The Ultimate crossroads

No images, no jokes, nothing flashy, just more thoughts than we could be bothered to tweet in a thread.

Ultimate frisbee is at a crossroads between "legitimacy" and whatever surreal limbo nonsense land its inhabited for 60 some odd years. In most ways, frisbee isn't that different from other sports. The concept of "Spirit of the Game" exists nearly everywhere under the far more recognizable "sportsmanship", and other than that its just a sport, with rules and people who play it. However, in one very specific way, ultimate is different from other sports, and that is not in how it is played, but rather when and where it is played.

Most sports are played primarily in unorganized fashion, what the frisbee world would call "pick up". On the playgrounds between kids, in the park with strangers, or on a frozen lake with friends; hockey, soccer, basketball, football, cornhole, darts, swimming... heck tag aren't ref'ed, judged, or officiated by anything other than house rules of wherever you happen to be playing. And as such, people grow up playing these sports learning how to play them safely also by playground rules. If you are playing touch football in the parking lot during recess and one of the kids is tackling people, you stop letting that kid play with you, cause you ain't about that recess life. The lady taking people out at pickup soccer stops getting emailed to play pickup soccer, and the person who keeps "jokingly" throwing darts at people instead of dartboards gets thrown out of the bar. See, even frisbee's "self officiatedness", isn't special, its just choosing to self officiate at higher levels of competition that is.

That's because frisbee actually probably isn't played primarily in an unorganized fashion. Much like quidditch, you have to organize so much to get people to actually play frisbee together that "pickup" games are vastly outnumbered by league, club, and pro outings. And as much as we may fight against it, the actual "rules" of frisbee don't discourage people from playing dangerously. They put the onus on the person getting fouled, not the fouler, to make the call, and the worst thing that happens during 99% of fouls is you recreate the play as if you hadn't fouled anyone. Imagine if a holding call in the NFL didn't result in a yardage penalty, but rather you just replayed the down. What about if a shooting foul in the WNBA was always a side out of bounds? You'd always hold and you'd always foul. But frisbee is worse than both of these scenarios, because we have embodied the "pickup" mentality of other sports (which was what the sport was designed as btw, you think refs don't exist on purpose? Not a chance. Ref's don't exist because when you are high and a nerd and you invent a sport with your buddies on campus where you are throwing a pie tin at each other your first thought isn't "we should really referee this". Beer pong doesn't have refs either) where you only call the most egregious of fouls, and placed it into a setting more typically competitive than a random pickup basketball game.

As pro frisbee becomes more visible, people will start playing more "pickup", and start learning how to play less dangerously, but we aren't there yet, and the responsibility isn't on the current pro players to make the sport safer. There are plenty of ways we can, however, make the sport safer, that don't involve retroactively finger wagging at pro players (make no mistake, that is not at all what the quoted tweet did. That person raised a serious issue and provided a concrete solution to it. That is, however, what seems to be a common way to approach the topic). The first way is to actively change the rules. If you consider the sport large enough and important enough that the athletes need to be protected, then the rules should reflect it. A foul should be a more serious penalty than a redo. Fouls on a poach (probably the most dangerous play in ultimate) should be more serious than a contact foul. "Ejection" should be a real concept and a real penalty that happens due to things in the game. There should be people, like say a referee, who are responsible for making sure that fouls are being called and tracked. There are players in every league that play dangerously. What if instead of just knowing and ignoring that you had people in your local league who play dangerously you had a ref... well we don't like the word ref so we can call them observers... who tracked the behavior and held the parties responsible. Also actually hold the parties responsible, not at the "elite select" level, or the pro level, but at every level. Have the conversation with the dude who knocked yet another wmp out on a poach that maybe ultimate isn't for him. And if it is too uncomfortable for you to specifically call people out on it, then allow for the position to be done by, say, A REFEREE.

The second is to consciously decide between the pickup or competitive nature of ultimate. If frisbee is a pickup sport, then start throwing people out for playing dangerously, stop televising it, and stop giving money to organizations to put on fancy tournaments that you can travel to. Plenty of people play tons of soccer without giving money to USA soccer so that they can have the privilege of traveling to a random field three states over to pay more money to play other people doing that. If frisbee is a competitive sport, then leave the pickup mentality with the pickup games and start treating it like a competitive sport. Call picks, call travels, call violations, call dangerous plays, get angry when someone wanders across the field, have a serious conversation with the person who let their dog run out unleashed. Quit the passive aggressive nonsense where you go to someone after a point and say, "that was probably a foul but I'm not going to call it". What the fuck is that? If this is a real sport, with real rules, and for some reason not real officiants, then enforce the rules, because the rules barely do a good enough job of deterring dangerous plays as it is. People don't play dangerously now because they are trying to injure people and aren't considering the consequences, they play dangerously because they don't realize they are doing it (because no one has every actually enforced the idea that it is dangerous) and because the rules and the play style encourages it. So either change the rules, or specifically tell someone when they are being dangerous and call the foul. And maybe throw them out of the game too.

As a related side note, another good way to have less dangerous plays would be to stop having tournaments where some people get really drunk to play.