Pioneers on the Frisbee Frontier: Kurdistan’s First Ultimate Coaches

Team building across age, gender, and geographical location in Kurdistan

To call last weekend’s ultimate coaching clinic in Dohuk a success would be a profound understatement. It was a dream come true, the professional accomplishment I am most proud of to date. In two eight hour days of programming conducted almost entirely in Arabic, the GIZ Sport for Development staff and I introduced the sport of ultimate frisbee and the concept of Spirit of the Game to 29 male and female coaches from all four governorates of Iraqi Kurdistan. We showed them how to throw, catch, and cut, taught them the fundamental rules of ultimate and foundational elements of Spirit to the point that they could play a game, and then taught them how to coach a basic ultimate practice for the athletes they work with – populations ranging from elementary school students to Syrian refugees and internally displaced Iraqis living in Kurdistan’s rapidly expanding camps.





A little theory, a little practice, a lot of progress

I had been very stressed in the lead-up to the clinic, working on my presentation in between games at the MENA Championships in Cairo (6th place finish with my beloved Ultimate Junkies; big congratulations to my Jordanian friends on the Bedouin Falcons for taking the crown back from Dubai) and worrying that my Arabic wouldn’t be up to the task. Turns out the GIZ staff had been worried as well, since this was the biggest and most geographically diverse clinic they had ever attempted to run. None of us voiced our concerns and we just went for it. Thankfully, the clinic went great, in large part due to the open-hearted enthusiasm of our trainees.







The coaches we trained all work for GIZ S4D’s past and present partner organizations – Friends of Waldorf Education, a British NGO called War Child, a Swedish NGO called Qandil and a Kurdish-Iraqi NGO called WCHAN. All of these organizations provide organized sports programming as a vehicle to advance social cohesion and community building goals, and simply to provide kids living in difficult situations with a space to feel safe and have fun. We also had a few undergraduate students from the University of Dohuk’s College of Physical Education. Every single one of the coaches in attendance was superb – eager to learn, excited about the sport and the Spirit culture, and patient with my less than stellar Arabic.

On the morning of day one they were watching a highlight video of the 2019 USA Mixed Nationals, my gambit to impress everybody off the bat with a glimpse of elite mixed-gender play and championship-level spirit. In an unexpected twist, by the afternoon of day two they were being filmed by the local Dohuk television station, and Kurdistan’s first truly local ultimate frisbee game was getting broadcast on the evening news. The quality of play wasn’t incredible, but it was leaps and bounds ahead of where they had been only one day before, and it was both awesome and a little bit funny to know that we had just introduced ultimate to the entire news-watching population of Dohuk province. I’m pretty sure that was the first time ultimate has ever been on TV in Kurdistan and probably all of Iraq.

Our clinic was on the 22nd and 23rd of November, a Friday and Saturday in step with the standard Muslim weekend. By Monday the 25th we already had coaches sending in pictures and videos of their first youth ultimate practices. I could have cried. Since last weekend, seven of our 29 coaches have sent me pictures and videos of youth and teenage ultimate frisbee practices in Sulaimaniyah, Dohuk, Halabja and Erbil. Five of those practices were mixed gender. In each instance, it was the participants’ first ever ultimate frisbee experience, and probably their first time ever seeing and holding a frisbee period.

Good vibes from the first generation of Iraqi ultimate players in Sulaimaniyah!

I can’t wait to see the rest of our coaches start to implement ultimate in their communities – I’ve finagled a part-time editing and freelancing arrangement with Rudaw that keeps my schedule pretty flexible, allowing me to travel around Kurdistan to help start frisbee programs. We’re set to have a follow-up clinic in February to take stock of our progress and provide our coaches with some more advanced technical and theoretical ultimate knowledge, and there seems to be some potential for partnership with other GIZ projects that might pave the way for ultimate frisbee in Iraq outside of the Kurdistan Region. I’m still subletting a room in Ankawa, sleeping on a fifty dollar mattress on the floor and living off a thinning envelope of hundred dollar bills (because an Iraqi bank account is about as useful as a third nipple and I’m already on enough US government watch lists), but when I get out of my own anxious way I am stoked about the possibilities for expansion in Iraq.

Explaining that you can totally play frisbee in khakis and still enjoy a robust social life

This clinic was a major accomplishment for me and the GIZ team I was privileged to work with. Jihan put in a herculean effort to translate my whole PowerPoint into Arabic in the span of a few hours – despite my strong speaking ability, I’m more or less illiterate in Fus7a outside of street signs and Instagram captions. (LOOKING AT YOU KATHRYN DAVIS FELLOWSHIP APPLICATION COMMITTEE. Fourth time’s the charm?) Samyan led the presentation of our theoretical modules, kept our participants engaged and motivated, and pulled us back on track whenever time started to run away from us. He also directed a real life Anthony Bourdain episode for me after our last prep session, treating me to a massive meal at a locally famous kebab joint call Sholeen. They don’t even ask you anything, they just bring you a bunch of shit as soon as you sit down and after you look too stuffed to move they bring over some tea and the bill. Harewan learned how to play and coach ultimate in a span of hours, set up and ran every drill with me, and kept me calm whenever I started to stress that I wasn’t doing a good enough job. Mareike, our fearless leader, orchestrated the preparation and execution of the entire clinic and trusted in me enough to bring me on board, offering me the opportunity to be the principal facilitator of her GIZ program’s first ultimate frisbee endeavor despite the fact that I was new to the GIZ methodology and had never trained anywhere close to that number of beginners before. I had actually recommended that she fly my friends Ahmed and Lucy out from Jordan to conduct a clinic since they did such an amazing job with the first one in Amman, but the logistics didn’t work out. Truth be told I was pretty pumped when she asked me to do it instead.

Harewan, Jihan and Samyan, GIZ Sport for Development coaches

I know my readers don’t know who any of those people are, but it’s important to me to thank them as I rejoice over our successful effort to introduce ultimate to Kurdistan on a somewhat large scale. The weather was perfect all weekend, and our coaches’ genuine excitement about the new sport was palpable. Before every practical session and during every break they were spread all over the field working on their throws. We all stayed at the same hotel, and many of them were in the lobby late into the evening looking up ultimate games and highlights on YouTube. One coach came in the second day with the entire WFDF rulebook printed out. One university student had discovered the AUDL, which forced me to acknowledge that yes, there is one league in this world that has abandoned a foundational component of Spirit of the Game in favor of referees because they are incapable of putting love, honesty and respect above competition or a perceived “legitimacy.” It becomes harder to convince newcomers, especially those who are skeptical that Spirit can work within the framework of their cultural norms, that Spirit is a cornerstone of our sport when the game’s most visible stars have chosen to abandon it to a certain extent. Anyway, I’ll get off the soapbox about spirit because the real point is the inspiring initiative Kurdistan’s first generation of ultimate coaches showed from the start, going above and beyond to educate themselves about the culture, strategy, rules and history of ultimate.

2019 has been a trying year. Those of you that have read my modest smattering of output know the rough story line – fired in Dubai, an itinerant summer spent wandering the Levant with a handful of books and discs, propped up by the generosity of friends and family at home and abroad as I stubbornly floundered my way across six countries. I turned down several lucrative job opportunities in favor of this frisbee vision quest, and after a crash landing in Kurdistan I made the snap decision to quit my teaching job here in order to keep the ultimate journey alive. This past month I’ve been extra conscious that the blog has been stuck in neutral even as the journey has continued, and extra tempted to tuck it in and head home every time I get a message from my friends asking where I am this Thanksgiving.

I am out here, in Iraq, missing my loved ones plenty but giving thanks nonetheless because when I get out of my own anxious way, I realize that I am working in a Middle Eastern newsroom in the center of an intensely interesting region at a time of great turmoil, and I’m getting paid to coach ultimate frisbee in Arabic on the side. Setting aside stress about money and every other thing, this is and has been the dream. It’s hard not to constantly search for an end game that is somehow synonymous with stability, but I think it would be more prudent to view this current phase as an origin story. I’m not firing on all pistons yet, but there’s a lot of frisbee left to be played and a lot of blank pages yet to be written.









As a final post script, I want to raise the point that I’ve been traveling and living in the Middle East for about seven years now, and I can count on one hand the number of people who have come out to visit me. This isn’t a critique, but merely a reminder that I am always happy to host anybody who wants to experience the places I am exploring outside the dimensions of a television screen and beyond the character limit of a tweet. Erbil isn’t a glamorous travel destination, but it is definitely an interesting one. All I’m saying is you won’t always know somebody who lives in Mesopotamia.