A Big Giant Hippie Sport
I'm pretty active - running, soccer, ultimate - and Edmonton’s got a pretty good outdoor lifestyle with good community-based sports and stuff. That makes me really look forward to summer. If it were always hot, I don't know that you'd appreciate summer as much.
I'd been playing soccer forever and you kind of plateau at a certain level where you're not gonna get any better. So I tried ultimate – absolutely hated it. I couldn’t catch a Frisbee and yet there’re national-level people on the team expecting me to catch one, so it wasn’t very much fun. I went back for some pickup in Hawrelak Park the next year, just for fun, and ended up on Glenn’s team. It was so much better. He doesn’t have a team anymore because it’s a lot of work to organize it all and he was getting his business off the ground, so we’re on another team now. We play with a bunch of friends.
It’s a good way to meet people. You don’t socialize just with your team. You talk to the person who’s marking you. That’s completely not normal in other sports. You don’t talk to the other team except to yip at them and make snotty comments, whereas in ultimate, you go for beer with them afterwards. The other weird thing about ultimate is that it’s self-refereed. And you can play in any green space that’s big enough. You just set up cones and stuff.
But ultimate’s a big giant hippie sport, right, so there’s all this love and it’s all about the spirit of the game. You’re supposed to be friendly and happy and enjoying it. That’s hard to do when you come from a competitive sport background where you just wanna win...possibly beat up the other team if you have to. You gotta do what you gotta do, you know. (I’m competitive, shall we say.)
Anyway, Glenn and I are getting married in August. He’s shipping his whole family out from Nova Scotia to here. And it’s all ultimate’s fault. Not shipping out his family, but marrying me, I mean.
Where Next?
Disa Brownfield
Disa Brownfield is a project manager at the University of Alberta and has a PhD in Plant Biology. Her soccer team went to the 2009 World Masters Games in Sydney, Australia. When not playing sports or working, Disa and her friends can be found ordering number 47 and 48 at Pagolac Restaurant in Chinatown. Look for the sign with the happy red cow on 97th street.
