Photo provided by Nicky Smith
My name is Nicky Smith. I’m a semi-retired ultimate player in Australia. At this time two years ago I was living in Mexico City, coaching the Mexican women’s ultimate team in the lead-up to WUGC 2012 in Sakai, Japan. Things had just taken a turn for the insane, with 9 of our players having recently discovered that the ~$1000USD they’d each paid for plane tickets had disappeared into the ether. We were just coming to terms with the fact that they weren’t getting any tickets, and they weren’t getting their money back.
On April 16, 2012, Tyler Kinley published this in Skyd. All of a sudden, a lot of the world knew about the fraud. And a lot of the world responded.
Delivered in true Mexican time, here are a series of short documentaries I have made about my experience coaching and playing with the Mexican women, what happened when $9000 went missing, and what happened when the international ultimate community found out.
The trailer is here. It’s short, it’s fun, and it’s a good synopsis of the story. You will like Part 1 if you’re interested in what it’s like getting a team together in a different country and culture. Part 2 explains just why exactly half the team decided to buy tickets from a “non-traditional vendor”. Part 3 explores the response and the outcome, as well as the challenges I faced as I brought my Australian model of a Worlds campaign, in bad Spanish, to the Mexican ultimate community.
Enjoy! And thank you again so much to Tyler, Skyd Magazine, and the many, many people who showed they care about this story.
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