Recently in Frisbee Category

The weekday nights last week were crazy busy. Here is a quick summary of the week, I have a few more things to post here over the next day or so, so let's get something online and move on.

Karen and I started Monday with our first Beginning Spanish adult ed class at the high school. Our teacher, Penelope, tells us this is her first time teaching adults. I think this is going to work out fine, as we are just big kids after all, right?

Tuesday I joined folks at work for a release party, celebrating the latest rev of one of our products. Brews and burgers and shooting (very poorly) some pool.

Jen and Jordi had given Karen the very nice birthday gift of tickets to see Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. Yes, that Steve Martin is a big blue grass music fan and accomplished banjo man. The show was advertised as an evening of banjo and blue grass music and that's what we got. It was a good time!

Most Thursday nights are basket ball nights for me, but this week was an off week from hoops as the whole school was taken over for parent-teacher's night.

Finally on Friday, our entry in the Buda Grandmasters club league, Minimum Time Aloft, had our first win (asterisked, as we were short on roster players and had to pull in a few ringers). As a "club" team, we don't get new t-shirts from Buda. I have, however, just updated my t-shirt page with the summer league threads.

This spring saw a resumption of Ultimate play. The Sunday division of BUDA Spring Hat league had, I think, three rain outs out of seven games. But the tournament two days ago saw perfect weather. Our team, Send In the Clowns, played three decent games and then ran into a no-show team and called it a day.

The Spring tournament starts a bulge week of Ultimate for me. Last night was the first night of BUDA Summer Hat for our new team. I stood in as a substitute captain. This coming Saturday is the UPA Mixed and Masters Easterns tournament. We will assemble Minimum Time Aloft for another hurrah. I'll report in on results if I survive.

After sitting out the spring and summer BUDA hat leagues this year, I did sign up for the fall session. Even then, I missed a few games with a sore hamstring and a rainout and the final game of our BSSC softball league. But I did show up for the tournament last Sunday, and our team, Hot Wheels, made a good showing.

Some of the players that gave us an undefeated regular season were missing. We picked up a couple freelance players to give us a reasonable sub situation and went 3 and 0 in pool play. We won the semi-final game, but were beat in the final. Good folks and good fun.

My BUDA T-shirt page has a new entry.

There is a nascent GM (grand master) scene brewing in the Boston area. BUDA is providing support with a six team GM division, and a tournament which was held yesterday: the BUDA GM Tune up. Four teams signed up. I hadn't joined one of the regular teams, and fell in with a fifth team assembled from free agents, for a round-robin format tourny.

We had spectacular, last day of summer weather, and drew a first round bye allowing us to sleep late. At the fields, we surprised ourselves, winning three out of our four games. And we had a game point in hand in our only loss. I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.

Shout out to Minimum Time Aloft:Natalie, Paula, Charles, Smitty, Bennett, Mark, Art (captain), Nathan, Steve, me, Jamie, and Josh.

Wednesday, July 23rd. Almost caught up now.

It was agreed all around that it was a really bad idea for me to go out to play in this year's BUDA Good Cause hat tournament. I have been sidelined pretty much since February after I rolled an ankle playing Thursday night hoops. And the weather forecast called for humid weather in the 90s. But maybe this is all for the best as these disinclinations ensured I would not even think of attempting any over-exertion.

And that's the way it turned out: four games played without undo wear and tear. As a hat tournament, we were paired up by the crack tournament organizers, seen in the pictures below. I was paired as co-captain with Buzz (not pictured) a teammate from some past BUDA hat league season.

Good Cause was very well run and raised over $10,000 for this year's cause. Harpoon Brewery was the major corporate sponsor and provided some incentives for the top money-raisers. Think of Harpoon next time you are at the packy.

Wondering what Skippy is chugging there after the day was over? It is a jar of pickle (dill) juice. In some Ultimate circles, it is believed dill pickles are just the thing to keep you hydrated and electrolyted through a long day on the fields. Maybe they just make you thirsty enough to drink more water? I dunno.

There is a box of Frisbee plastic in the basement that has been carried forward from the 1970's. Back then, Wham-o was the sole source of respectable disks and the cognoscenti liked to note and collect disks from certain preferred molds. I was also giving Frisbee golf a look then and played in a couple of organized events. If you are at all serious about Frisbee golf, then like traditional ball golf, you need specialized disks (clubs) for different kinds of shots: drivers, putters, disks that fade left or right, over-stable, under-stable. Throw in a couple of novelty and promotional fastbacks and it doesn't take a long time to get a boxful. Hey, even MoMA has a disk in its collection: Walter Frederick Morrison and Warren Franscioni. Frisbee. 1948.

There is an active market in vintage disks on ebay. Thinking I could perhaps have one fewer box and clear a little cash, I was checking some items there and discover that Wham-o is offering a 50th Anniversary Pluto Platter! Yes, the Pluto Platter first appeared in 1957. My first disk was a red Pluto Platter, probably a gift when I was in first grade (1959). I played it to pieces and it is long gone. An order for recently minted commemorative Platter (along with the new Morrison autobiography "Flat Flip Flies Straight") has been issued.

My forty eight years of just flat flippin' is just about double my years playing ultimate. I had seen ultimate played in the mid 70's but thought (for no good reason) that any defense would be hopelessly over matched by a patient offense. That is probably still true, but at the level I play, it is rare for a team to show that much patience.

Two individuals really got me jumped started into playing. My first team play was with Saddlebrook in 1986 in the Boston Area Corporate Ultimate League. Phil (apologies for my being unable to recall your last name) was the good club player who pulled a rag tag group of volunteers together for a couple of years.

Saddlebrook went under and I was out of ultimate for a few years. Until an amazing pick up scene started up right across from home. The Weeks fields near Newton Centre saw a lot of great play in the early nineties. That got me back into the (successor to BACUL) BUDA hat leagues. My first captain there was Gary Bernard - great spirit and very encouraging to a beginner like me. Gary is still out there mentoring and coaching a high school team on high level play and good spirit.

So here's a big thanks to Phil and Gary! Life wouldn't be the same without ultimate.

BUDA Fall Hat finished a week later than originally planned. Heavy rains the weekend before Halloween forced the league to postpone the event by one week. This gave us really nice Sunday weather.

2006 has not been a good "W" year for Jen, Jordi, and me, and the regular season continued the trend. But picking up a few sanctioned ringers for the day made us competitive at 2-1-1. Looking forward to Spring Hat now.

Saturday offered ideal weather for the Buda summer hat '06 tournament. Our team, Great Auks, played to our ranking and went winless. Still, I can't complain (and, no, it's not because I am still worn out two days later).

Karen took a bunch of pictures with her film camera. Developing the film we found a bunch more photos from last year's insanely hot edition. This year we had Walgreens develop onto CD-ROM, so there is no delay scanning in negatives.

Looking forward to Fall League!

We had a fun season with BUDA fall hat league. Playing in Lexington under the lights, we got off to an amazing start, romping to five straight wins.

The BUDA Summer Hat tournament was held Saturday, August 13th at Millennium Fields in West Roxbury. Our team "Throwbots in Disguise" had a good showing.

The WiPPs (Witness Protection Program) in the Open division invited me to join in August to add another body as the season wound down. Still feeling the after effects of last week's effort in the BUDA Summer Hat, I played only on Saturday of the two day tourny.

Thanks to the energy and vision of Jose Invencio, four GrandMasters teams assembled Sunday, June 26th for the 2005 Boston Invitational at Devens, MA. I got connected to Jose's team, WiPPed and we played through a hot, hot, hot day to earn our runner's up trophy.

Any blogger knows the impulse of leaving some mark in the world. A few years ago this was manifested in me with the urge to have a Ultimate disk made up with a design of mine. I was playing with 12 Fluid Ounces at that time, so the rationale was to make a disk for the team. Here is how it turned out:

My closet door is becoming harder to get closed. Inside and sprawling out in to the bedroom are way too many T-shirts, many from years of playing in the BUDA Hat Leagues. So, as a project, I dive in to get a count.