Ultimate Club 2012

The past year has been an exciting and good year for ultimate (frisbee) at Wits; albeit at times fairly exasperating for members of the organising “committee”. Indeed this time last year there was no such thing as an ultimate club at Wits and outside of a small committed core of players the sport was all but unknown amongst the greater Wits community. In a space of a year we’ve established a space in the sporting circles at Wits and I believe a much greater proportion of the Wits community now knows of our sport than was the case a year ago.

Allegedly there was an ultimate club at Wits in the early nineties and games were played at the old Charles Skeen stadium, the site of the new Science stadium. However this club did not last and the latest incarnation of ultimate at Wits has no relation to this earlier form and had its beginnings with a climatology MSc student, Michael Weston, who started organising weekly informal games of “pickup” in 2009. These games of pickup were erratic in nature with some weeks attracting a large crowd while on other days there were only 3 to 5 players! However, over 2010 the games became more regular in their occurrence and a weekly game of pickup was played every Friday on the Walton Milton cricket oval.

We kick-started our drive to become an official Wits sports during O-week by having a stand in OMSH and signing up as many potential new players as possible...this was aided by the fact that we were the only free “sports club” and by the end of the week we had 180 emails! In May we had the opportunity to present our case, for the establishment of a new ultimate club at Wits, to the powers that be (Wits Sports Admin and Sports Council) at the second WSC meeting of the year. Our presentation was a success, thanks to an awesome presentation by our first official chairman Dale Kitchin for 2011, who had to weather a few tough questions from the floor. The final vote was unanimous and a new Wits sports club was born; WUUC!!! But in 2012, on our first official year running as an official sport club we will have a minimum membership fee, fortunately we hardly have any costs to run the club.

We as Wits Ultimate pride ourselves for being the second University, after UCT to have Ultimate recognised as an official club! Ultimate (Frisbee) is not just “that sport where you just stand and throw the disc to each other” or “throwing the disc to your dog on the beach” as some of our fellow students responded when asked about the sport. It is basically a 7 aside team sport, 2 girls and 5 guys a side (as per the rules we used at nationals). In South Africa Ultimate is very small so we are not able to field an all girls or all guys competitive team hence the mixed teams. The playing field is divided into two 18m x 34m end zones and the main play zone (which is between these two zones) measuring to 64m x 37m square. The aim of the game is to catch the disc in the other team zone, where you only have 10 seconds to release the disc and can’t run with the disc.

Throughout the year Wits participated in a number of social and competitive tournaments. The first of these was the annual Swinburne Hat tournament in February 2011, held on a farm in the Free State. Hat tournaments are social tournaments where individual players enter and teams are drawn out of a hat. These tournaments are a great way for beginners (like ourselves) to play with more experienced players and pick up new skills...in addition they’re just a huge amount of fun and involve a fair amount of partying and general (frisbee induced) debauchery!! Next up was the major competitive tournament in the SA ultimate calendar...Nationals!

A team consisting of Wits players and players from Ultitude (JHB ultimate) came together to form a team of twelve players to take part in the gruelling three day event and emerged in thirteenth place out of sixteen teams; not bad for a team made up mostly of people who had been playing ultimate for less than a year!
Another highlight of the year was the Xefina beach ultimate hat tournament held outside Maputo in Mozambique. A contingent of 8 Wits players made the long and gruelling road trip to Maputo and spent a memorable weekend consuming copious amounts of seafood and playing ultimate in some of the windiest conditions any of us had ever experienced!

In addition to these tournaments Wits Ultimate has organised and hosted many weekend tournaments with our local Gauteng teams, notably Northern lights, Ult Control Delete, Orange farm and the team from the African Leadership Academy (a high school).

2012 promises to be an even more exciting and possibly tougher year for Wits Ultimate. The club will have to prove its staying power to Sports Admin while growing the sport on campus and increasing awareness about ultimate amongst the greater Wits community.

Practices are on Fridays at the Walter Milton Oval “the Bozzoli field”, we meet there at 16:30 for 17:00 with practice ending at 18:00.
For more information contact us, you can join us on facebook “Wits Ultimate Frisbee” or email us at witsfrisbee@gmail.com.