Up until this point, six weeklong youth Ultimate camps had been organised in Australia since the first one in January 2004. Upon returning to Australia, Matt and I had somehow been coerced into running the seventh!

The location for the camp was Ballarat, Victoria – our hometown – which made things a little easier than they could have been. After much preparation, 50 youth players arrived in Ballarat from WA, SA, Tassie, NSW, QLD, ACT and of course Victoria. The hardest part of the whole organisation for the camp (believe it or not) was collecting all the campers from the two airports and getting them to Ballarat! The volunteer support staff for the camp were many. They included head coaches, assistant coaches, people who made meals and looked after the players, people who taxied back and forth between the fields and the shops with bags of ice, people who drove a bus full of kids down to Ballarat from Queensland (!), and Matt and I – the Camp Directors.

One of the highlights, particularly for us, was the arrival of our good friend Jaime “Idaho” Arambula who had been one of our hosts in Seattle three months prior. Idaho is an excellent coach so Piers Truter (Australia’s U/20 Open Head Coach) had requested that the Australian Flying Disc Association fly him over from America to assist with our coaching for the week. After much discussion, it ended up happening, and Idaho became our guest for the week.

The coaches ran a great program and the improvement from day one through to day five was overwhelming among all the campers. For many, this was the first formal Ultimate Frisbee camp they had been to – so their skills improved out of sight. The week was also used as an initial scouting for talent for the 2010 U/20 teams that will compete at the World Championships in Germany.

At the end of a long week of logistics all the volunteers were tired but overall pretty chuffed with how well the camp ran. The skills we learnt running a camp of this size are invaluable and I am sure it will not be the last camp that we end up running….

To all the campers – I hope you go on to have an enjoyable playing career and find the sport of Ultimate to be as fulfilling as many of us have found it to be. And to all the volunteers – thanks so much for your contributions throughout the week, these things just don’t happen with out all the people willing to put in the hard yards!

See you at the next one!