(Photo from CAC Ultimate Frisbee Club)
On 29 April, we published an article on a Cairo team that plays Ultimate Frisbee. According to the information we acquired, we were led to believe that the Gezira Team was the only team in Egypt. Some of our readers commented and emailed us, telling us that that was not true, and that there are at least four more teams, namely The Destroyers, CAC Ultimate Frisbee Club, AUC Ultimate in Cairo and Ultimate Frisbee in Alexandria.
One of the organisers of the Destroyers Team, Ahmed Elsoud, emailed us with more details. “I joined Ultimate Frisbee in 2006, back when it was sponsored by the American University in Cairo. I played in Maadi and in the Gezira Youth Centre most of the time. In 2011, Mohamed Zaki (aka Tony) and I started to talk about forming a competitive team with some of the people with whom we played pick-up games every Saturday. We also encouraged Ibrahim El-Sayed, an AUC student that used to play with us in Gezira, to start a team in the AUC, which he did,” Elsoud said.
Elsoud claims that he tried to make The Destroyers an official sports team. “I wrote to the WFDF (World Frisbee Disc Federation) about an international tournament that we (The Destroyers) were planning on hosting on 31 May 2013. They wrote back recommending we should first establish a federation in Egypt. Based on that I took the recommendations and the bylaws and went to the Ministry of Youth and Sports to go through the paperwork, and it’s a work in progress,” Elsoud explained.
“My next move is to go into negotiations with four sporting clubs (Ahly, Zamalek, Wadi Degla and Shooting Club) to start Ultimate Frisbee teams and a league in Egypt, as a first step to forming a national team to compete in the World Series. We want to be ready to compete in the Olympics once the sport is approved by the WOC (the World Olympic Committee),” Elsoud said.
Elsoud pointed out that the Gezira Team is not a competitive team meaning that they do not have set players for each game. “They are playing pick-up games just for fun,” but that does not mean that when they do play they are not serious: “We played a couple of weeks ago with [them] and it was a good game.”
All of the teams have Facebook groups and are encouraging more people to join in. In addition, the AUC will host an Ultimate Frisbee tournament on 18 May, where all the teams are set to meet. The tournament will be organised by Ibrahim El-Sayed of the AUC Ultimate Frisbee team.
