Sydney Uni United Front for Alcohol

I recently joined Sydney Unis frisbee club, and finally went along to one of their training sessions run by coach Jimmy, It was a lot of fun, reminding me of the old days of frisbee before we met Phil and had aspirations of Junior worlds and it was just something we did during our lunch times.

Schoolyard frisbee was great, Obstacles like trees, year 7s and teachers. Fouls barely called, stall 7 to make games go faster, huge games with lots of people, endless endzones, uphill and downhill endzones and I remember a lot more foot blocks and hand blocks becuase people didn't really know how to play. Double teaming allowed, no outs unless you threw it onto the road (max lost a few discs being run over by semi trailers because of mark not being able to keep his throws in the school), and even hammers into trees to be caught for scores and the always fun 'Golden Goal' score system that started whenever the bell went.

The best bit of schoolyard frisbee was the amount of crazy and amazing feats occuring so often becuase of the nature of the game, that I've never seen completely repeated. I remember one friend managing a point face block on his thrower only to have it turn into an amazingly mac catch. There was times when the disc travalled about 10m through 3 mistaken macs to end up being a score. The only time i've seen another face block was on max, the thrower had the nerve to call a foul on him after he was bleeding from the mouth from the hit.

The other thing was the no limits on the team sizes, all inclusion style of play having 13 on 13 games on a field that was probably the size of what would fit a 4v4 game on it. There was also the game of soccer or touch running across the middle as well as the year 7s playing soccer or some other sport down in one of the endzones (that was the hard one to score in).

Not only was this great for developing field sense (well I think for me it helped a lot being able to pick out open receviers quickly and throwing complicated throws to dodge obstacles) but more funnily it was really good at showing the people who didnt have it. My friends that had terrible field sense then in the school yard, still have it now, looking off open players and in worse cases not even seeing them. The best thing is now, while people who I thought had good relative field sense (Me, Tiger and particularly Max) still have the good field sense, and those who didn't still make dumb/bad choices at times and had troubles getting over this for a long long time. It was also a good practice area for learning to control the speed of your throws, some people were terrible at catching, if you didn't throw a slow floater to their chest, they would probably miss it, so again this was great for your throwing without pressure.

Back to the present, the past few weeks of training for the Selection Camp were nuts, regionals and the two practice tourneys before that were heaps of hard work. I rested a week after the camp due to an injury and fak training was rained out that monday which saddened me. I finally recovered my broken training spirit and got back into it.

Thats when suufa came along. The trainings were laid back and fun, even had a lay out lesson from jimmy, everyones still learning the dump and stack (we haven't gotten to the swing yet, I expect thats next week) and then came the house party at clares for suufa. It was the first time I had drunk alcohol since new years eve, and Max and Calan were still on the ban since they were still on the team, we were standing around in a group with someone explaining the situation to which he replied:

"What!? Frisbee without drinking? Thats all I asscociate Frisbee with!"
Every week it seems to appear more like a false front for a drinking group rather than a sports club...