Students of Wandering River School were treated to a special guest last Thursday as world frisbee champion Rob “Frisbee Rob” Mcleod stopped by for a few hours.
Students of Wandering River School were treated to a special guest last Thursday as world frisbee champion Rob “Frisbee Rob” Mcleod stopped by for a few hours.
A six-time Guinness World Record holder and 10-time World Champion, McLeod visited the school on Feb. 23, teaching students from kindergarten to grade six important lifestyle lessons along with some Frisbee skills.
“Kids imaginations sometimes need to be ignited, so I try to ignite that through frisbee,” he said.
McLeod ran the students through a frisbee workshop teaching them the basic techniques of catching and throwing the flying disk, but also showed them a handful of the many ways it can be thrown. He demonstrated by throwing behind the back, skipping it across the floor and throwing six at once.
“The frisbee part just blows their mind because they haven’ t seen something like that before or they haven’ t seen someone with that kind of skill close up,” he said. “There’ s about 100 different ways to throw and I maybe show them about 15 different ways...showing them these different ways then teaching them to throw an catch.”
Besides promoting the sport of Frisbee, McLeod’ s presentation covers four main points kindness, acceptance, determination and unplugging, using a variety of verbal and visual examples for a better understanding of the subjects. McLeod said that he focuses on these four points so that kids can become the “best that they can be.”
“Rather than just trying to get kids into a sport, its having impact on them for life,” he said. “The idea for me with kids is to show them what’ s possible.. “There’ s also world records that kids can set, instead of me going around saying ‘I have world records,’ but they can set world records too. So it’ s trying to inspire them to do something.”
The event was well received by the 22 students involved. Wander River School Principal Dan Coonan said it was “a very positive response” from his students asking him if they can do more frisbee related activities during gym class.
“Obviously the afternoon where they played the games and the variety of games, and just all the different things they can do with a frisbee,” he said. “It just fit everybody from (kindergarten) all the way up to grade sixes there. It was a good activity joining each other and helping each other.”
