The Flight of a Frisbee

The successful Australian Women's Ultimate Frisbee team, including Physics PhD student Tamara Davies.

Ultimate Frisbee and the UNSW School of Physics have many shared links. Apart from being the best qualified people to explain the flight of a frisbee, the School's physicists have been playing a great deal of Ultimate Frisbee this year - and with much success too!

If you're not in the know, Ultimate is a mixed team sport, played on a field with a frisbee, and containing elements of netball and American football. Dozens of UNSW Physics students and academics have played Ultimate within the last 4 or 5 years.

Let's take a look at some of the outstanding players in the year that was 2000. Three Astrophysics students represented UNSW at the Australian University Championships: Tamara "General Relativity is funky" Davis (PhD), Jessica "I love the South Pole" Dempsey (PhD), and Owen "Can't talk, doing Honours" Shepherd (Honours). Even better, they brought home the winner's trophy, defending last year's title against a field of 10 other universities.

Both Tamara and Owen successfully juggled their university workload with Ultimate training and were rewarded with selection to the Australian National team. They were two of only a handful of UNSW students to represent their country in sport last year and were rewarded by receiving two of only eight University Blues awarded in 2000. At the World Championships in Heilbronn, Germany, these two scholars contributed to the best results ever for Australian Ultimate: 6th place in both the Men's and Women's divisions. To put the achievement of Tamara and Owen in perspective, we need the statistics: 4 months of training, 62 warm up matches, $4000 in return airfares, 45 rival overseas teams, 6 days of World Championships play, one prestigious "Spirit of the Game" award, and approximately a million hours of study to catch up on return to Sydney.