The Chennai Ultimate Frisbee (CUF) club is organizing India’s first international beach ultimate Frisbee tournament on the 29th and 30th of November 2008. The tournament will take place on the home ground of CUF, the Elliot’s beach in Besant Nagar and will feature seven teams from Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmadabad and Colombo.  The tournament represents a greater test of skill and fitness as the teams face off in matches both under the morning sun and the night lights (yes that’s right) on the Elliot sands.

The CUF Club was born out of ultimate passion to keep the disc flying. Manu Karan, Shankar Balakrishnan and Narayanan Krishnan – graduates from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, after having played for a year at business school, moved to Chennai for work and chose to actively promote this sport among the Chennai youth. In the summer of 2007, Ultimate was introduced to Chennai. An exciting journey thus began.

With memberships close to 50 within the first six months, the club decided to conduct its first tournament around December 2007, with four teams of players from within the club. Since then, CUF has come a long way, growing both in size and experience, reflected by the increasing number of players joining the club and its participation in tournaments across the country.

The first national tournament happened at Ahmedabad in February 2008 and was organized by Indicorps.  The game was played on hard ground and featured teams from Ahmadabad, Chennai and Delhi, with the latter emerging on top. Next up was the Flybaba tournament at Kodiakanal hosted by the Kodai International School in April 2008. This ultimate competition saw more interest with teams from Delhi, Ahmadabad, Bangalore, Kodaikanal and Chennai participating. Bangalore then organized a Chennai versus Bangalore event at Camp Shrishti this July. These prior tournaments have all been played either on grass fields or hard ground and the next logical step was to test the country’s sands.

November-08’s tournament is a showcase of the efforts to promote Ultimate Frisbee and the spirit of the game in the country, and is the biggest so far with seven teams having registered. The tournament next weekend will be different owing to the more demanding wind and ground conditions on the beach, which most teams are so far unfamiliar with. Being the only club that regularly plays beach- ultimate in India, CUF will send two teams into the competition: C-Ultimate and the Chennai Livewires.  Ultimate Frisbee in India is seeing more enthusiasm and popularity with tournaments that have been getting bigger and better. The upcoming Chennai tournament will also feature an international team flying down from Colombo. If everything goes well, we might just be on the brink of forming an ‘India Ultimate’ team here next weekend for possibly competing at international events next year.