VENTURA : Competitors Display Art of Frisbee ‘Ballet’

Dozens of flying saucers swooped down over Ventura’s main beach Saturday, but the whirling plastic discs triggered no UFO alerts.

Instead, the airborne activity drew more than 200 Frisbee enthusiasts to a sandy strip near the Ventura Pier for the 1995 World Beach Invitational Flying Disc Championships.

At one of the premiere freestyle Frisbee competitions in the world, more than 20 teams from across the United States and from countries including Germany and Finland launched their discs into the air for a shot at making today’s finals.

With a Led Zeppelin tune pounding in the background, Scott (Chipper Bro) Bell and teammate Tom Leitner trotted into the shoreline competition area and began volleying the Frisbee back and forth. As they pirouetted across the beach in an artful, but non-choreographed dance, they stopped to trap the disc under the leg, behind the back, on the index finger.

Yet with a fierce snap of the wrist, each would quickly send the disc hurling back into the wind. “It is really an expression of art through an alternative sport,” said Bell, the 33-year-old tournament organizer and a 10-time freestyle Frisbee world champion from Ventura. “Basically, the beach is your canvas and you can go out and splash that art.”

As in an art competition, a panel of judges sat under a small tent on the beach to evaluate each team’s presentation, execution and the level of difficulty of the Frisbee tricks.

Stunts named the “air brush,” “scarecrow” and “nail delay” impressed Jessica Gibassier of Santa Barbara, who came to watch a friend compete.

“I think it’s beautiful,” said Gibassier, as she observed a disc rolling off the body of one competitor and into his teammate’s grasp. “It’s graceful and there’s contact and it’s athletic.”

Gary Auerbach, the 29-year-old reigning freestyle Frisbee world champion from Toronto, compared the sport to ballet.

“Each one of us is a modern dancer,” said Auerbach, who was a ballet dancer in Germany and Venezuela for more than five years. “We could form a company of people who know how to move like us.”

Despite the sport’s seemingly genteel nature, teams were engaged in a tough competition Saturday. Bell said only four of 20 teams make it to the finals and that he and Leitner, a 30-year-old Palo Alto resident, had blown their chances after dropping the Frisbee too many times.

But Bell said given the sport’s mellow nature, even the fiercest competitors root each other on.

“We are all friends on and off the field,” Bell said. “We look forward to seeing everybody’s newest moves.”