Clad in cleats, the offense and defense faced each other on opposite ends of the green, rectangular field. They started toward one another, first jogging, then breaking into a sprint. Scot Blair wound one arm back, bent to his knee and sent the white disc spinning as the opposing team reeled their heads back and watched it fly. As the Frisbee curved back down toward the offense, Fred VanHorn picked up speed and slapped both hands around it for an interception.
At Grouse Mountain fields on a Wednesday night in Whitefish, it was clear that pick-up Ultimate Frisbee had landed in the Flathead Valley.
“It’s the greatest sport on the planet,” Blair said while waiting to sub in for one of his five teammates during the game. While Ultimate, as players call it, is traditionally played seven on seven, pick-up games are played with however many people show up. Sometimes that means as few as nine people, as was the case at the beginning of the game Wednesday. Eventually two more players showed, growing the game to a five on five with one substitute.
Not only are Ultimate pick-up games flexible when it comes to the amount of players needed to make a game, but the sport lends itself to a general laid-back feel. There are no referees, so players must self-officiate, which is one of the things that makes the non-contact sport so unique.
The Ultimate Players Association Board of Directors believes that one key factor that defines Ultimate is the players should be the ones in control, according the association’s Web site, upa.org.
“It’s all about being respectful of other people,” Paul Archie, of Kalispell, said. After taking a break from the sport for four years, Archie started playing Ultimate in Whitefish a few weeks ago.
Respect is such an important theme, the UPA has designated a name for it: Spirit of the Game.
“The integrity of Ultimate depends on each player’s responsibility to uphold the Spirit of the Game, and this responsibility should remain paramount,” reads the preface for the organization’s official rules.
“That’s what everyone loves about it,” player Anita Ho said. “It’s a very welcoming game.” Ho, who lives in Kalispell, said she had never played sports before starting Ultimate in college.
The lax attitude of most Ultimate players doesn’t necessarily mean the sport lacks structure. As its popularity has grown, so has a need for rules and regulations. The UPA, which is the national governing body of the sport, has a Standing Rules Committee and published the 11th edition of the Official Rules of Ultimate in 2007.
“It’s gotten a lot more competitive,” Blair said, but added that there is still a strong emphasis on the Spirit of the Game.
“The beauty of it is players work things out themselves,” he said. However, at high-level games, on college and club teams, there are observers monitoring whether or not players maintain this spirit.
Blair, a long-time Whitefish resident, said he’s been playing Ultimate for 30 years. He started as a 16-year-old in Connecticut, and continued playing through college in Boulder, Colo.
He said the game’s come a long way since it first started in 1968 at Columbia High School in New Jersey. Ultimate is now played in more than 42 countries, and there’s been a recent push to get it into the Olympic Games.
A Sports and Fitness Participation Report conducted by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association counted 895,000 Ultimate players in 2008 – a number that has been growing steadily since 1986.
On the higher levels, Blair said, fitness is key to solid team play. All of the players run hard throughout the game, and they can only sub out after a point is scored.
Ho said Ultimate is like a combination of soccer, football and basketball. The field is more similar to football, as well as the aerial passing skills, but the non-stop movement can be compared to soccer.
The object of the game, according to the UPA, is to score by catching a pass in the opponent’s end zone. Players must stop running when in possession of the disc, and like basketball, they may pivot and pass to their teammates. If a player moves both feet while passing the disc, it is called “traveling,” and is not allowed. A turnover is when one player drops a pass, there’s an interception, a pass out of bounds or when a player is caught holding the disc for more than 10 seconds. At this point, players move from offense to defense or vice versa.
A typical game is played to 15 points and usually lasts about one-and-a-half hours, but pick-up games are a little looser. On Wednesday, for example, the five-on-five match wasn’t even scored.
Now that pick-up games in the valley are run through the City of Whitefish, which began for the first time in April, Ultimate interest is sure to increase. And player Sarah Lundstrum is helping to coordinate another of the valley’s firsts – an Ultimate tournament. The tournament will be in Whitefish Aug. 15 and 16 at the Grouse Mountain fields, and will be hosted by members of the pick-up team, the Flathead Pandemonium. For more information, Sarah can be contacted at 406-871-3706, or by e-mail at [email protected].
To join pick-up games on Wednesdays, just show up at the Grouse Mountain fields with a light or dark t-shirt, cleats and a positive attitude. Games start anywhere from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., and players often trickle in as late as 8 p.m., which doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem. As Lundstrum put it: “We live in this world called Ultimate time.”