Some of you may be familiar with pop group The Village People, and maybe one or two of you (Hi Jon) have seen the awesome Village People movie, “Can’t Stop the Music”.
In the movie, the pseudo-explanation for the ‘look’ of the Village People – dressed as the Construction Worker, the Traffic Cop, the Leather Biker, the Soldier/Sailor, the Cowboy and the Indian – was that they looked like every day people you’d see around Greenwich Village in New York (relative to normal ‘pop stars’, I guess).
Of course, part of the fun was that these guys were singers, dancers and models, dressing up like ‘working class folks’, who were of course extremely camped up.
I thought of this when I was thinking about Ultimate players and what they do for a crust.
It’s always been interesting to me that when you play a sport like Ultimate, you end up with a very wide range of friends. If you play soccer, you’ve probably got 15 mates who make up your team. In Ultimate with the wider community vibe, you probably have like 50+ because you've played on different teams and everyone socialises together.
One result of this though is often you don’t know much about people off the field.
Very few people I suspect know what their Ultimate mates ‘do for a crust’. Its always interesting to ask.
Here’s my guess as to what we’d see if we put together an ‘Ultimate Village People’:
1. The Student
2. The Postgrad / Academic / Researcher
3. The IT Guy
4. The Bureaucrat
5. The Health Professional
6. The Teacher
What do you think are the most common professions for Ultimate players?
7 comments:
I find it interesting that blue collar workers are rare as hen's teeth in ultimate. I know maybe 3 or 4, and they all started ultimate while at school.
Is is a market we're missing or does our sport simply not appeal to them?
You could generalize heavily by associating career paths likely taken by university students (leading to white collar jobs) and ultimates strong grounding in universities.
i'd imagine that blue collar workers never get a chance to hear about the sport post school
You could generalize heavily by associating career paths likely taken by university students (leading to white collar jobs) and ultimates strong grounding in universities.
i'd imagine that blue collar workers never get a chance to hear about the sport post school
Heard you the first time, Will, but it's difficult to find such a way to advertise to them. Unis and schools are easy because they're a captive market.
An idea I've had before is to talk to footy clubs about playing ultimate in the off-season.
I have said for many years now that the absense of permanent fields and clubhouses could be addressed by recruiting more 'tradies'.
that or convince the smart white collar workers to switch jobs.
looking At the Div 1 QUT Uglies we have
3 students
3 analyst/manager types
1 Film professional/lecturer
1 international consultant
1 accountant
1 Nurse
strange mix
A team without an architect is like a student without a beer garden, an academic without a rec club, an IT guy/girl without a drive-thru, a bureaucrat without a "break out space", a health professional without a cafeteria and a teacher without a tuckshop. Nothing.
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