Why do I bother?

I have insomnia whenever I am stressed about something, and last night was no exception. The thing that is really stressing (and bothering) me the most is actually one of my recreation activities. Ultimate. I am one of the captains of seVen, which is the Ottawa-Carleton Ultimate Association (OCUA)'s competitive coed ultimate team. OCUA wants to develop its program for competitive program to have development streams for Open, Women's, and Coed so that the teams are no longer dependent on the personalities running the teams. I think that this will really work for the Open and Women's streams right now, but it is definitely not working for the coed stream which is the big source of my frustration.

This summer is a big year for Canadian Ultimate because it is a qualifying year for World Clubs that will occur in Perth, Australia in 2006. World Clubs is a different Championship than Worlds (which Canada one last summer in Turku, Finland) because countries are allowed to send multiple teams to World Clubs (in each division) depending on some system of points that are allocated according to some formula (which I really don't understand), whereas at Worlds, each country only sends one team per division.

Anyways, because this is a qualifying year, it will be a tough year for competition, which is great for Ultimate, and in other cities, the top players in each division will be banding together to win one of the illustrious spots to go to World Clubs. In the coed (aka mixed) division,Canada sent 9 teams to Honolulu in 2002. It seems though that in Ottawa that the opposite phenomenon is occuring. People like to play with their friends in the coed division so they decide to form their own teams to compete. I completely understand that people want to play with their friends and that they will still be competitive, but it is very frustrating from my standpoint because I am trying to build a program that will hopefully continue after I am finished playing competitive ultimate, but in our second year I am running into so many problems.

I guess the biggest problem with the formation of these other teams is that women (or quality women) are quite scarce in our city. We have two very strong women's teams who can compete with most teams in this country who are able to attract many women and there are also women who decide that they don't want to commit to regular practices who just pick up with touring teams around the city. Last summer, we had to take some players on our team who might not have been quite ready to play (at the beginning of the summer) at the National level, but I think that these players really developed over the course of the summer and as a team we were able to compete. Although we didn't quite accomplish our goal of top 8 at Nationals, we accomplished the goal of beating our rank (which we did at each tournament this summer, and even in the fall when we were playing at the UPA fall series). Hopefully we will be able to keep these women so that we can continue building our team and we will be able to realize our full potential at Nationals.

I think the other problem that I have with one of these teams, is that it will be taking players from seVen. I have been told indirectly that one of the captains of this new team will be one of the women from seVen and that she may be recruiting from our team. I think that the hardest part about hearing this was that she is (was?) one of my closest friends and she still hasn't told me yet. The captain of another team (who will be mostly comprised of players who no longer want to practice regularly but have been playing together for many years) told me that she would be forming this team, and I am quite grateful to her in doing this so that I can plan accordingly, and we may even work together this summer in some practices. I would have thought that my friendship with my old teammate would have afforded me the same courtesy, and it was really tough hearing from someone else her plans.

I think that this one of the reasons that I have been losing so much sleep because I am letting Ultimate get in the way of my regular life. It is only a game - although a game that I am quite passionate about - it is just a game, and I really don't think that I should have to lose a friend because of it.