The Ultimate Extracurricular
Some newspaper articles are good. Some newspaper articles are great. And some get started at the beginning of a season and don’t get wrapped up until the very end. That’s just how life goes sometimes.
In contrast to this article however, the Flower Power Ultimate Frisbee team has been going strong for the past few months. Roughly twenty players strong, this all-girls frisbee team has played games against rival schools every Tuesday since the beginning of the spring sports season.
And while the season may be almost over, by the time autumn hits they’ll have merged with the boys’ frisbee team (also known as Hula) for a season of co-ed frisbee fun.
The rules of the game are not simple; yet for all intents and purposes, they can be reduced to simplicity: make a successful pass over the goal line to a fellow teammate to score a point, switch sides every point scored, and above all, have fun.
Says Flower Power co-captain Ellory Boyd, “Ever since I started playing as a freshman, the environment in Hula and Flower Power has just been super welcoming, super open to people trying new things. We have a lot people who’ve never played sports before, and so we’re really open to people making mistakes but also into just working really hard.”
Nevertheless, while the players have faced great success on the field, the spectator turnout has been less than spectacular. “We’ve only ever had two students who are not frisbee siblings come to a game,” says Boyd. “[So] shoutout to Cassidy Adams…[for being] the only spectator we’ve ever had from Boulder High.”
Boyd had another point to add however: “And one thing that is interesting is, [while varsity sports] require you to attend 70 to 80 percent of the practices, six days a week, we only have practice three days a week and games one day a week, with no attendance requirements.” And yet, Boyd observes, Flower Power continues to have a higher practice attendance rate than the varsity sports she’s played, simply because “people really love frisbee, and they find a lot of friends on the team, and they find it as a nice relief at the end of the day.”
So if you’ve got an itch to put another extracurricular under your belt, or if you want to show some support for the friends and relatives that play, maybe give an ultimate frisbee game a whirl. Who knows? It might just be the ultimate game.
