If the first half of the season is any indication, the first year of Chamblee High’s new imaginary Frisbee team may be its best ever.
The co-ed team, which had its humble beginning as an idea last year, is undefeated and seems destined for greatness. Led by an imaginative group of seniors and augmented by a few underclassmen with a lot of creative talent, the Chamblee Frisbees have really come together as a unit.
“I imagine this team has really worked hard in the pre-season to develop not only team chemistry but also some amazing moves on the field,” said head coach Fred Avett. “I can just picture them working tirelessly every day after school, getting in shape by running and jumping and throwing things, and building a sense of shared purpose among all the players.”
Coach Avett said he thinks the main reason for this comradery is the inventiveness of the team’s captain, Adam Pohl (’22).
“Not only is Adam our tallest player, which I imagine is important in this sport,” said Avett, “but also he can think up some remarkable plays. Just yesterday I saw Adam and he told me he had been thinking about throwing a Frisbee really high into the air and then running fast toward a car, jumping on its hood and bouncing up super high in the air to catch the Frisbee and quickly throw it again. That kind of creative thinking is what makes Adam shine, I imagine.”
Pohl claims he was uncertain about joining the new team, but quickly fell in love with the idea of it.
“At first, I could imagine myself just throwing a Frisbee to other people, and maybe sometimes accidentally to a player on another team – and once to a dog,” recalled Pohl recently. “But then I started to get better at it. I just tried to imagine more and more spectacular throws and catches, like acrobatic stunts but with Frisbees and always with cool slow motion music playing.”
When freshman Ernie Tubbs (’25) first heard Pohl describe some of these amazing plays he was thinking about, he was not sure the tall senior was not insane.
“I mean, to be honest, it does sound kind of crazy,” Tubbs laughed this week while taking a break from imagining what practice is like. “But then I started lying awake in bed at night and imagining myself catching these epic throws, like me cart-wheeling through the air filled with dragons and catching a Frisbee that’s actually on fire.”
Avett was impressed when he heard about Tubbs’ imaginary skills.
“I’ve got to imagine that those are the kind of skills that major league coaches and scouts look for,” he said. “And Ernie is barely 15. Can you imagine what kind of player he will be when he’s 18?”
The team’s first game of the season remained neck-in-neck up until the very end, according to Pohl. “We were playing Dunwoody High School, which is easy to imagine as a big rivalry game,” said Pohl. “It seemed to me like every time we scored a point, they were able to match it. I was getting really frustrated, trying to think of a way to break the game open for us.”
In the end, according to Pohl, the solution was remarkably simple.
“I just imagined myself scoring a 10-point goal, which I had never thought of before,” he said. “And best of all, I scored it right as the buzzer sounded to end the game. So we won!”
Players and coaches are not letting the initial success of the imaginary frisbee team go to their heads, though.
“It would be easy to get ahead of ourselves and imagine us going to the state championship match at Mercedes Benz stadium in front of 100,000 fans and Kanye West and the Avengers,” said Tubbs. “But we have to take it one game at a time.”
A lofty goal to be sure, and there are a lot of games to be played between now and then. But what if, in its first ever season, the Frisbees actually brought home the coveted solid gold trophy from the state championship?
“I can’t even imagine that,” said Pohl.