Ether Bunnies

Ultimate was first played competitively in Austin around 1978.  By the Summer of 1981, the only available options there were the loose remains of the UT Frisbee Team and the Lone Star Frisbee Team. Both teams were led by strong personalities and it seemed there was little sense of cohesiveness or team spirit.  During that summer we practiced at the Zilker Park Rugby Fields and would commonly sneak into Barton Springs afterwards to swim. Often, we would grab beer and swim at the Sunken Gardens (the Drunken Gardens).  One night while lounging in the Drunken Gardens and feeling dissatisfied with the available team options in Austin, we noticed a whiteboard with a marker on an easel that had been left by a summer camp. Larry “Buck” Baldauf, Karim Aziz, Mike Long, myself and whoever else was there that night drew up a list of players on the whiteboard – folks we wanted to play with that had good psyche.  We came up with the name Ether Bunnies (loosely inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and made plans to attend our first tournament together at North Texas State in Denton the following weekend.  

The night before we left for our first tournament as The Ether Bunnies, we created a run-through sign (very popular in football but never seen in the frisbee world) and created our own hand-painted shirts.  When we returned to Austin after that tournament, someone from the old-guard Ultimate scene called us ‘backstabbers’ for not consulting them before we formed our team.  We just wanted to have fun and did we ever!  From the beginning, the team was focused on enjoyment and light-heartedness, equipped with face paint, unhinged warm-up exercises, and cheers of “Ether!”.  Using the word “serious” in team settings was likely to provoke a rebuke for having said the “S” word.  The Ether Bunnies were also known for our team spirit, wearing bright tie-dyed t-shirts as uniforms, waving team flags, having a loud jam box playing high-energy music on the sidelines (at times accompanied by a percussion section) throughout our games. It was a little like a traveling circus.  We also had training camps at Enchanted Rock and Port Aransas in which no drills were run, and Ultimate strategy was not discussed, and in our efforts to give back to the community the Ether Bunnies and Supremes participated in the Austin Mardi Gras parade as the Krew of Ether. 

Club Nationals was played in Austin for two consecutive years in 1981 and 1982.  Not only did we get to see high quality Ultimate, but it was a treat to see some really colorful teams and their particular brands of weirdness influenced us going forward. Inspired by teams like the Hostages, and the Gang, we started playing more zone defense and developing the team identity around a theme of craziness and unconventional team sports behavior and going against sports tropes, with tongue deeply planted in cheek, all in good fun. The Bunnies held an Annual Awards Banquet that was one of the highlights of every year. Despite being viewed as a relatively un-athletic team, the Bunnies were remarkably successful, winning multiple local tournaments and qualifying for Regionals almost every year that we were a team. And though we never broke through beyond Regionals, the Ether Bunnies hold the distinction of being the only Texas team to beat the Sky Pilots (semifinals of the 1984 Centex Tournament).  

The personnel changed a lot over the years with the roster swelling and declining as folks graduated and moved away.  The team was as small as nine or ten players for a little while and swelled to as many as 25 players at times. Although players came and went, we always seemed to attract like-minded new players who bought into our concept of having fun, keeping it weird, and still playing competitive Ultimate. The Ether Bunnies included a mix of students, graduate students, and former students with actual careers! For the longer distance tournaments there were two groups – the students who drove and the professionals who flew. We chartered buses along with the Austin women’s team, the Supremes to some of the Florida Regionals but our crowning travel achievement was taking 15-20 players to Mobile, Alabama in a Hertz Moving Van.  

The end of the Ether era came in 1987 as some key players graduated or moved away for work. We combined with the AU Snakes and a few other players to play as Splat for the 1988 season, making it to Nationals in San Diego. That year, rather than an Ether Bunnies Awards Banquet we held an Ether Bunny Wake complete with a dead bunny in a casket sporting a huge woody.  The bunny in a custom-built casket was thrown into the funeral pyre drawing to a close a great period in our lives.