Saturday, July 7, 2007

The introduction to the new Ballarat Ultimate blog...

So what if this is a blatant rip-off of the Brisbane Ultimate Disc blog?

Despite the proximity to Melbourne, the frequent traveling and the use of Myspace, Facebook and other stuff, the ultimate scene in Ballarat seems to be pretty sheltered from the rest of the country (Western Australia excepted). So taking the Queensland lead I thought I'd set up a blog to fill the rest of the disc community in on what the hell happens in our portion of the earth.

So what's currently happening?
- The Heads Of State boys are training hard for their NUFL campaign
- BUUF is recovering from their 3rd place finish at the Boycott City Challenge
- Church Street League Fighter Lighter are tearing it up at Youth Nats
- Social trainings are on hold for the holidays
- Everyone is starting to consider their Mixed Nats activities

A phone call to Dan reveals that Church St have a 4-1 record after today. The first game was against top seed In-Tents, where the score was 6-3 at time cap to In-Tents, and Church St scored the next four in a row to win. Other wins came over Chatswood (also double game point), Darwin and ACT. The last game of the day saw a loss to Panic! At The Disc.

The hot topic in the coming weeks will be Mixed Nats and who will be going. The Victorian squads are virtually settled with what looks like at least 4 teams (MUCUS, Honey Badgers, Station 59 and Team Gary) formed. There's still rumblings of other teams for the time being but nothing in concrete. The VFDA are proposing a league qualification format to give a much needed boost to the Thursday night Box Hill league, which ends the prospect of a Ballarat team. With guns Dan and Mark already playing for Station 59, plus most of the rest playing at AUG on the Gold Coast the week before, Ballarat was going to struggle to have a team anyway.

Along comes a brilliant concept - Country All Stars. Ultimate is slowly starting to thrive in regional centres (not counting Newcastle and Wollongong - they're virtually suburbs of Sydney) such as Ballarat, Townsville and Bathurst. The thinking is to create a team of players from Ballarat, Geelong, Bathurst and Dubbo to give a few players from those regions exposure to top flight competition. Their biggest problem - how to qualify? Odds are the team will have to nominate themselves as a "Victorian" team, watch as the other four eat up the allocated spots, and wait and pray for a wildcard. We'll have to wait and see.

Also we'll have to come up with a better name. Bozza's already suggested "Bogan United". Someone else said "Sheep Jockeys" but they didn't realise New Zealand were invited and it might cause some ripples. Any suggestions for a better name?


Hopefully there'll be more contributors than me to this blog, and maybe I'll provide some competition to JdR's "loldisc" posts. Who knows.

Come to The Big Wet V! Sunday July 15th! Register now!