Ultimate Frisbee

One thing I love to do in the summer and try to do it as much as possible is ultimate Frisbee.  We try to get about ten people so we have two teams of five and we just play for hours.  We play to about five points and then we usually switch up teams and try and make the teams as even as possible.  We play down and vets park on the outfield of the softball fields.  From end zone to end zone is about 200 feet apart and from sideline to sideline is about sixty feet.  The rules are: you cannot double team someone with the Frisbee, You are only allowed two steps with the Frisbee in your hand, if any part of the Frisbee touches the ground before you have possession of it it’s a turnover, you can bump and push but only to a certain extent.  I absolutely love chucking the Frisbee down field as far as I can but I never have anyone on my team that can catch up to it and get it, so I am usually the one sprinting down the field when my teammates hurl the Frisbee.  I hate when I have to dive for the Frisbee, because it’s either a win-lose situation or a lose-lose situation.  If you dive and catch it that’s a win but you’re all itchy, lose.  If you dive and miss it’s a lose-lose because you didn’t get the Frisbee and your super itchy now and have grass or dirty stains on your arm and or shirt.  If I had the choice I would play ultimate Frisbee every day for the rest of my life, but some things are more important, like school, and work.  I try and play as much as possible in the summer even if we can only get two teams of 3, its just more room for me to run and score.  

Olympics

One thing that my friends and I started our senior year in high school was this thing we call the Olympics.  The first year we rounded up 21 people from our grade and a couple from the grades below us.  What we did is we picked 5 countries and randomly drew people’s names to each team one at a time.  We had four teams of four and one team of five.  What we did is we created six or seven games that each team competed in. First place got five points, second got 3 points and third got one point.  Team with the most points at the end of the day gets bragging rights till the next year when teams are again to do all over again.  Every year we have basically the same games: balloon tag, lava tag, volleyball, ultimate Frisbee, and soccer world cup.  This year we got creative and added a couple of new games: egg toss, lightning, scavenger hunt, and a weird ball game that someone created out of nowhere.  This year we had our biggest turn out for people we had 30 people, and believe me trying to play soccer with 30 people on the field is crazy. Every shot someone took ricocheted off of 10 people before you even knew it.  When we created this game we were just joking around in physics class one day with a bunch of friends and we just thought of an Idea and we ended up following through with it.  So far every year the countries that stay are USA, Jamaica and Russia. The 3 other teams are always a tossup; it usually depends on how cool the countries flags are.  Right when summer started to come around this is what all of my friends talk about, nobody can wait until the day of the “Olympics.” When we draw everyone's names to their designated teams we take a car and play the Olympic theme song. We roll up a bunch of newspaper and light it on fire and pretend it’s a torch.  We pass it off from team to team as we run down the road as a huge group of “Olympians.”  I can only imagine what my friends neighbors are thinking when they look out the window and see a bunch of 18 and 19 year old kids running down the road with a lit bundle of newspaper.  

KneeBoarding

 I know I have been way behind on my blog post but I’m going to try and do better from now on.  About a month and a half ago my friends and I went wakeboarding, which is what all my friends and I love to do in the summer.  One of my friends asked if any of us have knee boarded, none of us have so he brought his kneeboard along.  Everyone had a couple runs of wakeboarding but eventually we got to kneeboard.  I never realized how fun and easy knee boarding is. The only difficult part is when you first start getting towed you have to lay on the board and shimmy up to your knees and then you have to hold the rope with one hand while you take a strap you knees to the board,  After you’re all strapped in its smooth sailing from there.  It’s super easy to stay up because your center of gravity is lower to the ground, whereas wakeboarding is harder to stay up because your center of gravity is farther away.  Which makes sense because for wakeboarding you’re on your feet and knee boarding you’re on your knees.  I loved when we went wakeboarding, and tubing but I think I found a new favorite thing to do, knee board.  Now on knee boards there are no fins on the bottom so you can do 360s in the water and other tricks you couldn’t do with fins.  The first time I tried knee boarding I got up the first try, which is usually everyone’s first goal.  Right off the bat I tried a 360 almost got around but got hung-up when I was backwards.  My next run I figured out how to do a 360 and kept doing them, But my friends wanted we to jump the wake so I tried that.   I got a little bit of air but they wanted to see more.  So I complied to peer pressure and hit the wake again I got a little more air.  They kept telling me to go big or go home so on my final run I went as far out as the tow rope would let me and just whipped it back towards the wake.  Now the average height of air for a knee board is about two and a half feet.  On my last run I was going a little too fast and my friends said I got four to five feet of air, while I was in the air I was a little scared.  When I hit the wake my knees moved out of the straps, which isn’t a good thing.  In the center of a knee board there is a little knob, when my knees slid out it went over the knob and when I landed all of my weight went right on to my knee and the knob.  It was probably one of the worst pains I’ve ever had, besides breaking a bone.  I couldn’t even bend my knee it hurts so bad, when I got out of the water there was blood all down my leg,  I probably should have go stiches but I didn’t think I needed to.  I can’t wait to go knee boarding again next year; it’s my new favorite aquatic activity. 

Here is a picture of my knee after Knee boarding.