Activity 7: Surat Ultimate Open | Service, Activity

Volunteering as a venue coordinator for the SUO was an experience that tested my patience, and resilience unlike anything else.

First and foremost, I had to help organize an Ultimate Frisbee Tournament, a sport that I am absolutely clueless about. I therefore had to learn new terminology, rules and procedures pertinent to the sport. This was challenging as Ultimate Frisbee is a sport unlike any other and a lot of the concepts such as spirit and soft caps/ hard caps are totally alien to people outside the Frisbee world. Apart from the theory of ultimate, I also tried out the sport practically, which turned out to be more difficult than it looks!

Spending all day in the sun at KG farm was also no easy feat and working and developing a friendship with the people around me definitely helped. From erecting umbrellas to devising innovative strategies to keep the sun out of our eyes, I think I worked well with the people around me to make sure that everyone was comfortable. We all also devised a system of alternating turns to make sure that no one person had to do all the work. Ask anyone you want, the team at KG farms turned out to be the most successful because of our synergy! 😀

I also interacted with the players who had come for this tournament from all over the country and the world. This not only helped me pass the time, but it also helped me understand the lives of people who have dedicated themselves to sport and social work, which was really inspiring.

Ethical was another noteworthy aspect of this event. The sport Ultimate Frisbee is centered around being ethical and displaying sportsman spirit and as a venue coordinator, it was my job to make sure that teams and players followed the spirit of the event to the T. I therefore did my best to ensure that all matches were, without fail, followed by the customary ‘Spirit Circle’ and that all teams filled out ‘Spirit Sheets’. In one of the matches, the teams had a disagreement on-field and so I forced them to do a ‘Spirit Circle’ which seemed to alleviate some of the animosity between them. All of this had two lasting impacts: firstly, it enlightened me as to why people like this sport so much (because it’s all about the spirit) and secondly, that I can use lessons about ethics learnt here in other the sports that I play and practice.

So overall, SUO was a pretty enlightening experience and quite different from my usual CAS activities that involve me sitting in an air-conditioned room in fancy clothes *coughs* MUNs *coughs*