-side throw, the defense was broken. An inspired cut into the end zone. A score. We had lost, 4-5. We should have been gutted.

Instead, we were filled with pride. Pride at ourselves for giving it everything we had. Pride at the other team for doing the same. The loss stung, but that sting quickly faded away. Kris and I had never been more proud of our team. In that game, we showed how far we had come. From a team made up largely of people that had never played Ultimate before, we had become a calm, collected unit, capable of solid defense and flowing, devastating offense. Sure, we aren’t the most consistent, and our mistakes cost us, but as we sat on the beach afterwards, we knew that we had played our best. And that next time, our best will be even better.

 

 

Sport or, How I Learned to Socialize Whilst Sweating

I sit with most of my body aching at present. My shoulder is sore. My calves are tight. My back occasionally reminds me that it is not at tip-top performance either. Finally, my throat is hoarse, and my voice gaining husky sultriness and quiet awkwardness in equal measure. Why is this? Bonding over sport, namely Ultimate and rugby. There were losses. There were wins (although these were fewer). Most importantly, friendships were formed or forged even stronger through the simple acts of playing and watching sports that we love together.

In school, I found sport largely an odd phenomenon. Sure, I played sport all of the way through my schooling career. I was in the 3rd cricket team in my final year. I batted at number seven at earliest, and bowled one over per game if I was lucky. I occasionally latched on to the optimistic thought that my fielding was that good, but most of the time I realized that I was profoundly average. The sport that I enjoyed the most in school was hockey. Although I did not achieve a higher team placement than cricket, I felt like a more integral part of the team than I did in cricket.

My first truly great sporting experiences lay on the hockey field, but on the club level. When I say club level, I do not mean the kind of club level where the players are all sporting six-packs, there is constant training, and my team is expected to win the title each and every year. I mean the kind of club level where the players are all sporting six-packs of beer, there is no training whatsoever, and the team is expected, well, to hopefully remain in the same league and not get relegated.

It was great fun, and I had many happy memories from my club hockey days. Some of these great memories came from on the field, but the majority arose during the shenanigans that took place off of the pitch. One memory that springs to mind most often is the one and only time I have seen my father truly drunk. Here is a picture from that night.

Doesn’t he look majestic? I was a year or so shy of legal drinking age, and fairly responsible. I ended up driving us home, because he was incapable of doing so. It was a night I will never forget.

Whilst hockey was my first foray into social sport, I feel that I truly found my outdoor sporting community in Ultimate Frisbee at Wits. Everywhere else, I had felt a little bit of an outsider, for one reason or another. I was too slow. I was too young. I didn’t drink enough. The list goes on, and many are likely to be overly critical perceptions from my mind. But in Ultimate, while I wasn’t the most integral part of the lineup, I still felt like part of the team to a degree that I had never felt before. Some of my strongest friends from my days at university come from the Ultimate team, despite me only playing in my final year in the university. I even played with my supervisor for my Honours thesis project whilst doing my thesis. Witsies will always be there to jol (have a good time for all of you not from South Africa), and that is what I loved about Wits Ultimate and the Ultimate community as a whole – everyone simply wanted to have fun.

This feeling continued into Korea, where the emphasis on the community is even more intense, especially in ROK-U, the main league in which I am playing now. ROK-U is largely comprised of expats from countries as varied as Russia and Canada, with several stops off in South Africa along the way. As a result, when game weekends are planned, so are organised social events for the teams to mingle and grow their expat connections within Korea. Ultimate people are great. Everyone is a little weird, and no-one cares, because you are all there together, in a strange country, playing the game you all love.

This past weekend, there was a two-day game weekend in Daejeon, which is pretty central in Korea. At one of these parties, the South Africans in ROK-U all bonded by staying up until 2am to watch our national rugby team, the Springboks, suffer a narrow defeat to the rugby juggernaut that is New Zealand. It was a heart-breaking affair, but I will never forget the sounds of a handful of South Africans (some more drunk than others) screaming at the top of our lungs at a television screen in the corner of a bar. It really was one of those special moments.

So, to everyone looking to meet new people, try sport. I’d say try Ultimate, but I may be a little biased. I am sure there are many sporting codes being played really close to you that you never knew existed. You don’t have to be serious, or even fit. I most certainly am not. Just get out there. Spend a little bit of time away from the digital overload. You won’t regret it. Not even when everything aches on a Monday evening and you have to carry heavy shopping.