YEAR OF THE DONKEY
“The Year of the Donkey” started as a campaign to boost Ultimate in PMB and KZN with the hope of performing well in the major tournaments but not expecting the results to unfold as they did. Thank goodness for the dedicated players and all around good people that play ultimate! Due to the Donkeys from “Sleepy Hollow” PMB being very isolated from SA and our schools talent pools
continually disburse all over SA to study, the challenge of growing Donkeys ultimate and meeting and the SAFDA rules introduced in 2013 seemed to be an unobtainable task for our small community. This sparked a drive by all the current players to attempt to recruit and retain, dedicated players that get bitten by the “ultimate bug”. The Donkeys Ultimate club has always and proudly taken the position that everyone who plays and practice with us regardless of their individual abilities are invited to participate in the Tournaments throughout the year. The Donkeys team does not do any “traditional” practice sessions. What we do is, we arrive, split up, make teams and play. This sometimes results in 3 v 3 games or even 10 v 10 games, nobody is side-lined or excluded. In recent times we have actually had to set up 2 fields (who would have believed). We are however very competitive (maybe the understatement of the year), which is driven by the senior players and now rubbing off onto the rest of the team. In an attempt to fuel growth we introduced the PMB Summer League at the beginning of 2014. We invited all KZN players to participate in it which included DBN and Lions River. This turned out very successful with 36 players participating and together with the annual Swinburne Hat Tournament was a great and competitive stepping stone towards the 1st and biggest Tournament of the year “Nationals 2014”. Nationals began with an unexpected twist as the Tournament Schedule drastically changing to promote same strength teams facing up against each other earlier in the Tournament to avoid very one sided results. We were a bit uncertain about this as it did mean we would have to face our biggest and one of our oldest rivals the Cape Town Chilli’s twice, but we are always willing to try something new (except on “D”). During the pool games we were fortunate to come across the UCT Game of Thrones (2nd Team). This was one of the highlight and most enjoyable games of the tournament for us, although they were adventurous with their play we still had an awesome victorious game ending with a UCT SHIRTLESS (men) point v our Donkeys girls and a Hammer only point. These were very entertaining with our Donkeys girls getting to their in zone twice but being denied. Overall a great spirited game to play and watch. When it came to the top teams we had to pull out all the stops to overcome the very athletic UCT Tigers in the Semi-Finals, with their guys and girls throwing themselves all over the park and skying some of our “smaller” players and with glue like man to man defense creating havoc for our offence we took home the win. Finals v Chilli Red was a potentially big problem for us as we had 2 major hurdles to overcome. Firstly we had already played them on the pool games and only narrowly defeating them on universal point, so they had a score to settle. And secondly we had played our new “D” zone card against them in that game –which we were holding back- and they had quickly figured it out so now what to do? Although having a +30 average age might seem to be a hinder this does however bring experience / calm and sanity to most problems, so with some changes to the line-ups and “D” we took a very hard fought victory with everyone stepping up for our team. Now with our 1st National title under our belt, and a few weeks off for sore legs, we were back. The focus then quickly turned towards the Open and Ladies Championship to be held in DBN in July. This was (although you might not think) much unknown territory for the Donkeys as a whole. As over the past few years the emphasis on the mixed team mentality was now very entrenched in our play and team spirit, as evident in the previous few championship victories. Open & Ladies Championship that was held in DBN created now new opportunities to again grow our club numbers by introducing 1 ladies team and 2 men’s teams. Recruiting enough ladies to take part was not an easy task as we all know, but thank goodness for the persistence of our snr ladies rallied together a small but confident team of 9 girls with 2 very new, birthed the Mares or “Night Mares”. The men’s teams were again challenging to finalise numbers as we had to lure in some of the “retired / previously injured” Donkeys players to rekindle their love of the game in order to field 2 men’s teams. The men were then split up with the bulk of the active participating men playing for the Donkeys and the “retired / previously injured” senior players with a youth contingent to play for the Mules. It was very evident from the start that the standard Donkeys “D” was not working with the ladies battling valiantly but coming in at 3rd place. Considering they had never played a ladies only game before this was a great result. The Mules took up the challenge to face the Donkeys in the Finals. This was very ambitious and unfortunately not to happen, although defeating and holding out a few teams their 5th place was well deserved. The Donkeys men made their way to their 1st Open Finals against a very talented Chilli men’s team with a few additions. The Finals came done to the last point of the game they pulled to us, all we had to do was score to win. Unfortunately for us they did not get the message and a fellow named Korne’ affected the turnover and the Donkeys men came 2nd. Now you must understand although we as the Donkeys lost the bigger issue was still to come in the form of a certain captain who could not play on the Sunday, lets call him “Long Stop” for now. The relentless barrage of taunting that followed was nearly unbearable ;). Now to lick our wounds so to speak and push through a cold winter leading up to Rocktober, was thankfully distracted by the
– Ice Bucket Challenge or ALS / MND Motor Neurone Disease. Which the Donkeys as a Club got involved in and all the players gladly participated in an attempt of promoting and educating people of this disease.
– There was additionally the “Battle of the Bands” with bought out the performer in our team “Piston” Paul one of our resident Doctors. We took on “livin on a prayer” bon jovi and in our opinion taking this challenge to the next level.. Rocktober came round faster than we expected. We as usual invited all team members to join us and were fortunate to take the biggest squad to date to any Tournament 19 (11 men and 8 ladies). Coming into the 1st day we were fortunate to play against some very spirited teams and non-more memorable that the infamous Voodoo Kudu’s. We took home the victory but they defiantly took home the biggest catch of the day, with an awesome display of inland fishing we have ever seen…
As with Nationals the format was changed and this time it meant running into the much improved UCT Tigers twice. We have always feared letting them get any momentum as this is like fuel to a flame and their intensity levels skyrocket creating havoc for any team. We did however bring home the round robin game which then pits us up against the previous 2013 National Champs Ghost Ultimate from Cape Town in the Semi-Finals. With a few of their key players having left there was hope this would turn out one sided but again they did not get this message and made our defense do kilometers of running per point with sometimes at least +40 passes before scoring. Thank goodness for our subs as we were able to rotate fresh legs in and took home a hard fought victory. The highlight of the game and maybe the tournament our very own SAFDA chair Ros Dredge getting her 1st Callahan. It must also be said the Ghost team were very well spirited towards Ros. The Finals was again against UCT Tigers. The game was a humdinger from the start trading points and with some athletic plays and layout “D’s” on both teams the Donkeys pulled ahead. The impression was that the Tigers had put everything into the Semi-Finals to overcome their Cape Town rivals Chilli Red, which gave us a slight edge for the Finals. The Finals was a greatly competitive game with the Donkeys taking home the title for the 2nd consecutive year. Now to round off an outstanding year our resident “Beard” Barry set up and ran a very successful Summer League “Game of Thrones”. Again the entire KZN Ultimate community was invited to participate and splitting the teams into the 4 Houses with now 46 players participating the year was closed off with a bang…
Donkey growth has been steady this year. Our social network has increased by over 100% year on year with team members numbers growing to the biggest ever. We the Donkeys as a team understand that South Africa Ultimate Frisbee was founded by players and the teams around the country are run by dedicated individuals, with the growth especially in smaller cities and towns where the international influence is nil requires the team members and individual members to recruit new players to the game we love. We also understand the challenges of mixed sports in South Africa and are doing our best to try and promote this aspect to ensure our clubs survival. All this required loads of time and energy by individuals at no gain to themselves. Many thanks to all that helped out during the 2014 “Year of the Donkey”. We feel the “Era of the Donkey” is progressing “kickingly” and we look forward to the 2015 Ultimate Frisbee year in South Africa.
