Colombia - Torneo Eterna Primavera

This entry is long overdue, and for that I apologize. Attempting to properly capture our time in Colombia in words was a daunting and lengthy task. Now that it has finally arrived, I hope you enjoy -

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I spent a good four hours of the three-flight-24-hour journey home to Seattle furiously scribbling in the Gatorade notebook I had been given while coaching in Medellin – my goals for the 2010 season. After 14 pages, I paused, and then wrote one final line: “play like Julian is watching.”

My first night coaching in Medellin, Jinny Eun and I went to the practice of a coed team called Frey. Frey consisted of about 20 men, women…and children. There was Julian Areiza Gallego, smaller than any of my 6th graders back at home, getting discouraged after taking laser forehands in the chest from 20-year-old guys and launching monstrous layouts onto a field of cement-like dirt punctuated only by rocks the size of my fists.

When this same kid, after watching Riot play against Vancouver’s Traffic a week or so later, came sprinting up to me and wrapped himself around my legs with a smile stretching from ear to ear, I knew that he couldn’t possibly realize that this meant at least as much to me as it did to him. And, later, when I told him that he needed to come visit me in Seattle and teach my middle-schoolers how to play, he responded in Spanish something that I only deciphered later – that he couldn’t possibly teach them better because I am “like a superman.” But what he couldn’t possibly understand was that he was single-handedly, in one moment, making me a greater player, teammate and coach than six years of playing Ultimate had before that. Because if I was a superman in Julian’s eyes, how could I have any choice but to be a superman, always?

Over and over again in “huggles” with Colombian teams after some of the most athletic, intense, and spirited Ultimate games Riot had ever played, we were told about how they had learned Ultimate from watching us, and that they had seen so much of us on videos but that having us playing with them in Colombia was “a dream come true.” Back home, especially where I am from, Ultimate players are just recreational athletes – we love our teams and our sport to death but they are just that, “ours.” In Colombia, we were role models the way I imagine it must feel like to be a basketball or football player in the US. Nothing we said or did went unnoticed and hadn’t for many years before we got there. We autographed discs, jerseys, pant legs and hardboiled eggs.

And as we spent day after day waking up at 6am and coaching 8-hour practices, the things we were saying started to sound different than they ever had before, like hearing your voice in a video. No longer were these just strategies, skills, tricks, or advice that may or may not be heeded or even really heard, these were Ultimate. Our players – young kids, teenagers, University students, men, women and Colombian coaches – they didn’t just hear the things we told them, they listened, and they went after them with the fierce passion that had been described to us as an obstacle to spirit of the game in Colombia. INDER coaches – similar to physical education teachers in the US – threw themselves after discs in the go-to drill and begged us to let them scrimmage 12 on 12 so that they didn’t have to wait on the sidelines. University students ran drills so ferociously that sometimes we had to pause them just to take a deep breath and remind them that it didn’t matter if they threw the disc out the back of the end zone or cut at the speed of light if it wasn’t to a receiver or didn’t have the right timing. I even had to threaten them with pushups for excessive contact in a defensive drill out of fear for their own teammates’ well-being. I can only imagine what Ultimate would be like in the US if we could all learn to play with that kind of passion, work ethic, and abdication of self-consciousness.

When we weren’t coaching or playing, we attended and spoke at conferences centered on how to build and spread spirit of the game, and how to use it to bring stability to vulnerable communities. This unique quality of our game is one of the main reasons that Ultimate has exploded in Colombia the way it has. The Colombian government granted the organizers of Torneo Eterna Primavera – namely, Mauricio Moore and Aleja Torres, along with an impressive army of volunteers – a sizable chunk of money under a few conditions, including the clinics, practices and conferences that they organized for the academic week prior to the tournament. Yet for all the experience and skill we brought to these events, they brought us even greater lessons in marketing Ultimate (TEP billboards dotted the city and our clinics were on the mid-day news, while the showcase and finals games were on live television), community outreach, and most ironically, spirit of the game.

As we spent two weeks in Medellin coaching and playing among Ultimate players from Canada, Australia, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and the Dominican Republic, I realized that, here in Medellin, they were achieving with action far more toward the goal of sportsmanship than our words could tell them. Players from at least eight countries were forming lasting bonds of friendship and mentorship, united by a common love of Ultimate and the desire to spread its values of communication, nonviolence and respect. I distinctly remember sitting at the University and thinking to myself, this right here is exactly how you develop spirit of the game – you give people the opportunity to build relationships off the field so that when they step onto it, they are peers and personalities, not faceless opponents. And it ought to be impossible to, in good conscience, disrespect someone that you know as a human being.

Too soon cresting the hill on I-5 that unveils the lights of Seattle’s skyline by night, I couldn’t help but think that it had only been moments since I was climbing into a tiny Colombian car piloted by Ana, barreling along the mountaintops that look down into the glittering teacup of Medellin. We had learned quickly that traffic lights, speed limits and stop signs are really more like suggestions in Colombia, and when I was told “You don’t need a seatbelt,” I thought to myself – for the law, or for my life? Now here I was back in the city that tickets you for jaywalking, muddled in a surreal cloud of questions like: Did that really just happen or was it all a dream? How is it that two such different worlds can collide so intensely and then just fall back into themselves and continue on their separate ways? And, when everyone asks me “So how was Colombia?” – how am I going to express the gravity of the humility and responsibility that settled on us during those two weeks?

And so I let these questions linger unanswered, leaned back against the seat, closed my eyes, and remembered playing Street Ultimate on an ambient-lit basketball court with the Suricatos; laying in hammocks while planning practices alongside Australians and Canadians; learning the mantra of “no te preocupes” from Mauricio and Ojos; sharing an unfamiliar oat-powder drink with the girls of Wicca after practice; hearing the children of the Escuelas Populares screaming my name from the stands to show that they had worn the jerseys I gave them; feeling patriotic for the first time in my life; getting to know my teammates to a depth I otherwise never would have had the opportunity to do; and being hugged, kissed, welcomed, loved and respected every single moment of every day. And in this way, I reassured myself that our worlds could never again exist separately as long as teammates in both Americas have a lifetime worth of lessons and friendships stored away in their hearts, and my notebook reads “play like Julian is watching.”

[Photos of Julian, as well as many of the people and events described here, can be found in our Colombia photo gallery. Special thanks to Scobel Wiggens, who traveled to Medellin as a tournament photographer and captured many fantastic moments for us.]