Frisbee, for Goodness Sake
So, I haven’t really written much about Ultimate Frisbee here, but it is really a significant part of my life. Fortunately for me, Madison is a HUGE Ultimate town, and I think I heard at one point that there are over 3,000 people playing Fribee in Madison. Whatever the numbers are, there are still enough people playing in the summer–when the majority of the 30,000 undergraduates leave town– to support an advanced league (15 teams), two recreation leagues (26 teams total), and a beginners’ league (11 teams). There are also Spring and Fall leagues that attract a large number of people, and some tenatious players even find indoor space to rent in the winter, when the ground is too frozen to play.
Anyway, in addition to league play, there are also the occasional tournaments, like yesterday’s 8th annual Dick & Jane charity tournament. The playing was awesome, the goodwill abundant, and the weather was perfect. It was so fantastic to have a really good reason to sit on my duff next to Lake Monona in the shade of a huge, old cottonwood tree, eating my lunch with a bunch of friends. That reason, of course, being that I had just played three games of Ultimate back-to-back, and I was really tired, and I needed to sit on my duff for a while, and since I was there anyway, it might as well be next to Lake Monona in the shade of a huge, old cottonwood tree, eating my lunch with a bunch of friends.
But the really great reason for sitting on my duff like that was that while I was doing something very selfish, and getting an amazing (over-)workout, and hanging out with friends, and enjoying the beautiful weather, the tournament is a charity fund-raiser. While I went out and had a great day, the 12 participating teams raised over $1,700 for the Madison Area Food Pantry Gardening Project, which collects fresh veggies for the local food pantries. How cool is that?
UPDATE: I added a post with some photos.
