Now What?

Looks like I can't keep my promise, again, about updating this blog on time. Life is too crazy now to write a decent entry, though I have started the promised second take on D-III nationals. I'll get it up here eventually.

I wanted to take this moment, on the eve of my departure from my parent's home in Ohio, to reflect on what happens now. I started playing real ultimate in 2006, and my last year of college eligibility is going to be spent in California working through a program called Lutheran Volunteer Corps at a nonprofit in Berkeley and living on a small stipend with other volunteers in Oakland.

I don't know what I'm going to do with this blog, save get that last D-III post up. I like the idea and the name, and I'm not going to stop writing now, just you probably won't hear so much from me about college ultimate. Maybe other people will fill in with that (you interested? email bfultimate at gmail.com and let's talk). I'll figure out what to do and will post stuff here sometimes-- I like how some ultimate blogs write about tournaments and very individual-viewpoints/experiences type of stuff...stories, pictures, etc., so maybe I'll do some of that on here.

Thing is, I don't really know how big of a role ultimate will play in my life out there. The Bay Area has arguably the best ultimate in the world (see: Worlds 2010), but I am missing the summer club season, for starters, and I don't know if I will have the money or the ultimate talent to play on a club team next season, or if I will even be around for another club season (the program ends in August 2011, and who knows where I'll end up after that). I am planning to join a winter league and see what happens then. The prospect of not being on a team is tough--it's been tough already. I've been a member of a tight-knit, wonderful little college team for the past four years. Ultimate was my life. I missed maybe two practices over four years, and I never missed a tournament. My only friends, basically, were on the team or had played at one point. I went to eight solid tournaments in a row one fall, both college and club, and have had other similar, some would say grueling, tournament schedules in a season. I lived with teammates for two years at school. When captaining, it seemed like sometimes the only thing I could think about was frisbee and the team. Leaving all of that has been hard. Anyone who graduates from college feels this about lots of things, I think, and for me it's frisbee. There's no going back to that ever, either. I will never again live within a four-block radius of all my teammates, I'll never have the ease of standing in the middle of campus with a disc and waiting until someone I know walks by and tosses with me, I'll never drive 22 hours to get to a tournament after midsems week, I'll never eat every dinner after every practice with my team again, and I'll probably never sleep 10 to a hotel room at a tournament to save money. It's still strange to think that this fall I won't be playing frisbee regularly, and it will be doubly strange to check my team's score reporter sometime and not know anything about the games I see there. I have learned, though, in the past four years, that the ultimate community is welcoming and surprising in what it can do for you sometimes, and I think I will continue to find that wherever I go and wherever I play.

There's more to say about transitioning from college ultimate to...ultimate in life, with jobs and moving and money concerns, and also transitioning from college to club, or from open/women's in college to coed club, which I find a lot of people I know doing. I'll try to write more about some or all of those things when I can.