A local team won the provincial championships in ultimate Frisbee yesterday and heads for the nationals in Winnipeg.
Liquid beat Toronto-based Monster 13-11 in a 90-minute game at the Ontario Ultimate Frisbee Championships at Kiwanis Park this past weekend.
July 13, 2009
Terry Pender
RECORD STAFF
KITCHENER
A local team won the provincial championships in ultimate Frisbee yesterday and heads for the nationals in Winnipeg.
Liquid beat Toronto-based Monster 13-11 in a 90-minute game at the Ontario Ultimate Frisbee Championships at Kiwanis Park this past weekend.
Team Liquid player Dan Yanke makes a leaping catch over a Team Monster defender during the mixed finals of the Ontario Ultimate Frisbee Championships held this weekend at Kiwanis Park.
"We knew this game was going to be a trying match and the intensity was up," Dan Yanke, one of the Liquid captains, said in an interview.
"We got up by a good amount, had some bad drops at the end of the game but we held on to it at the end," Yanke.
Liquid is now the top seeded Ontario team competing in the nationals in Winnipeg in mid-August.
The winning teams in Winnipeg will represent Canada in the World Ultimate Frisbee Championships in Prague next summer.
"We finished fifth last year and we have a better team this year," Yanke said.
Yanke, 28, who lives in Kitchener, started playing ultimate Frisbee about eight years ago after stumbling on game in a Guelph park while he was going to university.
Now he's a leading member of one of the country's top ranked squads in a growing sport.
The Ontario Ultimate Frisbee Championships in Kitchener this weekend attracted 18 teams with 360 members from North Bay, Ottawa, Toronto, Guelph, London and Hamilton.
The Waterloo Organization of Disc Sports, known affectionately as WODS, hosted the provincial championships for the second year running, in part, because of the support from the City of Kitchener.
"The city is great to us," Tushar Singh, a tournament director, said.
"The city lined the fields and cut the grass for us--no other city does that for ultimate Frisbee teams," Singh said.
Six ultimate Frisbee fields were marked and laid out by city workers on the Table Lands in Kiwanis Park. Kitchener is among the few cities in the country to have dedicated Frisbee pitches.
The Waterloo Organization of Disc Sports has about 1,500 members. This summer about 600 people are playing on 34 teams and more sign up for the fall leagues. Anyone who wants more information can go to wods.ca.
Each team fields seven players at a time. They must stop if they catch the Frisbee and have about 10 seconds to throw to another player. Points are scored by catching the disc in the opposing team's end zone.
"The ability to throw the Frisbee accurately for 40 or 50 yards in the wind is number one," Singh said.
"You also have to have a lot of physical fitness," Singh said.
Singh, who studied math and computer science at the University of Waterloo, wrote a computer application that allows him to stream digital video of the games in real time onto his website IamUltimate.com/live
He has played the game in many countries, but his favourite is a tournament in Rimini, on Italy's Adriatic coast.
"It's five nights of parties and four days of games on the longest beach in Europe," Singh said.
A couple of doors away on Kiwanis Park Drive lives Geza Argal, an older gentlemen who loved watching the games of ultimate Frisbee.
"It's fantastic, unbelievable," Argal said. "A really nice game."
Thanks!
Thanks to everyone that came out to watch the finals, it was great having the home-field advantage!
And of course to the WODS BOD and everyone that helped host the tournament, it was very well put together!
Higy