Resources on Learning Ultimate Frisbee

This year I started playing regularly on an Ultimate Frisbee team (wooo 30 Foot!) through our local organization MODS. I've always loved throwing a disc and have thrown regularly with friends over the past 4 or 5 years. I'm completely new to team sports with offensive/defensive strategies and formations, so its been a lot of learning and fun so far.

There's a lot to learn about the game, so I thought I'd post up links to some of the various guides I've found really helpful in teaching me backhand and forehand throws/grips, as well as introducing me to different offence and defence strategies. If you're like me, instruction, technique and practice is what its all about. Think, you might hear an amazing musician, but his or her music is the product of hours of unseen practice, mistakes, correction, hard work, and instruction. The same goes with most things in life, including Ultimate.

Read on and enjoy! There's stuff from learning to throw for the first time, to playing a rabbit 1-3-3 zone defence.

Learning to Throw

This is the most essential part of the game, fortunately its also the easiest to practice and improve on. Instead of needing a dozen people to team practice all you need is 2 people to effectively practice throwing. In fact 2 is best as you get in the most throws.

If I could only give one piece of advice to those hoping to improve their throw, its this: you have to change your throw to improve it. This sounds so obvious, but all the time I see people throwing exactly the same way 10 times in a row hoping that the result will be different. Throwing 100 times with bad technique will develop a bad habit and will take you that much longer to correct that technique. So keep experimenting by modifying grip, disc angle (left/right as well as up/down), wrist snap, arm position, weight shifting/rotation. That being said, be patient too! It took me several summers before I felt confident with my backhand and forehand.

Below I've listed the best guides I've come across in throwing. Careful reading them though, I almost broke something in my room when I went through it (you can probably imagine the situation).

Learning to throw Backhand [UltimateHandbook.com]
Learning to Throw Forehand [UltimateHandbook.com]
Various Disc Throws [Wikipedia.org]
Throwing Various Articles by an Australian Ultimate group

Learning the Game

Ultimate really appealed to me for its regard for sportsmanship and that its really accessible to new players (like myself who hadn't played other competitive sports). Here's some guides on introducing the game of Ultimate (rules, the field, players, history, etc):

Ultimate in 10 Simple Rules [UltimateHandbook.com]
Article on Ultimate [Wikipedia.org]


Learning to Play as a Team

I don't have much 2 cents to put in here. I come from a solo classical musician background, who got into solo endurance sports, who studied computer science. LOL so not much working for me there :P. Having watched and played good teams has taught me how essntial team skills are. Here's some guides on different team strategies that I've read and are really good:

Offence and Defence - Various articles by an Australian Ultimate group
Ultimate Basics [Ultimate Handbook.com] - Use the toolbar on the left, a bunch of articles covering basic offence, defence, marking, cutting, catching, etc

Most of All

Love the game and have fun =)

Got something to say or add? Post a comment below.

Click to continue reading...

Lost in Translation

Who am I? Over my travels I constantly met people of different nationalities/ethnicities. After learning each others' names the next question is always "where do you come from?" or essentially "what are you?" My reponse was complicated. If I said "I'm Canadian", they would sort of peer at me strangely, since they're really asking about type of Asian ethnicity I was. If I said "I'm Chinese", they would be puzzled by my fluent English and North American mannerisms. What I eventually found is that "Canadian Born Chinese" (CBC) really is the most accurate, albeit a bit longer (and thus harder for non-native English speakers to immediately understand). The problem is I'm not fully Canadian or Chinese. The Chinese have a slang for me, 竹星仔 'jook sing jai' (literally "bamboo star boy"). This term is used to say that just as bamboo appears in independent sections, I am such a section. Thus I do not connect with either the section that grew before (Chinese) or that which is growing after(my Canadian side). Rough.

The last couple years I have yearned to find my cultural identity, this post is about how this journey started.

The book The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan absolutely floored me. The book is a collage of the stories of 4 Chinese couples and their 4 CBC daughters living in the US. Jing-Mei Woo(a CBC), the main character, goes through her journey of finding cultural identity. Her mother passes away, and Jing-Mei discovers she has long lost sisters in China who have never met their mother. The other parents tell Jing-Mei she must tell her mother's story to these sisters: who the mother was, all that she had suffered, and all that she had done for these lost sisters. The daughter is at a loss for words, and stutters that she wouldn't know what to say... she is torn between feelings of shame, guilt and confusion. She always argued with her mom, always thought poorly of the Chinese way of doing things, and really never understood or appreciated the Chinese way of things. It was with a deep sadness that I empathized with Jing-Mei.

Since then I've been trying to get more exposed to my parent's culture. This involves getting back into learning Chinese, watching Chinese movies, reading books, but much more important than all this - simply having an open, receptive attitude.

Understanding one's culture identity is incredibly important for growing as a person. To know who one is, one must know where one came from. For almost all of us, that's learning about our parents' culture and background. Those by far are the greatest influence on our core values, perspectives, temperament, communication style, morals, etc etc I could go on.

As I grew in my friendships in Austria it was so enriching to encounter different cultures - the conversation that comes out of it causes us to learn to identify our own culture. So when I explained that I was 24 but still lived a home (one of the few amongst our group) I had to think about why that is, and why in CBC culture this was actually almost always the case.

There have been ups and downs in this journey. Culture is a tricky, and quite vague really. I'm reminded when my whole family sits around the dinner table (myself, 2 older CBC sisters, dad born in India, moved to Hong Kong as a teenager, and mom born near Canton and moved to HK in early twenties). We're all different. We're all really really unique ("really" used for emphasis, really you can only be unique or not - really). Culture is a convenient generalization, but really we all exist on a cultural spectrum, with varying similarity and variance.

So this is where I am - learning about who I am, and where that comes from. God has made us with so much cultural variety. And our culture is something we're all proud of, and the thought of losing culture seems both sad and shameful. This isn't the case though - our culture simply changes. Yes its true my Chinese culture is definitely watered down, and likely my children (well, pending children) will retain even less traditional Chinese culture. There will be something in its place, something different - but also something worth treasuring and being proud about.

And if I persevere, perhaps I will not find myself as flustered as Jing-Mei. Instead I will be proud to tell of the culture from which I come from. If I also persevere as a student of culture, hopefully I will be able to fairly evaluate different cultures, and take from the good, and keep from the bad. As a Christian this will also mean what God's culture is like, what are His values and perspectives.

What about you? Tell me about your culture.



My Books tagged with 'Chinese'
My Links tagged with 'Chinese'

Click to continue reading...

Arts: Film, Literature and Music

Great art can communicate before it is understood. -T.S. Eliot

I've had more time to explore these things these past weeks. We have the privilege of having easy access to film, literature and music like no generation before us. I have often taken this for granted, forgetting how these forms of art have power to inspire, impact, teach, entertain and allow you to experience such amazing things.

Here's some thoughts and tips that have been on my mind with regards to the arts.

High Art and Low Art

Often people differientiate between high art and low art. An example from music might be trying to compare Mozart and Britney Spears for example. I do concede that (and find it plainly obvious) that Britney and Mozart are on different levels of artistic music. However if we look at our lives, we see that both high art and low art are important. I love to listen to the classical masters, but that's not my bread and butter music. Shakespeare may indeed be beautiful and profound, but most of us need the simpler fiction for our dose of storytelling. A friend put it this way to me: high art is like those special lobster dinners - they're wonderful and special, but not what we live off of. Lets not forget the low art, our bread and butter.


Good Art and Bad Art

Although low art is important, this is different from bad art. Some might protest to this heading, that art is subjective and we cannot determine objectively whether art is good or bad. There is a standard though, if we consider God's example as the ultimate artist. Good art is good for you, bad art is bad for you. Some art reflects beauty, enlightens, or helps us grow as a person, and is good for us. Other art demoralizes, glorifies evil, reduces our humanity, and is bad for us. With the amount of art/media we get exposed to daily, its crucial that we are critical partakers. I'm mostly referring to TV here... lol.


Don't Buy New

Access to art doesn't require a lot of money. It can seem like it as movies often cost $20 and books aren't exactly cheap either. But unless you are super keen on it, or it has been very recently released, there really isn't a need to buy new. Cities have tons of great used book stores (Winnipeg's list), and many shops with used DVDs, CDs, etc. This helps give you exposure to the great classics out there too. Of the last 10 books I've bought, 9 were under $4 (a couple were $0.50), with the other being $7.


Don't Buy at All

Here's an even more obvious money saver. With books guess what, let me reintroduce you to a word most of us have forgotten since elementary school: library. Our tax money goes to pay for it, and for us Winnipeggers we have a really amazing newly renovated Millenium Library. This is the best way to try out a book without being sure if you'll like it. The books I have out: worth $30. Cost to me: nothing. There are somethings money can't buy, for everything else, there's mastercard.

Other great ideas are coming out like movie passes. I currently have one at Movie Village (in Osborne Village) where for $20 a month, I can always have 3 movies taken out and I can swap them as many times as I want. There's also many new mail order options that are very good as well.

The web has free stuff. Old classic writings are available free. For the musicians out there, the web has TONs of places to get free music, or very very cheap music. Here's the simple fact, virtually all classical music is public domain. The cost comes only from the editing and publishing. The web has really made so much more instantly accessible for almost no cost.

And last but not least: borrow and lend. I know, our materialistic society is very trophy-oriented. What I mean is that after doing X, we want to go out and buy something as our trophy/testament to doing X. Hence all the stupid T-shirts (I've been to the top of ________). You don't need the trophy, if the art was good for you then that is the most important thing. Also if you're tired of some of your stuff - why not give it away?


Variety is the Spice of Life

Embrace variety. There's so many genres and artists out there, why not try something new? We inherently love variety, but often because we fall into patterns where we stick to what we know. Make an effort to watch perhaps a historial movie, a documentary, sci-fi, anime, foreign, suspense, etc etc. Then one starts to realize how much great stuff there is out there. Use review sites and just pick out rated movies. I don't generally trust a single film critic, but I'm willing to listen if they're mostloy agreed on whether a film is great.

I think variety is most important for books. A lot of people desire to read more, so they pick a book and try to get through it. Then they get a bit bored or hit a lull and then kind of give up. Instead, I read so much more if I have 3-4 books on my shelf, and a bookmark in each. Then on a quiet evening I have a menu before me to choose from.

For the Christians out there I think this is a great way to add variety to reading the Bible. Reading cover to cover is tough (Leviticus will knock you down like nobody's business), rather I recommend this system:
-one bookmark starting from Genesis
-one bookmark in psalms (read a psalm a day)
-one bookmark starting in the major prophets (Isaiah)
-one bookmark starting in the Gospels (Matthew)
-one bookmark starting in the Epistles (Romans)
Its a nice way to get a cross section of the Bible and keep motivated.


So now what?

Go read a book! Listen/play some music! Watch a film! There's tons of other art out there besides simply literature, music, and film. Come to the Rodin Exhibition with me and check out some sculpture for example. Our workaholic society has a disregard for the quiet, stately enjoyment of art. In its busyness we forget we need art. We are creative beings and need oulets for that creativity, lest we let it die. Go get some, trust me - you'll be better off.

Love to hear about your thoughts/experiences. My friend was recently interviewed and shared some really good thoughts (Link).

More Resources

The web has plenty of offerings when it comes to art, check out what I've come across:
Movie Links
Music: Online radio, Sheet Music Sites
Literature: Sites with Ebooks online

Allan is Currently Tasting:
Books: Manufacturing Consent, Jan Wong's China, Discipleship, browse my libraryshelf
Music: Learning Schubert's (transcribed by Liszt) Der Muller und der Bach, Op. 25 No. 19
Film: Godfather I and II, Trois Coleurs: Bleu, Lawrence of Arabia

Click to continue reading...