Hi all!  My name is Michelle Ng and I am one of the captains of Texas Showdown, who will be representing the USA in the women’s division at Worlds in a couple of weeks.  We are so excited for this opportunity and are looking forward to representing the US ultimate community on a world stage.  This is our team’s first time playing at Worlds and we have been hard at work since January preparing for this week of competition.

A little bit about me and my perspective: I am a former captain of the UC Berkeley and University of Texas women’s teams, as well as a former captain of Bay Area Slackjaw.  Last year was my first season on Showdown, and I am privileged to be captaining the team this year with my good friend Tina Woodings, and one of my ultimate mentors (and outgoing captain) Cara Crouch.  I am a (mostly) O-line handler and I love all things ultimate- you’d be hard pressed to find me without a disc in my hands.  In the offseason, I run several college women’s tournaments around the country.  My passion is the growth and development of women’s ultimate.

Our team’s path to qualifying for Worlds was a bit of a rocky one.  We had a rough pre-Series season last year, with an extremely poor showing at Colorado Cup, and less-than-impressive performances at Chesapeake Open and Chicago Heavyweights.  We then went undefeated at Sectionals and beat Regional rival Atlanta Ozone for the first time in our team’s history to win the South Region.  At the Club Championships, we beat Ozone and Zeitgeist twice each en route to a 5th place finish to qualify for Worlds.

Our Worlds roster is a mix of our 2009 roster (some of whom will be retiring after Worlds), new pickups for our 2010 roster (including Amanda Berens, a former Showdown captain, who is back after a year of traveling), and two members of our ATL-pod, Kate Wilson and Angela Lin.  We had the privilege of hosting Texas Shootout in May and seeing fellow Worlds-qualifiers Fury, Riot, and Zeitgeist, and then made the trip to Boston Invite two weeks ago, going 6-1 including a come-from-behind win against the vastly underseeded Lotus (who is basically the Capitals).  We played LeedsLeedsLeeds in a preview of a Worlds pool play game, and we are looking forward to playing them again, as well as seeing a bevy of new teams.

Something that makes our team unique is that we have players in a number of Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston, College Station, and San Antonio.  As someone who is still relatively new to this team, I am amazed at how well this works.  This requires a lot of commitment from our players to work on individual skills in our “pods,” and also to drive hours for our 10-hour weekend practices.  This might sound like a lot of work (and it is!), but the camaraderie on this team is unlike any other team I’ve ever been on.  We love each other and celebrate our differences as what make us a unique, tightly-knit team.

For us, Worlds is an opportunity to do what we love best: playing ultimate with each other.  While we have trained hard and want to do well at this tournament, this week is just another (awesome) step in building our team and our program.  We’re still a relatively young team and we’re anxious to carve a permanent place for ourselves among the nation’s elite.  To view our roster and read more about our team’s mission, please visit our new website at: http://showdownultimate.com.  Family, friends, and fans- we love you and appreciate your support!

I have been the Chair of the WFDF Ultimate Rules Committee since April 2009, and a member of the committee since June 2008. The Committee is made up of Ultimate players from a variety of countries, including USA, England, Germany, Australia and Japan. The bulk of the redrafting and editing is managed by the Rules Secretariat, a group of five experienced and dedicated committee members, four of which were involved in off field roles at The World Games in 2009.

The process for deciding how we redraft and amend the rules is generally based on several factors:

• making the rules as easy to understand as possible
• reflecting how the game is actually played
• reducing unnecessary stoppages
• tying up any loop holes we discover
• trying to align with the USA Ultimate (UPA) Rules

We have members who are on both the WFDF committee and UPA SRC so we are in quite a good position to be able to remove as many unnecessary differences between the WFDF and UPA Rules. For a sport with such a relatively small player base it seems strange to have two different sets of rules being used. I hope that one day we could all use the same rules, but I’m not sure how we will manage that. At the very least it would be good to remove as many as the noticeable differences between the two rules sets, which I think we are moving towards.

I got involved in the rules committee because I was quite passionate about the rules. As a self refereed sport I think that knowing and understanding the rules is hugely important. Sadly it’s almost all I think about. I recall waking up one night and fretting that I didn’t know how to resolve a specific scenario! I find the best way to learn the rules is to look them up. When something happens on the field that you aren’t sure about, don’t just rely on hearsay to know what to do. After the game, grab a copy of the rules and look it up.

I have been watching with interest what is happening in America with the use of Observers. It seems that there is a push for more and more of the calls to be in the control of the Observers, rather than the players. To me, this is a move away from Ultimate being a self-refereed sport, and to my knowledge, is not something WFDF is considering.

At World Games WFDF used Line Assistants to help players make calls about in/out and up/down (as well as make hand signals of what calls the players were making for the benefit of spectators/commentators). I thought this was a really good step that enabled players to make calls based on the best advice available.

I am interested in seeing if we can add to this role by allowing players to ask the Line Assistants questions about specific rules, but still leave the final decision up to the players. If players aren’t sure what a rule, is or what the correct interpretation is, they could ask a Line Assistant. The Line Assistant wouldn’t give their opinion on what had actually happened in a play, rather they could describe the rule that was relevant to that particular incident and leave the players to make the final decision. Too often players make calls that are actually not based on the rules.

My hope is that we can have a system where players can self referee, based on the most accurate information possible. So if someone isn’t sure if the disc was caught in bounds – ask someone who had a good perspective. If players can’t agree if the stall count is supposed to come in on 6 or 9, ask someone who knows. But I think these types of roles would only be needed at high level championships.

But that is as far as I would like it to go. I don’t think that self refereeing is just some nice feel good idea about how you can play sport; I actually think it is a really good way to fairly adjudicate sport. The part of playing a self refereed sport that I enjoy the most is that players are never trying to do something illegal while the referee isn’t looking, or faking that something happened when it didn’t.

Admittedly self-refereeing doesn’t always work and it can be abused by those who want to cheat, but referees don’t always get calls right either. However it should be difficult for just one player to bias a game with bad calls, as EVERYONE should act as a referee. It’s the one thing that I see that annoys me the most – players knowing their teammate did the wrong thing, or made the wrong call, and not saying anything. If you see a teammate make a bad call – you should tell them!

Note regarding WFDF Rules:

WFDF Rules will be used at WUCC 2010 in Prague. Players can find these rules here: http://www.wfdf.org/index.php?page=rules/index.htm.

There is also a new WFDF Rules Website here: http://www.wfdf.org/rules_ultimate which highlights the differences between USA Ultimate and WFDF Rules (also available here in PDF format: http://www.wfdf.org/rules/WFDF_2009_v_UPA_11_Rules.pdf)

The key new differences are regarding “Travel” and “Marking” Infractions. Videos for these rules can be found on the Rules Website, and here: http://www.youtube.com/user/wfdfultimaterules

Reuben Berg is the Chair of the WFDF Ultimate Rules Committee. He was the Captain of Australia at AOUC 2007, as well as the Assistant Coach of the Dingos and WUGC 2008, and of Australia at The World Games 2009.

Dear Ultimate Community-

A year ago, I wrote in this space to introduce Ultimate Peace and to ask for money…and it worked, we made it happen – and it’s genuinely no exaggeration to say that you all played a huge part – and it was amazing. A group of American Ultimate players and coaches travelled to the Middle East and hosted a series of clinics for local youth – Palestinian and Israeli Jewish and Arab Israeli, together – to introduce them to the sport of Ultimate and the respect between players respect that’s inherent in the sport. The kids learned, they played together, they self-officiated and at the end of the day they truly were excited about getting to play more in the months to come. You can take a look at http://tinyurl.com/UPNews and http://tinyurl.com/UPPix to get the tip of the iceberg

At the same time, as we were implementing our plan, we were also recognizing how we could do better. Many of us were better at teaching Ultimate than we were at team building and helping break down cultural barriers (not surprisingly). We were incredibly successful given our naiveté…but we agreed that the next time around, we needed to do some things differently to be truly effective. And we agreed that it was absolutely critical that there be a next time: we recognized that, without appropriate follow-up, nothing we’d begun would last.

With all that in our heads, we’re planning to make this year’s Ultimate Peace even better. Instead of one-day clinics, we will be hosting a week-long camp for 120 local Jewish and Palestinian youth. The players will learn and play Ultimate, but also experience a full week with their fellow campers. We are also working on leaving behind an infrastructure of Ultimate – neighborhood/school teams, and a regional league where they can continue to play and connect.

This year’s Camp UP will be amazing, but it won’t be cheap. As tacky as it is, I’m writing this to ask you to consider lending your financial support. I know that’s not an easy thing to do, but please consider what it is that you’d be a part of. We all know that Ultimate is a unique and wonderful sport – you wouldn’t be visiting this website if you didn’t. Ultimate Peace is literally taking our sport and trying to change the world with it. Not a big part of the world, just 120 kids, but, still…isn’t that worth supporting?

Please visit our website, http://www.ultimatepeace.org/, whether or not you are considering donating money. Lastly, if you know of anyone who might be interested in or moved by this – parents, friends, etc. – please talk to them about our organization and website. Thank you so much for considering this and supporting us – financially or otherwise – in what we’re trying to do.