Welcome Back to Inside Out Ultimate!
Gus Macdonald
I witnessed my first true Ultimate miracle in the second week of my first season of div three Wednesday night Hills league. I was fifteen. I said zero words to anyone and did my maths homework between points. Every time I dropped the disc I’d do this thing where I’d go totally rigid with fury, yell ‘Aahk!’, and look to the sky for ten or so seconds in disbelief and frustration. This happened a lot. My team was called Platinum. We wore white. Our opposition wore their own glossy purple sublimated jerseys, and had one of those tawdry innuendo-pun names that I was embarrassed to say out loud to my mum on the drive home. I don’t remember the exact score but I remember that we were losing.
‘We’re losing,’ said our captain, who I think was the cousin of someone who played beach for Australia. ‘But you’ve never really lost a game until you give up in your mind.’
It goes without saying that these words have stayed with me. Positive thoughts are the secret to winning at the highest level, even if you technically lose 15-7. There are many semi-finals I still haven’t given up on and continue to play in my mind—you never know when the tide will turn.
The miracle I saw was this. Down on the scoreboard, down on our luck, our captain deploys what he calls a ‘Fiasco!’ play. He catches the pull, waits totally motionless while the opposition runs down, and then he throws it as far as he can while the rest of us charge to the endzone. It’s a windy Wednesday night—a real swirler—and this huck gets yanked up and down by the streaming air. There was real hysteria on the sideline. Oohing. Ahhing. Jeering and cheering. That raucous, cackling laughter that people think they’re too cool for in the higher divisions. Just when it looks like it’s going to properly sink, the frisbee jerks back up over the swiping purple arm of a leaping defender. And then another. The defender in gets a big piece of it, but she macs it upwards and at a weird angle that actually gets picked up even more by the wind, carrying the disc all the way to the endzone. The only other young person on my team—a Little Athletics long jumping prodigy by the name of Jason who I have not seen since that night—thundered down the side of the field and clap caught the disc just shy of the endzone. After the usual hullabaloo of structureless end zone offense, we scored.
It was the most incredible thing that I, aged fifteen, had ever seen.
And I don’t know if it was the magnitude of the moment or the airbending disc or some other stuff going on in Jason’s personal life, but when he caught that disc (outside of the endzone) he screamed, ‘I’m back, baby!’ It goes without saying that these words have stayed with me also.
After two years of disrupted seasons, with World Games and WUCC on the horizon, nationals rosters solidified, and leagues rolling along, it’s really starting to feel like Ultimate Frisbee in Australia is back. With the return of frisbee comes the return of so much else. Like heat stroke. Bad backs. Endzone eyes, sunburnt thighs, stall-nine pies. Air travel. Very long car rides with people who smell bad. Hamstring injuries. Red Bull, No-Doz, Ibuprofen. Blisters. Arguments about who should have been picked for a team that no one involved in the argument would get picked for. Travel calls by veterans who simply won’t retire. Love triangles. Hate circles. Spirit time outs. Memes.
And Inside Out Ultimate is excited to be returning as well. In the immortal words of Jason, ‘[We’re] back, baby!’
My name is Gus Macdonald, if you haven’t met me I’m a polite marketing coordinator from Sydney who gets heat stroke a lot. I’ll be one of the editors for this relaunch, and I’ll be facilitating the start of this new dawn for IOU before handing it over to the next chump in six months when I retire from the sport (again).
I’d like to say a sincere thank you to Mark Evans and Max Halden for building Inside Out Ultimate’s platform and audience. The many years of hard work that they put into IOU allows us to pick the disc up and run with it. Max will remain a visionary-albeit-almost-legally-blind contributor that I look forward to Revenge Editing, and Mark is now the President of Texas so that keeps him pretty busy.
If you’d like to get involved in any capacity, we have lots of ideas for how you can help. Simply reach out on Facebook or hello.insideoutultimate@gmail.com if you see yourself as a writer, editor, visual artist, audio engineer, designer, meme-manager, data-entry clerk, sponsorship liaison (we want free Red Bull), etc.
Importantly, submissions are the thing that will keep Inside Out Ultimate alive. If you have an idea for any content—regardless of whether or not you want to be involved in creating it—we’d encourage you to fill out this google form. Please don’t feel like it has to be a traditional opinion-based article, we’d also love to help you make podcasts, comics, hypothetical thought experiments, or quizzes. Ultimately, we want IOU to be community driven and to tell the stories you want to hear and read. So we need you—yes you—to get in touch and get involved.
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