Sports

Before you hear about Ultimate Frisbee, you should first know the history of the Frisbee. The Frisbie Pie Company sold their pies all over the East Coast, and it just happened that the pie tins were easy to throw around. At Yale, students began to make up games to play with the tins, and started to call them "Frisbees". The name stuck and tossing the tins around became popular at many East Coast colleges. Several years later, an inventor decided to recreate the Frisbee tin. He wanted to make it out of plastic, which was one of the new post-war materials. He shaped his new disk like a U.F.O., complete with little windows. This was the first real Frisbee, and since then, the design hasn't changed much.

People had been tossing Frisbees around for years, but had yet to create a sport using the Frisbee disk. At Columbia High School in New Jersey, students from the school newspaper created a new sport, combining different aspects of soccer, football, basketball, team handball, and hockey, they called it Ultimate Frisbee. These students decided to write an official set of rules for Ultimate Frisbee. At first, it was only played by a few students at Columbia. The sport soon caught on at other colleges and high schools in the area. From then on, Ultimate spread rapidly throughout the United States, and was at first played only in schools. Since then many non-scholastic leagues have formed and many countries have started national teams. Not much has changed since the rules were first published, and since then, Ultimate has spread all over the world.

The Spirit of the Game is the most important part of Ultimate Frisbee. In most sports, players purposefully foul their opponents. In Ultimate, the philosophy is that no one would ever foul an opposing player on purpose, and if a foul is to occur, it is assumed that the perpetrator fouled by accident. Players call their own fouls, and if the opposing team feels that the call was incorrect, they can contest it. Not having a referee involved means less time wasted. Another part of The Spirit of the Game is showing respect for your teammates and opponents. This "philosophy" is what makes Ultimate Frisbee different from all other sports.

Once you figure out how to throw the disk, Ultimate's a pretty easy game to learn. The game starts with both teams lining up on opposite end zones, the home team throws off to the opposing team; that starts the point. The team with possession of the disk attempts to move it up the field by throwing