..What I Know About Today's BUIC..

Well, not much, but only this :

Moon gets the first ticket to playoffs.
Slijpschijven and Huyltimate go down to second division.
Gentle Black Petards get beaten by Diabolic Heaven with one point but both teams stay in first division.

Freezzzbeezzz (ALSO A BIG TEAM FOR THE END VICTORY --- sorry guys for my major flaw in the poll, unfortunately I can't change anything about this without changing all the previous votes, so maybe vote for the "another team"---sorry, my bad, things happen when you've got things on your mind..) go up to first division.
Gentle Green Petards go up to second division.

Any info ? Bring it on and I'll post it.
Any pictures ? I remember Robin taking a lot, and somebody else from the Slijpies ?

Who Will Be Next BUIC Champion ?? VOTE

<=====POLL !!

Okay, I'm glad to see so many people still reading all of this.
And you know this is a democracy, so here's the poll as asked for by the majority!
Check it out on the left hand side, and vote!
Please only vote once, otherwise you'll screw it for the rest of us who want to see them opinions...
If you want me to add some teams or add/change anything else, just gimme a shout.
I'm still undecided...(Heart goes out to Gentle of course, but still in doubt.)
Well, actually thinking about it; Gentle's gonna make it this year.
We've got some good vibrations going on and for the last 3 years we just nearly missed the title... (and not to forget that the 2 or 3 years before that we were champs with ancient Freezzzbeezzz players!)
VOTE !

Indoor Love Point by Huyltimate

Since in three days from now the BUIC (Belgian Ultimate Indoor Championship) is starting I might as well give you another little video of some indoor action of last year at Objectif Moon.
A video sent to me by Julien from Huyltimate (thanks for the link), check it his explanation before you watch the video !

"This is actually a video of what huyltimate called "the love point". This point was scored during the final 2008 that we lost against the "Hot's" from France. Why LOVE point ? Because the last pass and the last catch are performed by PE & Gé that make together the lovely Huyltimate couple (just after Ivan and Sardine of course...)... We didn't score a lot during this game so that they could (and they still can) really be proud of it !

And, yeap, Huyltimate can't wait for the beginning of the BUIC too ! We wanna do better than last year... We guess we're not alone for this quest !

La Chèvre (julien), Huyltimate"

PS: you guys still reading all of this ? and by the way, who do you think will be this year's champ? should I start another poll ? or does anybody wanna make some crazy predictions about game results ? or should we start a contest about total points scored by certain teams? if you are still reading all of this just gimme a shout in the comment box below...
cheers, and see some of y'all on sunday !

Random Pictures - Viareggio '09

So, the official pictures of the Burla Beach Cup 2009 are online !!!

A lot of belgians on there so go check them out at this link :
http://www.sportshoots.it/store/gallery.php?gid=537&page_num=1&sort_by=id&sort_order=ascending

Props to the official photographers for getting a lot of nice action shots on picture, but unfortunately I'm not really blown away by them.
Some nice shots in there, but you gotta pay 5€ to get one image and it's not even full resolution, for that you'll pay 15€ per shot.
I agree that professional photographers need to get paid, but I have my doubts about this.
If anyone has some counter arguments or experience with ultimate pics like these, feel free to gimme a shout in the comment box.

For my fellow Team Too teammates, with whom I spent such a lovely weekend on and off the pitch: here's the pages in which you can find T2 pics: 4,5,11,12,21,22,25,26,27,28,30,31,32
(not that I'm saying you should only check these, but since you can't download any, you might wanna see them again some other time..)

Cheers
ps: picture above: my personal catch of the year(so far?), never dreamed I would catch it but still I tried and I did!you can even see me look surprised... damn, that felt good!

TIPS&TRICKS IV - Training for Dummies

Firstly : the page I found is in Dutch.
You can try Google Translate like I did and you'll get the point; but you'll also get literally translated jokes like this one : "They get their shoes again from the closet and walk half hours the soul from their body."

So, for all of you (well, most of you I guess) who do speak Dutch, check out this link with a very simple explanation on everything you always wanted to know about how to train.
If you don't wanna read a whole book on 'how to practice', or if you just don't even have a clue about what you are doing every week (besides practicing to get your game/tactics/technical skills right off course) and like things to be simple and short, check out this link :

http://www.beweegmobiel.be/displayFolder.jsp?fol=24&naam=Trainingstips&submenufol=24

Thierry Henry vs. Referee vs. Ultimate ?

Check out this email by Jumpi, organiser of one of the world's biggest ultimate tourney's Paganello and long time ultimate veteran about Henry's notorious handsball last week, and the link to our favourite game.

"Hi there,
I think almost everyone knows about the football match France-Ireland of last Wednesday during which France scored a decisive goal right after the French captain, Henry, clearly and irregularly handled the ball.
After the match Henry said: "I will be honest it was a handball but I'm not the referee."
And added: "The ref allowed it and that's a question you should ask him"
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/internationals/8367420.stm)
Apart from the "honesty" which sounds ridiculous as the admission is after the match, what is most interesting here is that Henry's reasoning assumes it was the referee who made the mistake.
You have to ask the referee - Henry says - not me.
Because it is the referee in charge for taking the decisions and stating what is correct and what is not.
It's not my business - Henry thinks - it's not my responsibility.
Henry does not need to lie to himself when he keeps on playing, because the "truth" is what the ref allows
Why does not he act honestly?
Why can he feel honest by admitting the foul only after the match?
Because there is the referee.
The presence of the referee on the field relieves Henry from any responsibility about his behavior.
And ultimately legitimates Henry not to play fair.
I really neither mean to start the 998th discussion about referees and observers nor saying Ultimate is better than football (I love football a/n): it's just small philosophy.
Ciao!
Jumpi "

Simpsons Frisbee Quote :

Bart:"Well, I was just doing the moves I learned from Ultimate Punching."

Marge:"Huhhhh?? Ultimate Punching ? ULTIMATE MAKES EVERYTHING WORSE...!"

Check out Otto's answer to this comment from Marge in the video below at 00:40

(Pretty obvious since it's on this blog, but funny to see this popping up in an episode of the Simpsons..)

Merci Fery voor het doorsturen!

PS: iemand enig idee waarom dit filmpje in spiegelbeeld staat?

The Birth of the EUF

The beginning of a new era with the European Ultimate Federation ?

At the same time that our belgian prime minister Herman Van Rompuy (try to pronounce this in English, hilarious..) might become the very first European President, a new federation is born.
For those of you truly interested in the development of the European Ultimate scene, check out the email below.

"Dear European Ultimate Community,

After several years of working on a transition, we are now pleased to announce the creation of the European Ultimate Federation (EUF).
This Federation is here to address the needs of the European Ultimate Frisbee community with the primary aim being to help develop the base of our players as well as increase the level of play in Europe.
To find out more about what the new structure looks like, follow this link: http://euf.efdf.org/EFDF_Restructure_20090917.pdf

At the xEUCF in London, there was a National Federations meeting hosted by Thomas Greisbaum where the structure document was outlined, and the new EUF Board was voted in.
Your current representatives can be found here: http://euf.efdf.org/manifestos/
As the Chairperson for the European Ultimate Federation, I would like to thank Thomas for his many years as Chairman of the EFDF.
We all welcome this change in the structure of how Ultimate Frisbee in Europe is going to be run and it is hoped that this change will lead to even more development of the European Ultimate scene.
Please note that each subcommittee of the EUF will be looking for volunteers, so be ready for more emails from your new EUF Board members.
I’m aware that we need to make an announcement requesting bids for the European Championships in 2011.
If you are considering bidding, please do start (or keep) working on it.
Best regards,
Si Hill
Chairperson EUF"

Diabolic Going For First NL & BUIC Title ??

Check a little report as written by Fery on how Diabolic Heaven played the first day of the Dutch Indoor Championships last weekend.

Now that Gentle has become outdoor mixed NL champ maybe there's another stunt in the making ?
Not forgetting to mention that a belgian team already succeeded in doing this back in the day : Freezzzbeezzz won the NL indoor championship back in 2001. (respect is still due !!!)
And as the title of this post says: better watch out for DH at BUIC, they could come out even stronger than last year !

"Somehow Sigi managed to register Diabolic Heaven for the Dutch Indoor Ultimate Frisbee competition. A great way to get some extra practice before BUIC and other indoor tournaments. Last Sunday Diabolic Heaven started in fourth division. After leaving Hasselt at 9 o’clock , our first car arrived at 10h50 at the nice sports complex in Wageningen. About an hour later we started our first game against ‘De rest van Nederland’. Still no sign of our second car with 3 replacement players. Fortunately we had 3 young players and I filled with motivation and energy, and Sigi who is smart enough to know when to run and when to rest. Fortunately for us ‘De rest van Nederland’ we’re quite ‘experienced’ (read old). So our physique at the end of the game was still a bit better than theirs. Four minutes before the end 3 fresh Diabolic Heaven players showed up. However, Sigi wouldn’t let them play without a proper warming up. And to be honest, none of us wanted them to play yet. We beat the other team without replacements +/- 14-6 , so we could survive the last few moments without help. Unfortunately Nuts didn’t show up. It’s always a shame when you anticipate a good game of Ultimate and finally you don’t get to play. Hope this wont happen at BUIC!Fortunately we could play the game against WAF a lot earlier. At this time we were happy to have three fresh players. WAF had a lot of energy, some tall fast players so this game was a lot harder than the previous. But we still managed to play our game, some nice throws, great flows and excellent points (I caught a disc between my legs in the endzone, it hurts). We finally beat them 11-6. The last game of the day was against a very young UFO team with lots of girls. They had some very good players who will be amazingly skilled when they are adults. Some good girls too, unfortunately none of our Diabolic girls could join us this Sunday, so it was hard for the UFO girls to play against boys/men who we’re much taller, heavier and faster. They gave us a great game, very good spirit too. In a couple of years these kids probably play us of the field, leaving us clueless about were the disc went and how they did it. But right now they lacked some experience and physique. We beat them 14-4 or something like that. So this means Diabolic Heaven will advance to the third division to the Dutch indoor competition. Next game day: Sunday the 13th of December!"

Merci Fery voor het verslag !

Random Pictures - Sexxxpensive @ Paga 09

Check out some pics of the golden boys I made during Paganello 2009.
I haven't published them anywhere yet, I kind of forgot I took these but now I found them on my computer..
By the way, click on the image for a better view or right click to download to your pc.

Maybe till next year.. (With Jelle and Peter again ?)

By the way: keep on reading, I've got some stuff coming (Pictus/Diabolic Heaven/VLUFF/TEAM TOO)

Freezzzbeezzz Autumn Champs

Today 4 teams had a little autumn league.
Slijpschijven,Gentle1 aka Black Petards, Gentle2 aka Green Petards and Freezzzbeezzz played three games each on a rainy at first but then again sunny sunday.
A lot of mud, a lot of good plays and good times.
A really chill atmosphere, almost no pressure and some friendly games.
Freezzzbeezzz came out on top after having beaten every other team !
Scores below :
FB 13-11 G1
G1 13 - 5 SL
G1 13 - 2 G2
G2 4 - 13 FB
SL 13 - 4 G2
SL 7 - 9 FB
A nice initiative by Chimme, and something more teams should do.
Kind of like organising a one day (or even half a day,cause we spent the other half of the day drinking or eating @ Guillaume's and the Turkish pizza place...) tournament that actually qualifies as a friendly game.
It's good to match up against eachother more than only at BUOC.
And Bruges,Aalter and Ghent are all really close by so....why not ?
Anyhow, time to crash.
Smell you later.

Viareggio Video : Burla Beach Cup !

No, it's not the long awaited Team Too documentary but you'll get to see some familiar faces in this video ! Check it out !

"Coup.....Soleil....Coup Coup Soleil"

FFindr+ => USE-IT !!

New features on one of the best frisbee websites around !

Since a little while you are able to create tournament lists on this great site.

I posted the basic explanation about FFindr.com already a big while ago here so check the archive or even better: just check out the website itself.

But as I was saying : one of the new features is this :

"Once logged into FFindr, everybody can now easily create personal event lists and add whatever tournament to it. Imagine tournament lists like
-Tournaments I played in 2009,
-GrandMaster Flash tournaments, or
-Disctèrics Ultimate tourneys 2010."

I tried it a while ago and came up with a list of all tourney's I've played before.

Unfortunately FFindr hasn't been around for years so the tourney list is far from complete (but you can help complete it!!)

Here's an example: a little piece of my list (only 2009, uncomplete as well;click picture for more):

FFindr is also really good for finding all tourney's in and around Belgium; as you can search by location ; but also for organising your own event/tourney.

It's possible to get players/teams to register online at your very own ffindr-tourney-page.

Let's face it , this is a very nice website and is a tool that can bring all of us together again to have more of those legendary times !

Use it !!!

Indoor Layoutssss by Gronical Dizziness

Check out this wicked wicked indoor layout by Erik from Gronical Dizziness (NL).
GD had some of these crazy passes and catches during the breaks in an game of the national basketball league. (for the international basket fans : GasTerra vs. Leiden)
At halftime they played a short ultimate match, while being watched and cheered for by 3500 spectators !!!
Of course I can't leave you with only this picture; there's plenty of videos made of this event.
Check them out below (especially the first -and best- one, and keep your eyes open at 00:32!)


And (below) some footage of the game during halftime (with a little less spectators unfortunately, halftime=beertime...)

Supercool in my opinion !
Give the crowd what they want ! Props to GD!
PS: Thanks Leo for youtubing it !
PPS: first pic by Henk Eggens

Gravel Layout ?

Check this dude laying out...!

Nothing to do with ultimate , just funny and at the same time amazing how this tennis player gets horizontal !

Thanks to Peter (Jetset) and Stef (Gentle) for both sending me this clip ! Anybody else have anything interesting ?

Cheerios

Belgium @ Worlds 2010 ???

So , as most of you should know : next year the World Ultimate Club Championships are being held in Prague, Czech Republic between 3 and 10 July.
Considering that the last WUCC was held in Perth, Australia , one might say that Prague is really close by. This means that us belgians should really be there and that's why we applied for three bids (three possible places , if you must).
Unfortunately , the WFDF (World Flying Disc Federation) decided our small country only gets two spots , being open and women. (in this case Mooncatchers and MissB)
More unfortunately this means we have no spot in mixed division , where XLR8RS were gonna proudly represent our country.
This is a real bummer , but can be -a little more- understood when I quote this :
"The process was a hard task as all national associations had requested more than 280 Bids but the tournament can only host approximately 120 Teams."
As I've been told there's a small chance that we might still get our 3d spot but we probably shouldn't get our hopes up.
Do remember this : a waitlist will be revealed on 10/01/2010.
If Belgium (and so XL) is on there I'll let you know, right here !

If you're wondering why they only granted us 2 spots out of 3 bids , here's the answer :
"Bid Selection Process for WUCC2010:
In the past Bids for WFDF World Club Championships were calculated by a certain formula taking into account information from the most recent WUCC and WU(G)C.
It was agreed that no formula taking into account 4 year old data will deliver satisfactory results.
In addition WUCC 2006 was held in a place and at a time that made it very hard for many countries to attend.
For 2010 it was decided to select an committee of 11 experienced players from all continents in order to discuss how to best assign bids to the countries in each division. All new members that are paid in full will receive a bid.

The first guideline was that every WFDF Member should get at least one bid in the division of their choice.
The following ides were taken into account:
· Worldwide distribution
· Strength
· Development
· Number of paying WFDF members per country
· Participation at former events"

Let's keep our fingers crossed for XL and equally as important , let's give MissB and Moon the support they need to put Belgium on the world ultimate map again , it's been a while !
If you want more info on this WUCC2010 click here.
If you wanna see which countries got how many spots in which divisions , click here.

New Spirit Scoring System !!!

As of 2010 , the WFDF and the BULA will be using this new system they created in the last few months. Here's a little info on it as written by Patrick , BULA president and Chairman of the WFDF Spirit of the Game Committee :

"The Committee looked at all the feedback on the 2008 system and worked hard to make the system better and easier to use.
I think we succeeded :-)
The reduction of the number of scoring criteria from 8 to 5 is one of the main changes.
Each team is now scored on: 1) Rules knowledge and use, 2) Fouls and body contact, 3) Fair-mindedness, 4) Positive attitude and self-control, 5) Themselves (did the team play with worse, same, or better Spirit than the other team?)
The other major change in the 2010 Spirit of the Game scoring system is the rating.
Each of the criteria are now rated "Excellent", "Very Good", "Good", "Not so Good", or "Poor", and teams awarded 4, 3, 2, 1, or 0 points respectively, yielding a score range of 0-20 points per team per game.
I believe that this correctly reflects the overall Good Spirit seen in the (Beach) Ultimate community and allows us to maintain this level of Spiritedness worldwide.
We currently have translations of the SOTG scoring sheet in 25 languages(!) and we will add new translations on January 10, 2010."

Click here for the English version , the Dutch version and the French version.
Let's start using this in Belgium as well , and most importantly : let's keep the spirit high !!

Random Pictures - FüF @ Cork 09

Check out some pictures of FüF at the Cork Open Tournament 09 where they got second place , after losing the final against Marko (see picture above) and his Broccoli teammates.
All pics by Mark (Broccoli, Ireland) and apparently also Laura (hope y'all didn't mind me stealing this off Facebook , if so , gimme a shout !!!)

The third year in a row FüF catches second place at Cork.

Time to bring the cup home in 2010 !

Small Weekend Update

Both my favourites didn't win their respective final , being FüF in Cork (not winning to Broccoli by 12-14) and Revolver at UPA nationals (by not winning to Chain Lightning by 11-15,if I'm not mistaken).
Nevertheless, a big "respect is due" to both teams for getting into the finals !
And also a big congrats to Gentle (playing with a lot of not so very experienced but nevertheless talented guys) ending 19th out of 24 teams in Cork ! (Merci voor de update , Morlie)

PS: Maybe there should be a small final for third/fourth place : FüF against Revolver ? :)

Live Ultimate TODAY !!

Today (sunday) you can watch some amazing live ultimate games on your computer.

Click the picture above to go to the UPA webpage where you can view live footage from today's finals.

If you're wondering what the UPA is , here's a quick explanation :

"The Ultimate Players Association (UPA) serves as the governing body for the sport of Ultimate in the US. .... Founded in 1979 , the UPA is amongst the first flying disc sport organizations around the world, and one of the largest, with over 27.300 members and hundreds of volunteers."

So , as you can guess , the UPA organises the national club ultimate championships in the USA every year; and this can be considered as one of the best (not to say the very best) ultimate club competition in the world (next to the world club championships of course , where USA also always has some top top teams!)

Nuff said , check out the schedule below and click the picture above to find the live stream and enjoy your sunday while watching some of the best ultimate there is to see !

15:00 CET Mixed Championships Game

Axis of C'Ville vs. Chad Larson Experience

17:45 CET Women's Championship Game

Brute Squad vs. Fury

20:30 CET Open Championship Game

Revolver vs. Chain Lightning

PS : we're cheering for Revolver , but more about that in a few weeks time !

PPS : This weekend FüF and Gentle are defending the belgian honour at the Cork Open Tournament in Ireland. Only news so far is that Füf made it to the quarter finals. I'll try to find an update.Next to that the cream of the european ultimate party scene is playing at the Porron hat tournament in Espagna. (Damn you Ryanair !)