LEMUEL BLIGNAUT
The Pietermaritzburg Long Donkeys Ultimate Frisbee team and Lions River Polo club played hosts to the seventh annual National Ultimate Frisbee tournament over the weekend of 5 October.
The tournament saw a variety of men’s and women’s teams vie for the title. The seven women’s teams played a series of round-robin matches, with the two top-ranked teams heading to the final, while the third and fourth-ranked teams faced each other in the playoff for bronze.
During the season, Mondays are match days, and all the Ultimate players can be seen across the Stellenbosch University campus in their club kit, practising their sport.
“Ultimate isn’t very well known across campus, we would like to grow quite a bit,” Maties Ultimate Frisbee secretary, Natalie Austin says.
Maties didn’t send a full women’s team to the National Ultimate Frisbee tournament, but several Maties players went as members of Wild, the Western Cape women’s team.
“Wild was made for the people that wanted to go to nationals, ladies that didn’t have a team and were keen to play on a national level. So we formed our own team,” Austin says.
Wild remained unbeaten throughout the weekend, shrugging off the University of Cape Town (UCT) women’s, team Bengals, 15 – 3 in the finals on Sunday, after the emerging top of the log after the round-robin matches.
The men played a more conventional pool-based tournament, with the top teams proceeding to the knockout stages. Marco Dewey, chairman of Maties Ultimate Frisbee, says the men’s team was a sort of collaboration between Maties and UCT.
“We did send a men’s team, although we ended up picking up some of the UCT players as they didn’t send a team, so it was kind of a combined effort from Maties and UCT.”
The men placed fourth overall.
“It is very successful for us, we had never come above ninth at Nationals before,” Dewey said.
