2023 Year in Review - NKolakovic

Year in Review 2023 Coming out of 2022 as a full recovery year I had money owed and feeling a little down. It got started with Lei Out, the weather was not the best on the first day but the spirits were high and the weather turned around on the second day and it was a blast. A great reminder of how fun ultimate can be! I went down to SBI next with UVIC and captures on of the best Layout Ds of the year! January had built a lot of momentum already! Throughout the winter and spring I did work again with Ultimate Spirit. Some Raw ultimate and players that are learning the love of the game right before my eyes! Into the winter I was asked by UW to help with Abby Heckos Callahan Video. It would be stupid not to jump on the opportunity! The video was a little too easy to make and a banger! A goal of mien has always been to have a Callahan Award winning video made, with 2/3 finalist I finally got the goal completed!In May I got in a car accident on the way up to my first playing tournament of the year. I got a concussion and had all my projects delayed. I wasn’t able to edit for longer than 2 hours without being in pain. My June quickly turned into any time I could possible get a touch of work done I would. I was PR for Blackfish for the year and although not able to practice as much as I wanted to I was finally able to be a part of a team again. Over the past 4/5 years I really started to lose my love for ultimate, it felt like more of a job and that I was pretty disconnected from the community as weird as that sounds. As a lot of you know I spend majority of my time in life and at tournaments a lone which can suck a lot of the time. Being apart of a team re bound me to the sport and re introduced and whole new love for the sport again. I never knew how much I missed that and how valuable being apart of something was to me. I launched my official merch! I made a line of clothing called Explore and DISCover. Something I’ve dreamt about for a long time. As well Discraft got met some new discs which have been a hit! My work with USA Ultimate continued thought out the year with all their major tournaments, the one that stood out the most to me was US Open. In my eyes it was a perfect tournament. High caliber play, great spirit and just amazing vibes on and off the field. I also got to meet Matsuno, I won’t lie I don’t know what I said but I was freaking out cause I’m such a huge fan of his. Off to the UK. WU24 was an interesting one! I had a bunch of fun and loved seeing success of some of the countries at the tournament! I was able to capture some awesome/ridiculous plays! CUC was fun, it was held in my back yard so it made it vary easy to cover. I had some memory card issues that messed with 2 games worth of footage but I was able to make up for the lost footage. Over the Sumer I had a couple surprising events lines up. The first was a second trip to the UK for Glastonbury Tor-nament A very fun tournament that was a solid break for the serious events! Earlier in the summer I actually reached out to WFDF with the idea of going to Africa for AAUC. It was a bit of a joke ask to start but it quickly went from a joke to a real possibility. In the end I ended up flying out to Kenya for 2 weeks with my Best Friend, Brother and Mom. Everything about Trip greatly exceeded my expectations! I can’t wait to see the future of ultimate in Africa! Between the Finals of AAUC and the start of USA Club Nationals I had a 36 hour window. It was all travel. I landed at 1am the night before the tournament started and was up at 6am for a 16 hour day! I was COOKED but I think I killed it! I was able to catch up with my good friend G00se and took some time away from my camera to just chat :)After USA Nats I played in my first tournament of the year. Felt pretty rough but had so much fun! The day after the tournament I flew down to LA for WBUC. I fan boy’d HARD for the TC Women’s and Philippines Open teams! I had so much fun covering them! With beach I had the pleasure of seeing a bunch of the Americans get properly tested and pushed. Coming into the Semis for the first time since 2016 I saw with my own eyes Team USA get beat by another country, France. It was an amazing game and I pretty well missed the final catch because I had no idea what was going on!MY year wrapped up around then and Im still editing away at some of the projects! I had a huge momentum gain this year and I’m excited to push for the following years! Somehting I do want to strive for Moree this year is to play more Ultimate. Ill be doing my best to get into as many tournaments as I can :)Thank you all for another amazing year! I can’t wait for the next one! Song: Illenium - Reverie (feat. King Deco) SHOP NKolakovic Merch! Website: My Second Channel! NKolakovic Extras!