The World Games was a very busy time. We had scorers down on the ground and up in the control room for the big electronic score board, but Stu Sinclair and I shared the work for scoring for our system.

A day or two before the tournament started I visited the main stadium to check out the facilities. It's a new 40,000 seat stadium, so a great place to have the tournament. We would be running everything from the control room, which is like a commentators box with a good view of the fields. We needed an internet connection to run our system, and there was no internet connection in the control room so it was lucky the wifi that was available in the stadium was also available (although a weak connection) in the control room.

Although the two days before the tournament were pretty busy for me, I managed to see a couple of sports. Canoe Polo was fairly exciting and we saw Australia beat Spain, but the softball was a pretty low scoring affair. All other sports we tried to get tickets to were sold out.

The frisbee started off with a bang. Australia went down to the US by two points, but showed they were pretty strong. The play was exciting and I think it proved the sport could be a crowd pleaser. The Chinese Taipei games particularly drew a large crowd in the thousands. They used line assistants who could help with only line calls and up/down calls if asked. Most importantly they signalled what any calls were to the scorers and the crowd so you could tell what was going on when a call was made.

The most exciting game of the tournament was on the second day, Australia vs Japan. Japan had showed they were strong and were a favourite to join US in the final, but Australia has the Dowle/Neild freakshow, and all our other guys were awesome. Katie Bradstock managed to shut down their pocket rocket girl, and it was pretty even. It was incredibly tense, with Australia winning by a point. I was in the crowd for that game, and it was absolutely electric. The first Japan/US game on the last day which Japan won by two points was also fantastic.

In the control room I was incredibly busy. The first morning in particular when I was still fixing bugs and fixing the schedule in the database while scoring the game was a tough one. But by the afternoon we had the site working well, with our media girls able to put up reports for each game, and a lot of people had started to watch the live scoreboard. Even though we had some trouble with it at the beginning there was a lot of positive feedback by the second day.

The website is probably still up at http://wg09.net. It started of as not much but grew over the three days. I'm happy I used Joomla, as it made it fairly easy to update content and menus as we went along. For things like team bios and the like it was obvious we needed to have that happening before the tournament though.

A few things I've taken out of the tournament:
- To be a great team you need to have no weak points.
- It's most important for girls to be quick and good defenders, then being able to make good decisions with the disc, cut well and take hard catches. Having them be awesome throwers is of course important, but less so than those other things.
- The only thing stopping ultimate from being a great spectator sport has nothing to do with refs. It's all about the quality of play. At Worlds and things like Australian Nationals there are still a lot of low level games which aren't great to watch, but at World Games all teams are great, so it really works as a crowd pleaser.