w  rd 2 the woss

There are many options when it comes to deciding what club you want to join in your four years at WOSS. However all of the clubs at White Oaks have had plenty of time to establish themselves, and create an image that they want to present to the students of WOSS, appealing to certain audiences and such making finding something different a challenge. Excitingly in the past few years a change has occurred, and that change is the introduction of the White Oaks Ultimate Frisbee Team. The Team started off three years ago as a small group of just four guys passing a frisbee back and forth and growing their love for frisbee. Last year White Oaks had the amazing opportunity to compete against other schools for the first time in WOSS history because the number had grown from 4 to about 21 people.

 

The team is made up of an array of interesting characters who all share a passion for the sport. When interviewing one of the team members she talked about the common perceptions that people have about Ultimate before they play it. “A lot of people when they first join the club think that it’s going to be really easy, with very little running and work involved. But it’s not; not in a bad way just that you work really hard. Frisbee is so much fun once you stop thinking of it a non-sport.” Frisbee itself is a very small sport in comparison to your everyday basketball or volleyball. Everyone’s played those at least once in their school gym careers and not everyone likes them. One of the things that makes Frisbee so appealing to people is that it’s new; it’s different. “The best part about being on this team is that there are no preset standards for how you have to do. It’s new so whatever we accomplish is a first, no one else in the history of WOSS Ultimate has done it before.”

 

Many of the people who argue that Frisbee is not a sport think that the game is just a bunch of people standing around passing a disk, but there’s a lot more work that goes into it than that. Professional sports magazines have released several articles over the years all agreeing that to play frisbee you need to have athletic skill. You need endurance, and good catching and throwing skills. You increase your agility, speed and coordinations by playing. With like a sport like basketball you also increase your endurance and improve your balance and coordination.

 

Frisbee outside of WOSS is also making large strides. It has gone from being a backyard sport to a seriously competitive league. On August 2nd of 2015 the International Olympic Committee sat down to decide what to do with the rise in popularity of this “glorified game of toss” and officially recognized Frisbee as the sport it is. A Tom Crawford, who was a director of coaching for the US Olympic Committee has been seen to paint frisbee in a very positive light. “I believe it [Ultimate Frisbee] can enhance human existence when done right. And when I saw Ultimate I thought, This is like everything that you would want to bake into a sport, if you were creating it from scratch. The speed, quickness, power. Women and men playing. Few disputes. And the entertainment value. I was like, This is wicked entertaining stuff! In one weekend I fell in love with the sport and saw its huge potential.” The World Flying Disk Association has been working very hard since August to try and get Frisbee onto the Olympic stage for six years and it seems they’re finally making headway as frisbee is a viable option to be entered in the 2024 Olympic Games.

 

The beautiful thing about the sport is how it hasn’t been tainted by the passing of time yet. It is a self-refed sport, meaning that it’s all on the team to call fouls and the other team has to be honest. This type of system promotes amazing sportsmanship between teams. Ultimate Frisbee isn’t just a sport to the people who play it, it’s a way of life because it connects with everything you do.