The Reading Blog

I played Ultimate Frisbee with the Guppies a highly recreational, definitely non-competitive, co-ed intramural team at Carleton College (Northfield, MN) in 1982-1985.  Everybody played Ultimate at Carleton in the Fall before it got too cold and as soon as the thick layers of snow covering everything thawed out. I also played it at weekend pick-up games in graduate school at S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook. It gave me a reason to run and stay reasonably fit (except for a sprained ankle) while having lots of fun. It’s nice to see how the sport has grown. Teenagers I know are looking forward to playing it in high school or college.

In The New York Times “Ultimate Frisbee Takes Off ” Bonnie Tsui talks about the growth of the sport. So this Blog is dedicated to all of us old and young Ultimate Frisbee players and fans. Here are some excerpts from Tsui’s article,

[...] In the last 10 years, Ultimate Frisbee has become one of the world’s fastest-growing sports. It is played in more than 42 countries. Ultimate’s success at the college level, attracting traditional athletes from other sports like soccer and football to compete on its teams, is largely what has elevated the game to this stage.

And the rise of women in Ultimate is another crucial part of the sport’s growth. Watching these women play, one can see the athleticism that has attracted them: gorgeous arcing throws, full-extension dives, insane vertical leaps, and discs pinched out of the sky with the barest of fingertips. “I play pickup most every week, even in the winter,” said Fi Cheng, 33, who works for a solar backpack company in New York. She helps run a spring and fall league in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and is treasurer of Westchester Ultimate Disc, the biggest Ultimate organization in the metropolitan area. “I’ve noticed a lot more women playing than when I started. There are women in their late 20s or early 30s who have been playing for 10 years now.”

The Ultimate Players Association, the governing body for the sport in the United States, has nearly 30,000 members. Total membership has risen 168 percent since 2003, when the association began breaking down membership statistics by gender. From 2003 to 2008, membership of women nearly doubled, composing about a third of total membership.

Among members, play spans from beginners’ pickup and laid-back summer leagues to elite clubs like Fury, a women’s team in the Bay Area that has won four national championships and the World Ultimate Championships last year in Vancouver.

“While there are significantly fewer female players than male players, most people who play say that the community aspect of Ultimate is a large part of why they play,” said Peri Kurshan, the president of the association’s board of directors. “It’s one of the few sports whose top tier of play makes no distinction between the two gender divisions. The men’s and women’s divisions are showcased equally in all U.P.A. championship events.”

Ms. Kurshan thinks that this aspect of Ultimate is what has allowed for the dramatic rise in the number of girls and women, as well as their success at the top levels of play. Though the game was invented in Maplewood, N.J., in 1968, modern Ultimate has its epicenters in California and the Pacific Northwest. Its continued expansion is helped by the fact that all you need is a plastic disc and a field.

The seven-on-seven game has the speed and endurance of soccer plus the aerial passing and end-zone scoring of football. Once a player receives the disc, he or she stops running and has 10 seconds to pass it to a teammate; a team scores by completing a pass in the opposing team’s end zone. The beauty of disc flight and the athleticism of the chase have won Ultimate its fans.

“I love to run with purpose, meaning I hate the track, but I like to chase things,” Ms. Batchelder said. “I love the fact that when you’re playing, you make hundreds and thousands of little decisions — where the disc is, where your body is — but they happen without thinking.” [...]