What on earth are these people doing?
Beach ballet?
Fleeing from oversized, crab-clawed extraterrestrials?
Ultimate Fighting: Beach Edition?
Here, maybe this picture will help…
That’s right. Not Ultimate Fighting, but Ultimate Frisbee.
What you’re seeing are the first publicly released photos of the Vietnamese National Ultimate Frisbee Team in action. What’s that you say? You didn’t know that Vietnam had a National Ultimate Frisbee Team? Well, they do now. Because that’s what our shirts say, and there’s no one around to tell us different.
It all began last year when I (Steven) took note of the fact that the only sports people seemed to play on the beach in Quy Nhon were volleyball, soccer and a local specialty I’m going to call “throw handfuls of wet sand at members of the opposite sex and run away.” Since I don’t particularly enjoy or excel at any of these sports, I decided—along with my teammate Jason—to introduce something new to the mix.
Jason and I happen to own identical 175-gram Ultimate discs (a sure sign that we would be good friends from the get-go). One day, we pulled them out and started tossing them around with students on the beach at exercise time.
At first, the kids were--to be honest--downright terrible. Many were the Frisbees that had to be fished out of the ocean. There were plenty of near-misses, with wildly-flung plastic discs nearly causing serious injury to elderly folks, young couples and small children alike.
But things slowly improved. Under the patient tutelage of Steven and Jason, the students (shall we call them ‘apprentices’?) stopped hurling the discs willy-nilly and gained some control. They began catching more than they dropped. They learned different styles of throwing. They discovered Rule #1 of Frisbee, which is this: It really isn’t that difficult.
The students—who numbered just three or four at the beginning—enjoyed tossing the Frisbee, but they didn’t really understand what the big deal was. Throw, catch. Throw, catch. Throw, miss, chase into the ocean and retrieve. It got a little tedious after a while.
But wait, we told them. There’s more.
One day, when we had a total of six people out on the beach, we played our first “real” game of Ultimate. As expected, it started off pretty terrible but the students caught on quickly. And they enjoyed it.
Throughout the second half of last year and the first half of this year, we’ve continued playing regular games of Ultimate with the students. The group has grown from three or four regulars in the beginning to seven, eight, sometimes ten students (plus the two foreign coach/players). At times crowds gather to witness the sheer awesomeness unfolding before them. Some of them actually have enough courage to come down and play with us, and a few of those stick around and become part of The Group.
We even have visiting foreign players who put in an appearance now and then—Joelle plays once in a while, and we usually rope most of our visitors into playing at least one game while they’re in Quy Nhon.
Partway through first semester this year, I realized something: These students were good. I mean, they were really good. They were fast, they knew how to throw and catch, they understood the game. And they made me work hard to keep up with them. When others showed up to play, the students themselves were able to explain the game and teach the newbies how to play much more quickly than I could. Hmmm. An important Nugget of Wisdom in there somewhere, to be sure.
We finally reached the point toward the end of first semester this year that we figured our skills (and, indeed, our fame) had grown to such a point that we would have to make ourselves official. And by “official,” I mean we had to make cool shirts for us to wear.
In a time-honored Vietnamese tradition, I went out and “borrowed” a couple of design ideas from various places, put them together, and we had ourselves a shirt design. This is what I came up with.
So, now that we are the undisputed representatives of Ultimate Frisbee in Vietnam we just need some other national teams to contact us and play a game or two. Any takers? Anyone?
P.S. Yes, we're aware that there are already some Ultimate leagues in Hanoi and Saigon...and we're willing to consider taking them on as minor league partners to our franchise.
P.P.S. Thanks to Sylvia for taking some great pictures of the team in action, and to Paul, for being a visiting foreign star player.
