Dartmouth Ultimate

I didn’t expect that when I was 64, I would still be a Frisbee® Mom.  However, there I was, on a Dartmouth playfield, watching Coach Brook running would-be athletes through their paces.

     I’d been watching Brook for 20 years, since his Oregon college team won their national championship at Fort Collins, CO. Those players are now men in their early 40s, evaluating each other’s hairlines and beer bellies, talking about their orthopedic injuries over the years, and picking up more golf clubs than Frisbees®. “Bon bon” who started playing fat has kept his lean form. Doug Welch, the architecture student, lives in New York City and works exclusively for the musician Lenny Kravitz. And Rick Milner, whose first job after college was watching sports videos for Nike, is super dad. He has five children, three of whom are monozygotic, identical triplet girls, an occurrence that is almost unheard of.

     The New England evening is cool, and the captains require the players to keep their legs warm, to avoid injuries. The players have a choice of wearing sweat pants, or more favored, leggings in pastel colors from a dance studio. The leggings go with this season’s sports shoes. Athletes pamper their feet, and this year they are wearing shoes in bright colors with a metallic luster.

      The athletes warm up and stretch with “butt kicks,” running in place and literally lifting their feet high enough to slam into their own butts, hip flexors, lunges, running with the knees lifted high in front, high-kicking like Rockettes, exaggerated skipping like girls on a playground, dancing the “grapevine,” and ending with “Spiderman,” crouching deeply on flat feet while thrusting the knees outward  and extending the forearms to the ground, creating the classical comic book look of Spidey.

     They divide into teams and run braided patterns like a basketball team.  Brook emphasizes the placement of feet to put power behind a throw, then hucks a disc far down field. “I can’t run as fast as the young guys any more,” he confides, “But  the old man can still show them a thing or two!”

     It’s time for scrimmage, and here comes one of those deep down-field passes where the disk soars nearly the  length of the whole field, then abruptly slows in its flight and begins to drift down as gently as a snowflake, so slowly that you’d think the thrower could sprint down field and catch his own pass. A chant goes up, “Gaaaaawd Damn!” at an amazing catch.

It’s Friday evening, it is the eve of Yom Kippur, and the sun is getting low, so several of the athletes need to take their leave, to get to services. The team is dismissed, and Brook and the captains chat. Brook will have input, but the two team captains are about to make their choices and select the members of “Pain Train” for the coming college Frisbee® season.