Breaking my collarbone has prevented me from doing lots of things at the level I'm used to: chores and bathing are going to take me forever, playing guitar is going to feel really awkward, and playing sports seems out of the question until the new year. The big thing is I've been sidelined for the rest of the ultimate season. It's weird because for the first time in my life I started the season wanting to win it all. Maybe this injury is the cosmos telling me that I should just stick to having fun when I play sports. And that's okay! Ultimate is the sport where I understand the formations, positioning, timing and specific roles on both sides of the disc. I'm not a defined leader yet but its a goal I want to work towards because I'll back this sport until I'm pushing daisies. I love everything this sport stands for and the community that surrounds ultimate. I can't wait to get back to it but in the meantime I'll praise it from my hospital bed.
I've been playing ultimate off and on for 6 years now. It all started as a ploy to get a date for prom, which fell through, but I discovered a new love interest. A group of seniors, myself included, formed our school's first high school ultimate team. No teacher had any idea what this sport was (some even questioned it as a valid excuse to leave class early) so our captain found a person willing to coach on Kijiji. He was the best, and taught us how the game is played and introduced us to Posts aka Beersbie and emphasized sportsmanship during the game. In Toronto, the sport was not very popular so we were travelling for forty minutes to an hour on the subway. We were a rag-tag bunch of kids and we managed to hold our own and make the playoffs going 3-2 with a ho-stack-piston offence and stellar man defense. Then we played OFSAA finalists from the previous year and got torched to end our season. The loss left a bitter taste in my mouth but also opened my eyes and inspired me to get better, which carried me into university.
When I got to LU I went looking for an ultimate team right out of the gate. During frosh week I found them and was outmatched in every aspect of the game; my teammates were all juniors or seniors and, at seventeen, I felt completely out of place. Luckily there were Res. Sports. Each month houses would compete against one another and the first sport was ultimate. I couldn't explain to my fellow Gators how excited I was to play Ultimate again. I was up north in the boonies and assumed I'd be one in ten people on campus who could flick. There were about twenty. It was still a lot of fun to teach my dorm mates how to play. Although I felt like a huge dick calling travels and double teams and getting a "WTF" look in return. I stayed in residence until my junior year as a House President as an excuse to keep playing ultimate even after finding a campus rec team to play with indoors during the winter. That team was the definition of rag-tag. My co-captain brought most of his house in every year who were mature students looking to socialize: there were party animals, thirty year olds, soldiers, rugby players, a shitty quarterback, and people who have never held a disc before. I got my fair share of coaching that first and final year. After that I just started playing flag football but I missed the sportsmanship and "go have fun demeanor" of ultimate. During my professional year I didn't play at all. With a shitty relationship, working 20 hours a week, and school I couldn't fit in. Looking back that was a really depressing year as a whole maybe not playing ultimate had something to do with it.
Coming to Busan I met a guy who played back in England and told me about pick-up. I didn't go until October which was when I got sick of seeing everything through the bottom of a glass. I remember getting there early in running shoes and seeing everybody in cleats then watching people run zone offense for the first time. It was intimidating especially seeing this closely knit group of players talking as if they were all friends from birth. Then they start hucking end to end and jumping 2 feet off the ground skying one another. It was insane. I knew I was out of shape after playing the first point and walking off like it was over, sweating all over, only to realize the games are to three. The ROKU league had just started and I wouldn't be able to hop on a team. Subsequently, I went back to the life of KSU and drinking myself stupid. After new years I decided I would commit to ultimate and that was the best choice I made. Now I've become part of that circle of friends and returned to my on and off high school romance.
Now that we're on a forced hiatus I feel so far away from the sport I'm obligated to write letters like a soldier away from home.
Be safe my love,
Shraham
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