11 January 2009

The history of your sport

The AFDA held a Gala Dinner back in July.

It was a fantastic event, where past Australian representative teams were celebrated and the current ones were introduced. As an amateur sport, recording the history of the ultimate community in Australia has been sporadic.

The speakers at the Gala Dinner were videotaped, so hopefully members of our community who weren't present will be able to learn about our sport. Where is that footage?

As someone who has worked in public institutions like museums, I am aware these days of how you need to consider not just having a record of history, but sharing it with the wider community, and have them contribute, comment and evaluate it.

With the world, and especially ultimate players, moving online for more and more of their life, sharing history has got easier.

AFDA.com has a list of Australian representative teams and a history page. We acknowledge contributors through the AFDA awards and the Rob Hancock award.

UPA.org has a Hall of Fame.

But the most valuable things are the stories - humans are storytellers, and story-listeners.

The book Ultimate: The First Four Decades is an example of a great collection of stories and characters.

More collections like this would be awesome. And if the Americans barely mention the existence of non-North American ultimate, it is up to those countries to share their history.

One project I have on my Someday/Maybe list is to interview and record the veterans of our sport about ultimate when they were younger. These chats could be published as podcasts. Give Greenie and Garvey a couple of beers and you'd get some great stories coming out.

The 1988 Australian Open team. Notice Michelle in the front row, right.

1 comment:

  1. I think there's a place in the online ultimate community for more podcast content. Definitely lots of stories and information out there that would be really useful/interesting to the rest of the community.

    ReplyDelete