Last Saturday Matt Kass, Representative Director for BULA Japan, and I were at the the World Ultimate Club Championships in Prague and attended the WFDF Congress to defend BULA’s motion to get Beach Ultimate recognized as an official sport.
This is what happened:
The WFDF had been too late submitting all the motions to its members. According to the WFDF bylaws they needed to do this 60 days before the congress starts. BULA was on time with our motion to the WFDF (75 days before congress starts) but the WFDF was late in sending it out. So, to try to rectify it, the WFDF submitted a motion to Congress to accept the submission of motions that were submitted too late.
The US and Canada had problems with some of the motions and with the fact that the WFDF didn’t follow their own rules. So they decided to publicly show their discontent with the WFDF by voting against the motion to allow the late motions. This meant that we could have gone home almost immediately.
Fortunately Jonathan Potts, the WFDF President, suggested that congress would discuss the motions during the meeting and do a non-binding straw poll to see what the direction of the votes would be. In about a month or two a binding electronic vote will take place and those results count. This idea was accepted, albeit somewhat reluctantly, by the US and Canada.
In total 9 motions were voted on and the Beach Ultimate motion was the only motion that did not have any votes against or abstains. Beach Ultimate as an official sport was “passed” by 26 votes for, 0 against, 0 abstains!
Again, this is not 100% official yet, but the fact that Japan, US, and Canada voted for the decision is a huge win for Beach Ultimate. I honestly don’t see any problems laying ahead of us now. Whooohoooo! 🙂
Next steps will be to organize a hugely successful World Championships of Beach Ultimate in Italy next year and getting Beach Ultimate included in the World Beach Games that will be organized by SportAccord at the end of 2012.
This sport is going somewhere… 🙂
Go beach Ulti!
Perhaps a future post could outline what being officially recognized by WFDF will entail?
Meanwhile: Chicago Sandblast this weekend. Can’t wait.