I was approached by the tournament director of the Chennai Heat Beach Ultimate tournament in India. He wanted to know if his tournament could be BULA approved? He likes the Discraft discount and he also values the legitimacy BULA approval brings. It allows him to get more international teams to participate.
He told me that the tournament would adhere to all the BULA criteria except…they play 7-on-7 Beach Ultimate..
As far as I know this is the only 7-on-7 tournament in existence and since time was of the issue (the tournament is 2-4 October) we allowed them to be BULA approved this year. It will help the growth of the sport in India.
However it brings up an interesting question: should BULA accept 7-on-7 Beach Ultimate as another version of the sport?
I kind of like the idea. Field dimensions would obviously have to increase though…opens up some new beach defensive options and challenges the O to work that much harder.
Absolutely.
BULA’s mission:
“To assist, educate, and promote the Spirit and the Game of Beach Ultimate worldwide”.
It doesn’t say anything there about the number of players on the team!
Why not?
The most important thing is that people play Frisbee on the beach, I don’t care much about how.
Official tournaments will (hopefully) keep the 5vs5, but every other tournament should be able to do pretty much anything (as long as they adhere to SOTG of course).
There are several reasons why we might not want to support it. One of the reasons is that we do not have enough resources. We have focussed on 5-on-5 but if we also support 4-on-4 and 7-on-7 we should have Continental and World Championships for those variants as well.
Another reason to not do it is because it is best, from a promoting point of view, to have a single sport. Marketing of various variants waters down the impact that one can have. If we want Beach Ultimate to grow, it is much better to have one format. Not 3.
I am not saying we shouldn’t, but I also don’t want people to think it is easy to do. We are all volunteers that already put in a lot of time.
Patrick
Hi, I’m one of the tournament directors for Chennai Heat 2009.
Yes, we do play with the regular grass field size. It does bring about various new challenges. For example, how do you throw a cup on the handlers? The cup cannot catch up with the disc like on a grass field where movement of the players is much faster. Here, we’re experimenting with dynamically forming cups instead of the same 3 people on the cup, etc.
Patrick, you bring up a valid point. Maybe we can help with creating some of the material required for a 7-on-7 support? We’re doing it anyway, and maybe you can reuse some of our material?
Manu