[Travels] At Rising Home

A few weeks ago we attended Rising High; an excellent tournament in Ingeborg’s old home town of Delft, the Netherlands. She definitely suggested attending the tournament her former club hosts, and we’re both very glad she did! At Rising High we had our booth out in the sun, surrounded by 8 fields chock-a-block full of high-spirited ultimate.

The organizing teams (all three of which played and volunteered throughout the tournament) did an excellent job hosting three days of disc joy for intermediate to experience teams, providing us excellent food at a great location with an excellent party to boot! Thank you for the excellent work Force Elektro (and the Power PUF Girls!), Ingeborg had the best time being home.

Hosts Force Elektro and the Power PUF Girls in action at Rising High

Attending a tournament as your job is obviously a very awesome and fun type of work, but it does usually means not playing any actual Ultimate while we are there. Furthermore, we have come back from tournaments and realized that we had not thrown a single disc that entire 2 – 3 day period. Whoops.

All of that was very different this year in attending Rising High. Before the tournament proper got underway, Robin played the one day HAT tournament with the blue team. The excellently titled Rising Hat is an excellent opportunity to meet the people you will be playing against for the rest of the weekend, and for Robin is was a chance to play before working the rest of the weekend.

In a nice turn of events, things would not remain so clear cut. Since a few HAT players forgot to bring cleats, Robin worked a little during the HAT tournament; and because Robin found out that one of the teams at Rising High would have only 6 players for the tournament, he ended up playing for a lot of the weekend! Eventually WAF found a few more players, and they had a luxuriously large team of 9 players.

Here are a few pictures of Robin stretching his legs with WAF.

Naturally Ingeborg got a little jealous of all of the on field frolicking fun that Robin was having, so she picked up with her old regional women’s pick up for the second day; back in pink with the Power PUF Girls!

Once again we ran our disc giveaway competition. And once again the Callahan Catcher disc was claimed seconds into the tournament while the Greatest Thrower remained unclaimed. A lot of players cheerily boasted that they would do the deed in the next game, but this remained all talk and no action. One team even took a time-out in order to strategize how they could execute a successful Greatest; but that time-out only led to an almost immediate turnover and zero successful Greatests.

(left) Harald of the Frizzly Bears, our Callahan Catcher
(right) Greatest attempt, picture by Cheron Huskens

We want to congratulate Harald of the Frizzly Bears for successfully catching a Callahan score in their first game of the tournament. Funnily enough, it was during their game against Force Elektro, the team who had won the Callahan Catcher disc at Tom’s Tourney the weekend before! Harald credits his team’s excellent junk defense for throwing of FE’s offense. A floaty disc went up to the poached handler in the endzone, and Harald had “way too much time to get the disc,” the score and the TOKAY Giveaway Disc to boot!

Also a special shout-out to the Belgian U20 team for scoring 3 Callahans in a single game! And also for winning the tournament…

Congratulations to all of the winners at Rising High 2018: Dutch U20 Women for winning the women’s division and Spirit, Belgium U20 Men for winning the High Open division, Flying Colors for winning the Rising Open division and to BORA for winning the Open Spirit prize.  Also a huge congratulations to Jet Set for winning the party and Undutchables for winning the flip-cup tournament.

Perhaps it was our time on the field playing, or the ever present sunshine, maybe even the flip cup tournament or that falafel lunch on Saturday… for all those reasons and a thousand more, Rising High was a joy to attend and felt more like a holiday than any tournament we attended has so far. As always it was a pleasure to meet and re-meet many wonderful people in our little world of Ultimate. We look forward to catching up with you all soon, and are eagerly anticipating our next travel destination!