Three Sundays ago while scraping my cramped and out-of-shape body off Washington Park after a morning of flag football, a diverse mix of men, women, adults and college students filed on to take our place.
There was no football. There were no flags. There was only a Frisbee.
No, it wasn’t a massive game of keep away from Sparky, the family dog. This was Ultimate Frisbee.
 Liz Lim (foreground) of the Ultimate Frisbee team Axis of C’ville does all she can to knock down the Frisbee and break up an offensive rally in a rare losing effort against Amp, a team from Philadelphia. At the upcoming National Club Championships, Axis will have a chance for revenge. |
Ultimate Frisbee, better known to those who play as "Ultimate," combines features of rugby, soccer, basketball and American Football. Ultimate is played by two seven-player squads with the objective to score by catching a pass in the end zone similar to football. One major difference is that a player must stop running while in possession of the disc, resulting in nonstop movement by the other 13 players. The pace of the game requires the stamina of sprinters as well as the endurance of cross-country runners.
That afternoon at the park merely featured a pick-up game, but for the local residents who make up the Axis of C’ville, a Charlottesville Ultimate squad, the stakes are much higher.
"We’re practicing twice a week," says one of three tri-captains for Axis, Natasha Sienitsky, who, along with Oliver Platts-Mills and Kevin Kusy, helped form the team more than a year ago. "On Sunday we have much longer practices ranging from three to four hours."
The practices include stretching, wind sprints, hill climbs and strategy, as Ultimate uses not just physicality but planning.
And the game plan for Axis seems to be paying off.
In September, the squad finished atop the Capital section (Virginia, D.C., Maryland) and second in the Mid-Atlantic Region, making them one of the top 16 co-ed teams in the country. They will now compete at the National Club Championships in Sarasota, Florida, this upcoming weekend.
"It’s a tremendous accomplishment," says Sienitsky. "We’ve been working hard to get to this point."
"We really had rock star women and not enough men," says Sienitsky of a team that she and Platts-Mills created with a core base in Charlottesville. "So we decided to join forces with [Kusy] and a bunch of people from a men’s team in D.C." Six players still drive down every weekend from D.C. for practice. For them, it’s more than just practice and a game but also a time to be among friends.
"Ultimate ties us together," says Platts–Mills. "I don’t think we would know each other otherwise."
According to Sienitsky, the team’s dynamic is unique. "There’s 25 total people on the team and most of us have been playing competitive Ultimate for quite some time. It’s something that brought us all together—otherwise I don’t know if we would know each other. We have a stay-at-home dad on the team; we have UVA undergraduates, grad students, engineers, doctors and teachers."
The group does, however, feature a few familiar faces, including four couples in addition to a husband who joined the team this year to fill in after his wife took a hiatus after giving birth to their second child.
So now it is off to Florida, with the chance to win a title as best in North America. They’ve booked their own hotel rooms, paid out of pocket for their own airfare, and used their own vacation days just to try to win a title that won’t reap roster bonuses or parades down Emmet Street.
They leave for Florida not only because the sport has meaning for them, but also because they genuinely care about each other as people.
All this surely gets to the heart of the phrase "the love of the game."
Wes McElroy hosts "The Final Round" on ESPN AM840. Monday-Friday, 4pm-6pm.