Author: patrick

The Subic Bay Beach Ultimate Frisbee Challenge

The Subic Bay Beach Ultimate Frisbee Challenge in the Philippines was held last June 7-8, 2008 at the Waterfront. Twelve teams from Manila and Boracay participated in the tournament. Boracay Dragons White and Gold ended up playing against each other in the finals. Dragons White won 13-6. Junthir from Boracay Dragons Gold got the MVP award in Pool A. Janjan from Dragons Gold suffered a severe cut just below his left eyebrow and chin. (See collision on video.) Dragons Katol bagged the Most Spirited Team Award (AGAIN! They won the same award at the Bora Open 2007.) Awarding and party took place on the field. There was a band…and lotsa beer…and a lot of dirty dancing party people!
Thanks to all who joined and especially to Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority and Department of Tourism for sponsoring the event and to UP Sunken Pleasure volunteers for organizing the tournament.

Foot underneath the line, in/out?

There has been some confusion about catching the disc while the foot is underneath the line. Here is the response from Lorne Beckman, the person who has been involved in all the BULA rules as well as most UPA rules:

First let’s clarify nomenclature: a person’s foot cannot be “underneath the line”. “Lines” are conceptual. A person’s foot can be underneath the coloured tape, but the coloured tape is not the line. The coloured tape is only an aid to mark the lines. See the BULA addendum to the WFDF rules:

  • 2.2 The perimeter of the Field of Play is the Perimeter Line and consists of two (2) Sidelines along the length and two (2) End lines along the width.
  • 2.2.1. All lines shall be marked with colored tape between five (5) and ten (10) centimetres wide
The conceptual “line” exists as a plane that extends infinitely upward and downward parallel to the pull of the Earth’s gravity.A person who catches the disc with a foot which is underneath the coloured tape is therefore squarely on the line, and therefore, out-of-bounds. If the disc is caught by someone with a foot before the tape and then the person’s foot slides underneath it, he/she is in-bounds.

I hope that clarifies it. Let me know if you have any questions.

BULA adopts WFDF rules

UPDATE 15 March 2009: the links now point to the 2009 Rules instead of the 2008 rules.
Since BULA’s inception early this century we have had an independent set of Beach Ultimate rules. However this was not an optimal solution for Beach Ultimate players. Differences between WFDF, BULA, and UPA rules made playing internationally more difficult than is should be. So when the WFDF made major improvements to their rules last year BULA wanted to follow suit.
As of today, and after getting unanimous approval from the BULA rules committee and BULA tournament directors, all BULA tournaments will play by the just released 2008 WFDF rules with an appendix showing beach specific difference such as number of players, field size, etc…

wfdf_bula.gif

Ffindr: what a great service!

Wow! Ffindr.com is something that the disc community needed for a long time. A central depository of tournament info, leagues, pickup games for DDC, (Beach) Ultimate, Freestyle, Disc Golf, etc… They work with volunteers around the world to make sure as many disc events are added and the amount of listings they have already is enormous. I have yet to see anything that comes close.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Using Web 2.0 technology anyone can setup a filter to display what they are interested in. Only interested in Ultimate in the Iberian Peninsula? No problem! What about DDC worldwide? Any disc event in Africa? Just 3 clicks away! And still this is just the beginning. You can save filters as an RSS feed so you can immediately see when new events that you are interested in are added.
As if that wasn’t good enough, the real beauty comes when you then have webmasters integrate these feeds into their own websites. This is what BULA did. We created a filter to select all upcoming Beach Ultimate tournaments worldwide. Next we saved the filter/RSS feed and then, using some fairly straightforward coding, this feed was integrated into an existing page. Check it out: beachultimate.org/tournaments.html. The same was done on the Portuguese site: bug-p.org/teams.html and I am sure many more websites will follow.
Ffindr.com is like a pot of gold for anyone playing disc sports. Whether you are a player, a webmaster, or a tournament director. You can only gain by going to ffindr.com to add your event, select your event, or promote your event.
Thanks Christian. What you did was long over due!
ffindr

Dutch Beach Ultimate on the rise

Dutch Beach culture is mostly limited to holidays and ‘strand jutten’ (picking up things that wash ashore after a storm). The Crunch Hut tournament in Hargen has been the only Beach Ultimate in Holland (although this year will be their 14th edition!) and until recently the Netherlands never participated at a BULA Beach Ultimate World Championships.
However Beach Fever has struck Holland. They participated at the European Championships Beach Ultimate where they just missed the chance to go to the semi finals and suddenly there are two new Beach Ultimate tournaments planned:
The Texel Beach Tournament 21-22 June: Texel is the biggest island of the Netherlands and it’s about a 100 km. north of Amsterdam. The tournament is going to be an open tournament and you can sign up at their website.
The Monsterball Beach Classic August 30-31: This tournament is very close to The Hague and the base of the tournament will be the Bondi beach club.
Hup Holland Hup!

European Championships overview and results

Well the 1st European Championships are behind us and we are left with great memories! The local organization did an exceptional job in pulling this off. It looked and felt big. For very little money everyone got a great player package with a beach chair (with beer holder), lots of flags around, stands for spectators, a great beach, VIP’s, parties, etc… It was the most impressive BULA tournament ever!

Soon the ECBU website (www.ecbu2008.org) will have a guestbook where people can leave links to pictures, comments, etc… Until then, here are some of my pictures on Facebook, as well as the final results:

Classification
Pos. Open Mixed Masters
1 Switzerland Germany Germany
2 France Spain France
3 Belgium Czech Rep.  
4 Spain Portugal  
5 Netherland International  
6 Austria Belgium  
7 Czech Rep. Denmark  
8 Ireland    

For the Spirit of the Game award, the new WFDF/BULA SOTG scoring system was used. This system gives 1 point for a normal game and 2 points for an exceptional game. The teams are rated on 8 criteria so a score of 8 is normal and a score of 16 is truly exceptional. After all the games were played, the average score per team was calculated and this was the result:

Spirit of the Game
Pos. Open Mixed Masters
1 Ireland (11.5) Portugal (11.0) Germany (11.3)
2 Switzerland (11.4) Germany (10.3) France (10.0)
3 Belgium (11.4) Belgium (9.9)  
4 Czech Rep. (10.8) Denmark (9.8)  
5 Austria (10.6) Czech Rep. (9.7)  
6 Netherlands (9.2) International (9.6)  
7 Spain (9.2) Spain (9.1)  
8 France (8.7)    

I want to thank all the players, organizers, the volunteers, sponsors, and the city of Le Pouliguen for making this happen. The next National Championships will be the World Championships in 2011. Next year we will send out requests for bids.