Thread by @being_ulti

The class I teach tonight (poetry) is all set and the class I take today (boxing) won't start for a bit, so let's talk origins. I got into this lateish, 25, with no sports background and no one in my life who'd ever played, so some very specific stars had to align to get me here.

I gave some of this in the bio and a fuller rendition on @SinTheFields (starts halfway in, but like, listen to the whole thing, learn some league draft strategies, subscribe to Ultiworld, etc.), but the very short version is… ultiworld.com/2019/06/21/sin…

…on a whim (actually after one of @jodyavirgan's three annual frisbee tweets, so good work growing the sport), I started watching the 2017 college finals, and — intrigued by both the sport itself and this wild hidden world around it — went down a rabbit hole and never came back.

How do I explain it? I loved watching discs fly, and seeing athletes do athletic stuff was dope. I was fascinated by how much the people cared — how much they HAD to care, there being really no extrinsic reward for any of the love or work or physical risk they put into this game.

The self-officiation piece was fascinating, too — not that it always produces ideal results, it clearly doesn't, but the fact that how the players themselves make/handle calls is part of both the challenge of the game and the narrative of the sport? That's interesting to me!

And, if we're being honest: there's a piece of me that is fatally earnest and believes in the beauty of fierce competition grounded in mutual respect, and there is also a piece of me that is a gremlin that loves chaos, and from very early on, frisbee lit up both of them.

So, this was the summer between my MA and the MFA I'm on now. I was living over an outbuilding on my parents' farm, working an office job and trying to save money; I was committed to OSU, but wouldn't go for a few months. There was space for a project, and frisbee became it.

I was reading articles and watching games and highlights where I could find them, not always knowing what I was seeing but trying to keep up; I was DVRing the US Open off the Ocho. I read blog posts. Remember blogs? That's how deep I was in.

In retrospect, it's hard to say where "what a weird, yet also kind of cool, thing people do" became "it would have been cool to have done this" and then "it would be cool to do this" and finally "actually, maybe I can do this"? But I'll say this:

around that time, I found some of @jennaweiner6's stuff on Skyd, and — while I wasn't talking about my own gender stuff yet — that made me feel like, you know, maybe it wouldn't be effortless, but this could be a sport where I might be able to. That made a lot feel possible.

So I got a disc and started going around the farm with it, throwing wobbly flicks to nobody in the late summer light. I mean a grown adult wandering the Appalachian countryside, re-enacting the Milhouse gif over and over. Cows watched me do this. But I had my eyes on the prize.

Because at some point I realized — as a soon-to-be college student enrolled at least half-time in a degree-seeking program with fewer than five years of post-HS USAU experience — if I wanted to play for OSU, technically, no one could stop me. And if I could… why not?

Why not see what happened? Why not take this incredibly specific, kind of absurd thing that had fallen into my life and see how far it could possibly go?

Anyway, I did email the contact person on Fever's now-gone website (remember websites?) saying basically, hey I'm a grad student with no experience, I know I'm technically eligible but is it weird, thanks for your time, and the contact person — who, btw, was @sadiejezierski —

said, basically, "come on out! we'd love to have you!" And I did; and they did; and the rest is history.

Haha no it's not. I was very bad! I was speedy and athletic but I had no field sense at all and couldn't throw for shit. The team, though, was great, and very good to me—

—and, even then, the tiny percentage of times I managed to do something cool on the field were so electrically satisfying, I knew I had to keep coming back. And for all the times I wanted to bail, I always, always wanted more to see what would happen if I stayed.

Which is not to say it wasn't rough. At that point, I'd kind of set up my life so I never really had to do anything I didn't feel decently good at — I'd been basically a professional English major forever, I'd never had a job or hobby that didn't play to skills I felt I had, etc.

So to just roll up and be bad at something, with nothing for it but to be bad at it until you can be better at it, was bracing. And I'm working on the mental toughness thing, but I've always taken my own screwups hard, and mannn I had to take a lot of them, and so did my team.

But have I told you how much I loved that team? God I love the Fever program — the teams as teams and the cumulative ultimate experience there, but also the people, who are a cross-section of OSU I'd never run into otherwise, and who took in a weird old stray like me so readily.

So I kept coming back, and I kept working, and tried to let my dissatisfaction with myself be a fire to work harder while also making peace with looking stupid, and I've been working hard and looking stupid ever since.

(Nah, I got better. I've played a few leagues and at some party/overnight tournaments, and practiced with a club team this year; I think I'm still pretty consistently the least skilled player on those teams, but mostly by a non-embarrassing margin, which I will absolutely take.)

More to the point, though, that kind of wild rapture that fell on me out of nowhere while I was watching those ESPN3 games? That's never gone away for me. I have never stopped being amazed and delighted by all this, and I have never stopped being amazed and delighted to be here.

Like, hell yes I'll go to the middle of nowhere and watch a pageant queen chase discs in her sash. I'll drive hours in snow to play till 4 a.m. in floral tights and a bikini. I'll sleep on my friend's childhood bedroom rug while half of Argentina Ultimate Club camps in the yard.

But also, hell yes to the daily stuff. I still love watching discs fly. I love sprinting around. And — look, I TOLD YOU I WAS EARNEST, I am in POETRY SCHOOL — I love, very much, sharing hours a week of my life with people I care about,

in a world that belongs totally to itself but has this continuity of losses and victories and things to work toward you can feel with your whole heart. It's so basic — like, what I am describing is sports — but I never had that, and coming to it late, I feel very grateful for it.

It's the best, right? It's the best. I'm gonna go box.