Complex rules, no refs, post-game ‘spirit circles’: The father of a player discovers the only slightly hippie-ish joys of the Ultimate Frisbee college championships

Sailing into the air with a balletic lunge, Georgia’s Katherine Yost can’t quite intercept a pass to Williams’s Haley Lescinsky.

Sailing into the air with a balletic lunge, Georgia’s Katherine Yost can’t quite intercept a pass to Williams’s Haley Lescinsky. PHOTO: NICK LINDEKE/ULTIPHOTOS

By Michael W. Miller

May 24, 2018 10:52 a.m. ET

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“How did our kids wind up in this stoner sport?” my friend Aaron asked as we pulled up to a multi-field complex in Rockford, Ill., where the Preying Manti, the Flying Horsecows, the Spidermonkeys and the Vicious Circles were all warming up. A guy with rainbow-colored hair jogged by us, boomboxes blasted “Teenage Dream,” and flying discs filled the broad midwestern sky.

We had arrived at the Division III National College Ultimate Championships, an improbably organized oxymoron of an event, given the sport’s roots in 1960s counterculture. To this day most people think of Ultimate Frisbee, as it’s widely known, as a hippie game played on campus quads and beaches under the influence of something illicit.

But Ultimate today has grown up into a legit sport with college and pro leagues—a highly physical endurance game with a lingering whiff of its tie-dyed past. It’s not hard to imagine that J.K. Rowling was watching an Ultimate game when she dreamed up Quidditch. Players dash down the field and across a goal line as they toss a disc to each other. A player holding the disc can’t run, so everyone else scrambles to get open for a pass, while the opposing team tries to block it to reverse the direction of play. The official rules include a complex set of illegal fouls, but there are no referees; the players adjudicate everything themselves, in accordance with a principle known as “the Spirit of the Game.”

If the moral and technical complexities of the sport are a challenge for the players, they are even more so for their parents. Does the Spirit of the Game let you scream for your kid, or is that hurtful to the other team’s feelings? For a crazed fan on the sidelines, there’s no ref to yell at when a player calls a foul.

Our team, Williams College, arrived at nationals as the powerhouse to beat, seeded No. 1 in the 16-team tournament, with a deep roster of athletes who take the game seriously. They’d followed an intense regimen of team practice and weightlifting throughout the year, with drills in the snow during the harsh winters of the Berkshires in Massachusetts.

This was a new way of life for our daughter, Abby, who grew up in a sports-free home and apparently experienced a genetic mutation upon arriving at college. So I came to the tournament as a clueless sports Dad, thoroughly out-parented by the seasoned sideline jockeys who arrived with backpacks that transformed into armchairs, coolers full of soba-noodle salads and vegan date nut bars, and elaborate dossiers about the opposing teams.

Williams's Caroline Weinberg.

Williams's Caroline Weinberg. PHOTO: NICK LINDEKE/ULTIPHOTOS

Aaron, a deeply obsessed fan who sees every athletic contest as a grim psychological chess match, broke it down for me. The tournament would begin with World Cup-style pools, with the top eight teams going on to a bracket on day two. Aaron thought our rivals in Pool A were beatable, but B featured the two most terrifying players in the tournament. One we knew all too well: Josie Gillett, of the Bates Cold Front. Her lethal trademark move was an upraised arm with an odd flick of the wrist that shot her disc across the field. The other was a player we hadn’t seen, Tulsa Douglas of the St. Olaf Vortex. I read about her with dread on the website Ultiworld: “She is ready to join that group of elite ultimate athletes that you only need their first name to identify. People like Leila, Surge, Opi, Tulsa.”

Our first opponent, the Georgia College Lynx Rufus, had a star player of its own, a lanky speed demon named Katherine Yost with two pigtail braids. But the sideline Dads quickly assessed that the rest of her squad wasn’t a threat to our steady and ruthless daughters. “You can’t pass the disc to yourself,” explained Doug, father of a Williams captain and thus, by the laws of the sideline, the captain of the other Dads.

As Williams ran up the score, I tried to follow the game’s bewildering ways. I learned that the players who “hucked” (threw) the disc were “handlers,” while the ones who caught it were “cutters.” Depending on their strategy, they arranged themselves in “ho stacks” (horizontal lines) or “vert stacks.” The game would end according to a system of “soft” or “hard” caps, following a formula of time and score no one seemed to understand. Sometimes for no evident reason, the Williams players on the sidelines suddenly broke out in a throaty yell of “NASCAR!” “O-H-I-O!” or “Let’s go cats!” This had nothing to do with their team mascot, a cow.

‘In the spirit circle afterwards, a Williams player and a Claremont player reenacted the birth of a moose.’

The game lurched wildly from hyperintense and balletic, everyone crashing and leaping, to sudden outbreaks of Zen when a player called foul. At such moments, everyone froze while the two involved players—who had just minutes before been trying to destroy each other—tried to reach a consensus free of microaggressions. Then they went back to trying to destroy each other again, until we won, 11-4. Afterwards, as per tradition, the two teams took turns serenading each other with a cheesy pop song rewritten with Ultimate lyrics. They all linked arms to form an enormous “spirit circle” for mutual compliments and an empathic discussion of what everybody learned.

I asked a player on our next opponent, the Claremont Greenshirts, to explain their uniform: blue shirts with dinosaurs on them. “We really like dinosaurs,” she said. Williams made easy work of them, and in the spirit circle afterwards, a Williams player and a Claremont player reenacted the birth of a moose, for reasons even the sideline Dads could not explain. By the end of the day, Williams was 3-0.

“We don’t drop the disc,” said Doug. “They do. Sometimes it’s that simple.”

Day two featured the eight top teams in bracket play, but we woke up to a ferocious thunderstorm and buckets of rain. Everyone took shelter in a large fieldhouse. The scene resembled a small liberal-arts refugee camp, with hundreds of kids and their backpacks sprawled on the gymnasium floor. A pair of former camp counselors on the Williams team cranked up a speaker and led a large crowd of players in a flash-mob line dance. Two men’s teams agreed to play their game indoors with modified rules: smaller field, smaller teams, first throw goes to the winner of a sock-wrestling match (whoever pulls off both the other guy’s socks first).

I ran into Eliza from the Williams team. “I’m on my way to the gender equity discussions,” she told me.

After a goal, ​Williams’s Mia Wang (at center) celebrates with the team. Next: a “spirit circle” to discuss lessons from the game with the losing squad.

After a goal, ​Williams’s Mia Wang (at center) celebrates with the team. Next: a “spirit circle” to discuss lessons from the game with the losing squad. PHOTO: NICK LINDEKE/ULTIPHOTOS

Finally the storm passed, and Williams took the field for its quarterfinal game. Our opponent was St. Olaf, a team we beat at last year’s nationals—but Tulsa Douglas was injured that day. Now it was bitterly cold and windy, the field was wet, and our team bore no resemblance to the merry steamroller of yesterday. They had trouble catching the disc, and the choppy wind made a hash out of their throws. Meanwhile Tulsa seemed to be wearing a magic cloak that made her impervious to the weather. She fired the disc anywhere she chose, with the pinpoint precision of a missile pilot dialing in a target. The sideline watched in disbelief as St. Olaf rolled ahead to a 13-7 victory.

Even the seasoned sports parents were speechless, while our daughters were in tears. They were out of the bracket. After a brave rendition of their signature cheesy pop song of appreciation to the winners, the team sat down on the cold, wet grass in an “affirmation circle” and talked for the next 90 minutes about their season and how much they loved each other.

St. Olaf went on to win the tournament, in an 11-8 shootout against Josie Gillett and Bates. But as Abby later explained it, because Bates had beaten St. Olaf in pool play and Williams had beaten Bates at the regional tournament earlier in the season, by the Ultimate transitive property, Williams was now the national champion. I’m still a clueless sports Dad, but I’m learning the Spirit of the Game and that logic made perfect sense to me.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3986042&forum_id=2#36123495)