This past Saturday, UP held it’s season ending event: UP Games. Teams from UP communities from across the region came together at a field in suburban Tel Aviv for a day of game. Players played as community teams against other communities. This marked the end of a packed year where a dozen different communities had regular weekly practices.
This last year has been one of my favorites with Ultimate Peace. I’ve had the amazing opportunity to take a larger role in two UP communities, Bueina Nujidat and Arabe. Making it north almost every Friday was the most rewarding struggle I’ve ever faced. Watching a whole year go by, really seeing the players grow (physically and with their ultimate skills) allowed me to learn so much more from them than I ever expected. Continue reading
This is the last 2/5ths of an essay I wrote to help me deal with everything swimming through my head this week. I think these two parts stand on their own, but if you are ambitious enough please check out the full version.
Part IV
The coaches with UP’s year round program are always an eclectic bunch. There are some transplants from the US, like myself. There are local Israeli born players. And there are the foreigners, the Americans and Europeans who are in the region temporarily for anywhere between two months to four years. These three groups come together to create a cadre of coaches who travel everywhere from Jericho to Tamra, from Binyamina to Ein Rafa, and many places in between.
We drive together, coach together, gorge on humus and shwarma together. We share in the ups and downs of a yearlong program coaching in all these communities. We share stories of little kids with amazing forehands, or shy players coming out of their shells. This is a family that goes on a journey together. Continue reading
I embarked on my first Ultimate Peace experience last weekend. This has been an organization with which I’ve been infatuated with since I heard about its launch in 2009. Middle Eastern conflict resolution was a smattering of oversimplified, idealistic theories I’d studied from a safe and privileged seat in an American classroom; and I’d heard that UP’s founders were some of the greatest athletes that the sport has known. So I would scroll through their website and talk about their work in the same star-struck way that a kid might keep baseball cards on his dresser, thumbing through them on occasion before tottering off to little league. Five years down the road, I find myself elbow deep in the political knots and cultural complexities of Israel. I’m sitting alongside the heroes themselves who are welcoming their new family members and toasting to a successful first hat tournament of 2014.
Continue readingDani Glass writes about the ins and outs of getting Ultimate Peace’s summer camp up and started.
Elliot Blumberg writes about disappearing anxieties and the excitement of meeting campers for the first time. Continue reading