Matt Sorensen

November 20, 2013  -  

Matt

 

Meet Matt – one of the many Kickstarter backers that made this trip possible (and also the youngest). Matt is currently a Freshman in college, and is playing Ultimate Frisbee for the Minnesota Ugly Ducklings. I had a chance to play against him at the Eau Claire Chillout, a tournament we host every year.

Matt’s brother is one of Eau Claire’s former captains, Josh Rizzo, who both captained myself and James Wagner when we were freshman in college. Josh has been an inspiration to both Wags and myself throughout the years, and his music was an inspiration to us on our long drives during our trip.

Matt, we appreciate your support, and your commitment to Ultimate in your community. As a thank you, I’ve included a video I made in high school of myself kicking your brother in the nuts. I hope you enjoy it!

Some Awesome Sketches

November 17, 2013  -  

Meredith Bray

This is Meredith. She a member of the Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team at UW Eau Claire, SOL (which stands for Seven On the Line, and is also the Spanish word for Sun). She also played for NOISE this last summer, a mixed team from Madison which stands for No One Is Safe Ever, and is also an English word referring to loud sounds. With Meredith’s help, NOISE Finished 4th at Club Regionals this last year.

As well as being a baller Ultimate player, Meredith is a crazy good illustrator. Back before we left for our trip, I asked her to throw together a couple sketches for some ideas for a Break Side logo. I didn’t give her much instruction, I just told her it should have a disc in it, and to maybe a dragon, because they’re pretty cool. This is what she came up with:

Meredith's Sketches

In the end, the sketches ended up being too complex to use as a logo, but are awesome nonetheless! Maybe sometime when I’m motivated, I’ll incorporate some of these sketches into our current logo, and make it into a T-Shirt or something.

A Weekend of Dinners

November 12, 2013  -  

Schasse and I had three Break Side dinners on the docket the past weekend. Professional Ultimate player Neal Hanke, my aunt and uncle, and my dad and his fiancée.

On Friday night, we had planned on a late dinner at Neal’s, as Schasse wouldn’t be able to get to the cities until around 7 in the evening. I agreed to do all the prep work so we could eat as soon as we got to Neal’s place. However, at the last-minute, we were offered free Timberwolves tickets. So Neal dug out his old Tom Gugliotta jersey and we watched the Pups lay down a 19 point butt-whoopin of the Thunder.

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Afterwards, we made it back to Neal’s and had dinner around 10:30. His roommate Al had promised to make a roast and we were in charge of chicken wild rice soup, salad, and beer. Al got preoccupied with other things and forgot the roast, so thankfully we made a lot of extra soup and no one went hungry.

On Saturday, Schasse and I prepared our largest Break Side dinner yet. My aunt and uncle Jane and Kevin were willing to host a larger crowd, combining their dinner with my dad, Jeff, and his fiancée, Meaghan. We invited a few other Break Side supporters; my grandma and grandpa, Kay and Jim, as well as family friends Brad and Diana.

We got to work early in the afternoon preparing roast chicken, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and a salad in a bowl large enough that Schasse almost got lost in it. Although we were cooking a detailed dinner for a large group, we managed to escape with only a minor hiccup. It turns out that a pumpkin pie has a longer prep time than an ice cream cake, so we had to skip the pie. Fortunately, Jane had some cookies and we brought ice cream, so the dessert was salvaged. AND, since the Wagner Thanksgiving is being hosted and Jane and Kevin’s, I’ve already delivered my contribution to that meal. Win-win.

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Flashback Moment!

October 23, 2013  -  

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I dug this picture out today in honor of Jackie Williams (far left) and her Seattle-based team, The DOH Abides, for their appearance at Mixed Club Nationals this past weekend. DOH won their region and took 11th at Nationals in Frisco, Texas.

This photo was taken in Seattle the weekend of the Emerald City Classic. Her friend, Johanna Leader, stumbled on our website after seeing herself in one of our videos. She then invited The Break Side to make an appearance at Jackie’s birthday bar crawl. We brought a few friends from MSP along and made a night of it.

At one point, we ran into the guy in the middle of the photo, who had arguably the best facial hair we saw on our trip. I insisted that he take a picture with the birthday girl and me. Clearly he was super enthused about doing so.

Anyway, congratulations to The DOH Abides, and all other teams who competed at Nationals, including The Break Side’s hometown favorite, Drag’n Thrust, for bringing home the National Championship!

We’re Making Headlines!

October 6, 2013  -  

Headlines

Now that we’re back, we (I say we, but I mostly mean Schasse) have been working hard on creating and promoting our web-series. As you know, we will be releasing 10-12 episodes profiling our summer trip in great detail. You’re gonna enjoy watching.

The UW-Eau Claire College of Business has been a great supporter of ours ever since we started planning for our trip. I myself am an alumnus of the COB and Schasse (old as he is) is a current student. With this in mind, the COB decided to profile us in their October Newsletter. It’s a fun little article with a lengthy Q&A session with The Break Side fellas. It gives some interesting information about our trip that you may or may not already know.

You can check out the article here: http://www.uwec.edu/COB/info/news/2013_10_1b.htm

The Q&A was a really fun way for us to recap and rehash some of the best parts of our adventure. We’ve found out through out dinners and countless conversations with friends and family that we really enjoy talking about our trip and the plan for the future of The Break Side. So, as always, if you have questions/comments/idea/opinions for us, we’d love to hear them. Chris Schasse is quite the talker and as you probably know, I’m not a shy guy myself.

Thanks again for all the support and we look forward to sharing our episodes with all our fans come spring!

One Final Disc Donation

September 5, 2013  -  

Last-Disc-DonationI know that we’ve been back for more than a week now, but I do have one more disc donation that I’m privileged to report. We gave away our last disc on the day we got back to my good friends, Nick and Katie Pekarek. However, I was asked to wait a few days before publicizing this information. You see, the Pekarek’s are expecting and they wanted to be sure all their family members were notified before the news went viral.

Nick and Katie have been good friends of mine for many years and they called me while we were on the road to share the good news. After some thinking, I decided that it would be cool to donate our final disc to future baby Pekarek. We at The Break Side believe that every kid should have the chance to grow up with a disc in their hands, so we were proud to make it happen for baby Pekarek. The disc was donated in Marie Kragenbring’s name, and I know she will be proud too.

Of course, it’s too early to tell the sex of the baby so I can’t promise that it’s name will be Marie. But I think even if it is a boy, Marie would be a strong middle name. Timothy Marie really rolls off the tongue…but it’s just a suggestion.

Dan the Ultimate Man

September 4, 2013  -  

After spending 2.5 months on the road meeting and showing off awesome Ultimate people, we decided to take a day to show off someone in the Twin Cities. While we have a lot of friends who do some pretty cool stuff, we decided that Dan Kaler would be the best person to feature. Our rationale for this was pretty simple: Dan is just cooler than anyone else we know. He’s the type of guy you would hate just because he does everything really well, but he’s just too cool not to love.

Dan invited us to his house to film him on an average Saturday afternoon. For me, a normal Saturday consists of sitting around and doing a lot of nothing all day. But Dan fills his free time with longboarding, kitesurfing, wakesurfing, brewing beer, playing lawn games, and grilling. Of course, that’s just what he does when he doesn’t have anything interesting planned. When he’s not spending his time doing these “tame” activities, he likes to skydive, bungee jump, mountain bike, and of course, play Ultimate really really well.

As it was, we got to spend some time out on the boat where Mr. Kaler taught us the basics of wakesurfing. It took Schasse two tries to get up on the board and in no time he was throwing a disc back and forth to me on the boat. It took me probably 20 tries and costed me most of my self-esteem, but eventually I too was wakesurfing. Dan says that he’s never failed to get someone up on the board, but I gotta figure I was one of his worst students. In the end, perseverance paid off and Schasse now has a ton of outtakes to use for this episode.

And We’re Back!

August 29, 2013  -  

We are back in Eau Claire (well, at least I am, Wags is back in Minneapolis now), and we created a video outlining for you where The Break Side plans on going from here. I do have to say, though, that we were both severely sleep deprived while making this video, and at the time it seemed like a good idea to me to have Wags play Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah on his ukulele while I harmonized to his singing.

It wasn’t. Wags can hardly play the ukulele, and neither of us can sing. To be frank, we ruined a great song, and for that, I apologize. If Leonard Cohen was dead, he would be rolling over in his grave. Fortunately for us, he isn’t, so we’re still going to post this video. Sorry Leonard!

The Drive to Darwin

August 26, 2013  -  
Maria and Carol about to enjoy their meal!

Marie and Carol about to enjoy their meal!

If you’ve ever spent any time in South Dakota, you know that apart from a few square miles in the southwest corner, there isn’t much to the place. As such, when we were finished in the Black Hills, we decided just to bite the bullet and high tail it back to Minnesota. After about ten hours on the road, we made it to Darwin around 11 pm to spend the night with my Aunt and Uncle, Carol and Art.

After a few beers when we arrived Friday night, we went to sleep dreaming of the steak stir fry we’d be having for lunch. But before we went to buy the ingredients, we had one more surprise up our sleeves. Yes that’s right, we hide multiple surprises in each of our sleeves. My other Aunt, Marie, has been one of The Break Side’s biggest fans, so we wanted to include her in on our meal. Carol invited her over for lunch, but she had no idea that Chris and I would be there. When I answered the door, she was very shocked and even shed a few happy tears!

Now Darwin’s claim to fame is that it’s home to the largest ball of twine rolled by a single person, but you’ll have a lot more fun if you skip it and just hang out at Dunns Lake for a day. After our meal, Carol and Marie asked us to show off our skills, so we grabbed a few discs and tried to film ourselves laying out off the dock. We were mostly unsuccessful, but a few of the local kids joined in, so we decided to hold a contest to give away Joey Q’s disc.

William and Chance both had their eye on a disc, so I said I would throw it up into the lake and whoever caught it would get to keep it. If neither of them came down with it, we would do it again until someone caught it. It took a few tries (27, more or less) but Chance finally came up with the sick grab over the smaller Will. But, in a move that would make the disc donor, Joey Quintana proud, he gave the disc to Will because “he needs it more.”

Badlands…You Gotta Live it Everyday

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Disc-DonationAfter a heated debate, we chose the Badlands over Wall Drug for our last touristy stop on our trip. Schasse somehow convinced me that seeing really cool landscapes would be more fun than a drug store on steroids. He probably wasn’t wrong.

We arrived in the Badlands shortly before sundown so we made camp in the very nice and very free facility there. We fired up the grill for the last time and went to meet our neighbors. We had a tough time understanding them as they were vacationing all the way from Belgium (which is in Europe). However, a flying plastic disc looks majestic in any language, so we became fast friends. Schasse explained our trip to them and was happy to give a disc to their young daughter, Berthe. So, Brother Aaron, I think you’ll be proud to know that your disc will be traveling the furthest to get home.

The next day, we drove through the Badlands, stopping to check out various cool things. At one point, we bumped into Dave, the father of Dane and Grace, who both received discs when we met them at the Wind Caves. He said that he enjoyed reading our post about his kids and wished us luck with the rest of our adventures. It’s good to know that our disc recipients are checking out site and will hopefully spread our story to friends back home!

It’s pretty much a straight shot home from here, but we aren’t done giving away discs just yet! Hopefully we’ll meet a kid along the way that’s as awesome as Marilyn and John Zmuda. Then we’ll know we’ve got the perfect candidate for a disc donation.