Viareggio, Italy

06-07/09 USM: Uppsala, Sweden (coaching)
14-15/09 SM Dam (Women's nationals): Linköping, Sweden
21-23/09 Burla Beach Cup: Viareggio, Italy
26-29/09 eXtended European Ultimate Championship Finals: Bordeaux, France (watching/volunteering)
04-06/10 Oktoberfest Hat: München, Germany

I was in Italy for the Burla Beach Cup, where I picked up with a London-based league team called PAF, which is short of Pyramus and Frisbee. After every match we acted out the play with members of the other team. For this tournament they made the team name Pafacino, since we were in Italy.

This is a sand tournament on a beautiful beach with a sweet view of crazy mountains.

The beach, pine forest and mountains. It was the end of the season, so most of the chairs were put away and there war room for 8 pitches. Photo from here.

The first day of playing was a bit rough, as we lost our first two games 15-0 and 15-1. We closed out the day losing by a much smaller margin, plus I scored the least exciting Callahan ever. A Callahan is when a player catches a disc that is thrown by the other team to score a goal. These are fairly rare and usually require athletic moves. I didn't have to jump or layout. Just took a step and caught the disc right above my head with two hands. That evening my team played a lot of monopoly draw (a card version of monopoly).

The second day went marginally better: losing 15-0 and 15-3 in the first two games. The party that night was pretty cool. The theme was Big Circus and my whole team went in animal onesies.  There were aerial silk performers, sweet jams, and weird foam to dance in.

Big cats and misfits (penguin, owl, non-onsie zebra, and a cow) at the party. Photo from Mic.

The third and last day of playing was really nice. We lost to a team from Kopenhagen, but it was the best we played all tournament. They were really nice opponents- it was definitely one of the best spirited matches of the weekend We lied to one of our teammates about what time the game was, so he'd show up on time (only he and I were there when time started running... I'll have to lie to the whole team next time). After losing all of the matches, we faced off against another London team for the game for not-last place, which we won! I got my toe broken, but we won! (It didn't hurt that badly... I didn't notice until I was swimming in the ocean before finals and saw that it was crazy-purple).

The team then sat together to watch the finals, eating and sharing a massive watermelon that we had gotten for free from a local shop keeper. We just asked about it after we had checked out and he motioned for us to take it. Bonus points for the language barrier! A teammate carved it up arranged the slices on a disc and passed it around to other teams. Perfect in the sun! There are photos of this somewhere on the internet, but I decided to go ahead and publish the posts, instead of waiting for them to come out.

Teammates enjoying watermelon! Photo from Mic.

I spent the day after the tournament reading on the beach before carpooling with other ultimate players to Bordeaux. 

Linköping, Sverige

Five consecutive weekends of ultimate doesn't leave much time for blogging (especially when you have to wait for other people to post photos), so I've decided to have an individual post for Swedish nationals and lump the other three weeks into a massive post.

06-07/09 USM: Uppsala, Sweden (coaching)
14-15/09 SM Dam (Women's nationals): Linköping, Sweden
21-22/09 Burla Beach Cup (picking up with british people I don't really know): Viareggio, Italy
26-29/09 eXtended European Ultimate Championship Finals: Bordeaux, France (watching/volunteering)
04-06/10 Oktoberfest Hat: München, Germany

*all of the photos in this post are stolen from Ultimate Sweden's Instagram*

My team Swedish Fish won silver at the swedish national club championships this weekend! It's not gold, but I am really proud of how we played and considering our two match-ups against the champs were 15-7 and 17-5 in pool play and the finals, respectively, they deserved it. There were only a four teams and it is not uncommon for the tournament to get canceled for a lack of teams (last year there were only 3) and all of the four teams were really combinations of multiple teams. We joined forces with some young superstars from a suburb north of Stockholm.

There were only 2 games each day (3 pool games, then placement matches) We started the tournament down 0-4 to Akka, but went on an 8 point streak to take half! This was really good. I mean Akka is a good team, but our team really needed a positive first game. Emilia, one of my swedish besties recently moved to Lund for school and now plays with Akka. After a little bit of good-natured trash talking, she got to eat some of the pumpkin muffins that I had baked for the Fish.

Then we fell to E6 in our second match of the day. It wasn't really close, but we figured out some ways to elevate out game.

We had sushi for dinner (followed by hamburgers for those of us with appetites) and met up with another team at a pub to hang out for a bit. There are very few ultimate tournaments in Sweden, so it was nice to catch up with players I'd met throughout the year.

We started Sunday with a match against Örebro. They have a lot of girls from the U23 national team and their girls often play open youth tournaments and they also beat Akka and lost to E6, so we didn't really know what to expect. The wind picked up during warm-ups, so we played zone the whole game. We took the match 15-1, with time to spare, so we had extra time to rest before finals.

Looking super serious after winning 15-1.

We lost substantially in the finals, which was not unexpected. E6's attitude towards the whole tournament was really irksome. They essentially felt entitled to the gold (and the one world's bid sweden is guaranteed) and wanted to do as little work for it as possible. They only wanted to play round robin (no semis or finals). We had agreed on a match to 17 for the placement games, but they tried to get the rules changed right before the match to play to less. I mean, it's great that you are awesome, but the rules say you have to score 17 points to so to worlds, so stop complaining and just play!

If you want to brush up on your swedish or see a photo with me in it in the local paper, you can check out this article about how there are no referees in ultimate.

Stockholm & Godegård, Sweden + London & Manchester, GB

This past Spring my dad came to visit me in Sweden. The true purpose of the visit was to watch Premier League games in the UK, but he flew in and out of Stockholm, so we also got to take in a Swedish league game, sight see in Stockholm and visit the town that our ancestors emigrated from in the nineteenth century. A lot of planning and research went in to figuring out this trip: we tried to find a weekend where there were games on Saturday, Sunday and a weekday for which we could get tickets.

Stockholm
Dad was with me in Sthlm for a day before we went to England for our soccer-vacation. It was rainy, but I tried to squeeze some Swedish things in: a bus ride around Gammla stan and Södermalm, a tour of Systembolaget, a tour of KTH (well the library and quad... no hiking up to my office in the M building). The sun came out and we walked around Stureplan/Nybroplan on our way to Stadion, the 1912 Olympic stadium to watch Djurgården IF play. The stadium is brick and beautiful, but the team is moving to a stadium in the outskirts because the field doesn't comply with FIFA regulations.

Fika. Swedish afternoon coffee break.

One of the quads at KTH.

GB

Peter Crouch: awkward looking in real life, too.

We flew to London the next morning where we were graciously hosted by Kathryn (our families go way back) and her husband, Richie, a wine writer. We "went for a curry" for dinner then turned in. The following day, Dad and I walked around South Bank (and got some Krispy Kreme... they are fancy in England) before heading to Loftis Road to watch QPR play against Stoke. This wasn't an ideal game, but tickets were available and there were two Americans on Stoke's roster at the time (Shea and Cameron - I'm pretty sure I was the only person in the stadium who cheered when Cameron was subbed in late in the game).

"Enjoying" a pint at the local...
my super smokey microbrew was a bad choice. 

Hanging out with the (replica) dinos at the Natural History museum... well worth the visit just for the architecture
 + PROTIP: they have eduroam wifi.

We spent the next day in London, we couldn't get tickets to the Tottenham game that I was targeting (I'll have to go to an MLS game, if I want to see Dempsey play), but we watched it in a pub. Dad loves talking to strangers about soccer. I don't remember the chronology, but we also went to the Natural History Museum to check out the dinos and the British Museum to look at the stolen artifacts. Richie roasted chicken and vegetables and picked out a with a nice dessert wine, which he needed to taste for a certification he is doing, to pair with the strawberry trifle dad and I picked up at the grocery store (that seemed so casual in comparison).

I went into the ManU supporters only Trafford Pub,
but now they are making me accessorize!

We then headed north to Manchester to see Man U play Aston Villa. We had to join the supporters' club in order to get tickets. One of my dad's teammates and a lifetime ManU fan was also at the match, so we met up with him and his girlfriend before the match to talk soccer. We are not really Man U fans: in England, I like certain players and tend to follow them as they move around Europe (especially the few Americans who make it over there) and don't like the big money clubs and I'm not sure, but I think dad just likes football. Nevertheless, dad bought a scarf and I did not appreciate getting draped with it. Van Persie had a beautiful hat trick (including the "EPL goal of the year" according to my dad) against (american) keeper Brad Guzan. Man U clenched the League title by winning the match, so the crowd was really happy. They sang and chanted all game long. It was a crazy fan experience - very different than that at QPR! We caught a flight back to Sweden the next morning.

The view from our seats.

Godegård

After our UK soccer extravaganza, we returned to Sweden for 36 hours before dad flew home. We watched Bayern trounce Barcelona in my local pub, then work up early the next morning to road trip 3 hours to Godegård, the town where my dad's great-grandparents emigrated from. Armed with some cursory genealogy research (thanks LDS church), we hit up the cute old church and cemetery. We knew the names' of parents of the relatives who settled in Pennsylvania, but could not find their headstones. There were lots of Karlssons and Perssons, but we were looking for Larssons and Jonssons. We found a few potential relatives, but no one whose names we had. It was really fun searching for our roots; it felt so detective-y.

The town had several informational placards posted (all but one were in Swedish), so we were able to gather a little bit of history of the town. It was big in iron/steel and the smelter shut down about the time that the family came to the US, so we think they may have left because there were no jobs, especially since they settled in a metal smelting area of PA. We also saw the old festival place (now a field) and missed the annual festival by a week (it was May 1).

The sole restaurant/gas station/store.

Cute little church. We couldn't go inside, because as far as I could tell,
the guy with the keys would be there tomorrow. 

Some history in English, so I could confirm what
 I "understood" in Swedish

The manor house.

Uppsala, Sweden

Last weekend kicked off the first of what could be five consecutive weekends of Ultimate!

06-07/09 USM: Uppsala, Sweden (coaching)
14-15/09 SM Dam (Women's nationals): Linköping, Sweden
21-22/09 Burla Beach Cup (picking up with british people I don't really know): Viareggio, Italy
26-29/09 eXtended European Ultimate Championship Finals: Bordeaux, France (watching/volunteering, maybe)
04-06/10 Oktoberfest Hat: München, Germany

After Oktoberfest, I do not know what I am doing or where I will be. I am not 100% sold on going to XEUCF. I have some friends who will be there playing and it seemed silly to fly back north for such a short amount of time, but I think it is also a little weird to go to a tournament to not play. (feedback appreciated in the comments or other channels) I may also have a job interview that could screw all this up...

Three days before I was scheduled to come back to Sweden in Mid-August and was really questioning my decision to do so (more on that in another post... maybe), I got an email from a guy in the Swedish ultimate federation who does a bunch of youth stuff in Stockholm asking if I wanted to get school team ready for the Ungdom Sverige Mästerskap, USM (youth national championship). I had helped at some school demonstrations where we take over a few gym classes at a school and teach throwing and do some drills and had kept score and reminded kids of the rules at the Stockholm school tournament in May (basically like instructional observing), but I had never had a group on my own before. I decided to try it out - It sounded like fun and I would get paid in "Ultimate Money" (to get around wage taxes, the money gets donated to my sports club, which them applies it to my costs such as tournament fees and jerseys), plus it sort of gave me a purpose for being wherever I was during my job search (and make interviewing in Europe much easier)... I mean it was lovely hanging out with family, but I didn't have very much going on in NC.

The team I worked with had some Ultimate experience: it had been taught in their gym classes for the past two years, they actually won the school tournament in May, and they had played in an indoor tournament somewhere at some point, but most of the schools in that competition had only recently picked up the sport (in one case we did an instruction on Tuesday and they brought 3 teams to the tournament on Thursday). They had some notion of the rules, but the rules used at the previous tournaments were not standard WFDF rules (in indoor you count to 8 and can drop the pull and at the school tournament you could have a meter of "disc space," since they were new throwers), so I really had to fight against these old rules. They also had basic throwing skills, but we worked a lot on taking your time and throwing flatter. We didn't make much progress on making a stack or executing set plays.

A practice. In cuts! (all at once and too close, but still cuts!)

The school is located in Husby, which you may have heard about as the site of the riots in Sweden a few months back. The gym coach their likes Ultimate because of spirit and self-refereeing and is even trying to incorporate some of the themes of Ultimate into other subjects at the school. One of the keys for the week was being a good ambassador (the others were holding the force, running up and down instead of side to side, and at one point "stay friends"). There were teams from all over Sweden (okay, not really the north) and the kids needed to show them that they weren't the type of people who set cars on fire. We had some attitude issues at the beginning, but by the last game things were going really well.

An unflattering photo of me with the squad. Screen shot used for attributing the source and for the amusement of gained by reading all the hashtags, which the ultimate Sweden account manager loves. My favorite: Sport with Swag!

We practiced an hour a day four days a week for two weeks, but that was not quite enough time to catch up to the level of play of teams that are part of established Frisbee Klubs in Sweden. We almost won a game (for bronze), but blew a 6-4 lead, losing 6-7 to Sigtuna, which is located just north of Stockholm (my club sometimes holds joint practices and combines with them when we are low on numbers for tournaments). The comeback is partially a result of them going straight up on our flick hucker (basically our default action) and us running out of gas. I'm so proud of the kids for making it that far - most of the team had never played on a sports team before. Their attitude was so much better in that game, maybe it was because they were able to get some more points on the board (we only scored 6 total in 3 games on Saturday), but they cheered, "peppa upp"-ed each other, and didn't get hung up on their (or their teammates') mistakes. The last game really made the whole experience worth it. AND it continues the Stockholm-Sigtuna rivalry!

I tried to speak some Swedish with the kids (they didn't laugh like my friends do), but was largely unsuccessful. I would start a sentence in Swedish then toss in some English for the words that I didn't know and I think that was just more confusing.

Will update with more photos, when/if they get emailed to me.