We had the pleasure of chatting with Ravi Vasudevan who will be playing with Geneva Wizards at the WMUCC this summer. Ravi brought us through his ultimate journey and highlighted some aspects of ultimate that have changed his life. 

What first got you playing ultimate

I first started playing Ultimate back in 2004 when I started college. Before then I had never really played any sport competitively but I was looking for something new to do. There were a ton of people playing pick up during the orientation so I checked out a practice and just fell in love with the sport. It’s really since then that I stuck with it after that.

How would you say ultimate has changed you

Well one thing for sure is I was in much worse shape before Ultimate. It made me get myself in shape way more than ever before.. 

There’s actually another big thing that I think changed me that probably didn’t come until I moved to Europe. 

When playing in Europe I realized I had to be more considerate of my opponents’ perspectives and start to understand my own internal biases. When I was playing college ultimate in the US there were no spirit circles at the end of the game, like nothing of the kind. If there was a bad call you wouldn’t talk to your opponent. Instead you’d just think “oh they’re just cheaters, we’re the good guys” which can be the case in most other sports.  When I started playing Ultimate in Europe I realised ‘oh they actually talk to each other about the call, and actually listen!’ They have a legitimate perspective and I had to realise that I have my own bias of wanting my own team to do well. 

I learnt that this consideration wasn’t just towards my opponents – I had to be considerate of my teammates too. In one of my first games in Europe, one of my teammates was having a discussion about a call and I was like “hey! Stop wasting our time? Take the contest to move on”. My teammate took me aside later on and said “that’s not how we do things here, we do actually try to talk through calls here. Don’t call me out like that in a game”. This made me really take a step back and fully realize the difference in culture between college ultimate in the US and club ultimate in Europe.  

This in particular has helped me a lot, not just an ultimate, but in life in general to recognize biases and be much more empathetic towards those that disagree with me.

How would you best describe the team you are coming to worlds with

So the Geneva wizards is a club that’s been around for ages, I think since the 80s so there’s decades of experience there. It’s a really international team because Geneva attracts people from all over, Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, USA, you name it. We are reigning champions of the European Masters Open Club Championships so we’re going to Poland this year to defend our title there and also as preparation for Limerick. We know the basics and know how to adapt to situations on the field but we have some craftiness to us too.

And how would your team describe you? 

Oh that’s a really hard one! I’m not sure but, yeah, probably annoying in some ways. I’m captaining the team so I’m trying to push everyone to do the fitness which is really challenging when everyone has kids, their careers, and other things going on. We have some good drive on the team and I’m just trying to keep that fire going, pushing people to do their workouts, to get out throwing and all that good stuff. I’m the kind of person that would fire a team up while being very supportive and having a steady kind of presence on the field. 

What is the training schedule like?

We have monthly weekend practice sessions that will run through to European Masters Ultimate ClubChampionships. This will be our only tournament together in preparation for the road to Limerick and then in June we’ll play WMUCC. The majority of our players are in and around Geneva but we also picked up some players from the Netherlands, and the US that wouldn’t be there for the monthly practice so we’ll play as a team for the first time together in Poland. That’ll be a tournament we take seriously to defend our title but it’ll also be the first time for a lot of us to get together so will be great for building chemistry and gelling together.

And how are you finding Captaining the team?

It’s good. It’s interesting because at masters you don’t need to teach the basics, like, everybody has been playing for 10 years or so. Our main challenge really is the chemistry thing. We’re not trying to put together complex systems or cutting patterns. Bringing all our experience together and getting everybody on the same page when we don’t have a lot of practice time together can be difficult. And then getting to team doing their fitness and stuff when they have their own lives to deal with the other challenge. But I’m excited to see how it will go. I was a little worried for our first practice together that we’d be a little rusty with it being the first time we played since the pandemic but the intensity was great so I’ve been pretty happy with all.

What’s getting you excited about heading to worlds?

I’m just excited to get to play competitively again at an international tournament. I think we have some great potential as a team so it will be fun to see how we bring the basic ultimate pieces and athletic pieces all together and see what that can become. We just want to have a really good week and for everyone to play their best.