Ultimate experience

This weekend I got to play two days of Ultimate Frisbee*!

How did I get linked up with not just an Ultimate team, but an awesome Ultimate team, here in this big big city? Let's hear it for yaaaay church! One of the guys that does production with Kurt is the captain of a team largely made up of NCC'ers. I was first invited to play this past fall, but with us being new to the area (i.e. easily intimidated by new groups and experiences) and being parents (i.e. kids with sickness and variable sleep habits are easy excuses), I never got out for a game.

Enter Spring and a few sweet folks at church asking "When are you going to come play with us? We'd love to have you!" and I finally make my DC debut with 3 weeks left in the season. It'd been seven years since I had last played a full-on game. So I was a little rusty. So rusty that two minutes into getting on the field, I got called for a foul. (The feisty red-head I was guarding pointedly reminded me "This is not a contact sport!" My hands and I had forgotten.) I quickly got back my sense of Ultimate space and didn't keep us from winning the game.

Fast forward two weeks and it's the weekend of both the round robin to determine the championship bracket and the championship tournament. We had nice weather. We had rainy weather. We had mud everywhere. And we won all of our games! ¡Somos los campeones!

So I feel really lucky. Not because I happened to cut to the right place at the right time and scored three points (seriously, I had to be told I was in the end zone every time. Wait, is end zone even the right word??). Not because I got to take home a DC Division Championship disc (which is awesome - what would I do with a trophy?). I feel lucky because I'm two for two in getting to fellowship with cool folks from church via a sports team.

In Iowa I played slow pitch softball. Every Friday night during the summer I got to hang out with people from our church. And so did my family. During those games I got know faces and families. There were high school kids, couples, families with quadruple the kids we had, parents with kids old enough to be on the team, the whole gamut. And all of those folks became people we knew. It was a huge fellowship connection point.

Now I'm playing Ultimate in DC. The demographics are different (I'm the only player with offspring), but the potential for connection, even after just four games, has been equally exciting. It's one more way of putting together the church family picture, and I'm lovin' it. For this girl, it doesn't get much better than when play time = social time with lots of fun (which often = Jesus) lovin' people.

*Apparently here in DC "Frisbee is a registered trademark of the Wham-o corporation" is not a pat sound bite that's recited by everyone who's picked up a disc more than one time. The former is what I got first time I walked into an Iowa State Ultimate Club practice and innocently stated "I'm so excited to play Frisbee!"