Ultimate Frisbee

During the coldest, darkest days of winter, the lone bird flying overhead becomes the epitome of melancholy. Its sisters have mostly gone south to warmer climates. Even the trees, bare of their summer leaves and subsequent autumn foliage, serve only to accentuate the solitary nature of the bird’s winter flight—their branches offer no shelter from the chilly winds. Finally, as spring sweeps into town and the air carries with it a promise of warmer days, the bird’s flight is transformed into a celebration of the very essence of earth’s energy. I see that flight—and I want to grab hold of it and taste a bit of that unfettered freedom. And so my mind turns to thoughts of Ultimate Frisbee.

“Ultimate,” as it’s known to its legions of devotees around the world, is a team sport played with a frisbee on a rectangular playing field. With your six teammates, the object is to complete a pass into one of two endzones on either end of the field. This simple premise is complicated by the rule forbidding the thrower of the frisbee from stepping beyond a single pivot foot.

The sport was founded as the organic 1960s transformed into the “technology-of-tomorrow” 1970s. A simple Internet search yields countless introductions to the finer points of the game. Aside from the principle of self-officiating—carried through to the highest levels of the sport—the paramount originality of this sport lies with the nature of the frisbee itself. As if creating a counter balance to the intensity of the athletes on the field, the disc obliviously follows the ebb and flow of any breeze blowing across the field, and any forces exerted by centripetal motion. Indeed, it’s like a butterfly that flitters just above the after-work urban dog run.

In most North American cities, this time of early spring is when Ultimate players dig out their worn cleats, coated in last year’s dried soil, and head out to meet other devotees for the first games of the year. The dedication of those hearty souls who continued to play through the winter months is finally rewarded, as they can finally gather enough “warm bodies” to play full-sized games (perhaps even with the luxury of subbing out for a point or two, so players can catch their breath). Pick-up games of Ultimate abound in most large cities. Like finding the location and assembly time of a flash mob, the trick to joining such a game is learning on exactly which patch of flat field—40 x 120 yards—and what day and time the regulars meet.