Ultimate Frisbee

My first throw was terrible. I remember standing in the amphitheatre in junior college in 2019, watching someone catch a disc cleanly and send it back into the air like it weighed almost nothing. I could not stop looking at the flight. A ball rises and falls, but a frisbee hangs there a little longer, adjusts to the wind, and glides.

I wanted to understand how to make that happen. At the time, I thought I had found a hobby.

Ultimate changed the more seriously I played it. At first, I cared about throws, catches, and whether I could keep up. Later, I started to understand that the best version of the sport is about reading a whole field at speed, seeing where the defender is leaning, knowing when your teammate is about to cut, and finding the space before it fully opens.

It is fast and physical, but it is also a constant decision making game. Angles, timing, trust, fatigue, wind, pressure. That is what made me stay, not just the disc, but the game itself.

In late 2023, I found out about trials for the Singapore U24 national team. The timing was inconvenient in every practical way. I had an internship offer and no clear idea whether I could handle a national training programme at the same time. The sensible choice was to skip trials and keep life simpler.

I went anyway. Letting the chance pass felt worse than dealing with the uncertainty. Making the team meant figuring out the schedule, the energy, and the tradeoffs as they came, but I knew I would rather try and make it messy than wonder about it later.

The next eighteen months were heavy in a way I only understood properly after they ended. We trained three to four times a week, on weekday nights and weekends, through Singapore heat, with sessions getting longer and sharper as Worlds came closer. Some weeks I was not just tired. I felt worn down.

That was where discipline became very plain. Showing up on a Tuesday night when you would rather go home, having a bad game and coming back ready to fix something, learning that the person beside you is counting on your effort even when you do not feel ready. Over time, the question stopped being whether I felt like training. The answer was just to show up.

Eighteen months of that changed my standard for work, for teams, and for myself. It cost a lot, but it gave a lot back too.

We landed in Logrono, La Rioja, for the WFDF World Under-24 Ultimate Championships. Before the trip, I knew almost nothing about the city. It turned out to be small, warm, and unhurried, with old stone streets, terracotta rooftops, and the Ebro River along the edge. Between games, I walked with my camera, and the calm of the city sat strangely beside the pressure of why we were there.

I arrived at the tournament feeling ready. Not invincible, just ready. The work had settled into my body, the reads felt cleaner, and my legs reacted faster than my thoughts. More than anything, I trusted the people around me. That kind of trust is built long before tournament week, in ordinary sessions, bad losses, and honest conversations after games that did not go well.

What I remember most from Spain is not a single point or a single result. It is how we were with each other through the week. Morale stayed high even when games hurt. We celebrated each other's plays, absorbed mistakes quickly, and kept moving.

That was not accidental. We had already gone through sessions where nothing worked, tournaments where we fell short, and stretches where we were not yet the team we wanted to be. By the time pressure arrived, we had enough trust underneath us not to crack.

We finished 4th. I have thought about that a lot since coming home, and the competitive part of me still wishes we had gone further. I trained too hard and replayed too many points in my head to pretend otherwise.

But the result is not the thing I carry most. What stays with me is the standard we built together, slowly, through ordinary training days, bad sessions, and the choice to keep showing up for each other. The best teams are not only the most talented ones. They are the ones that know how to fail together and still stay together.

We were that kind of team, and I am proud of that.