PlaySportsTV Ultimate Frisbee

Ultimate Frisbee: Growing on the Youth Level

Ultimate Frisbee is a growing sport on the youth level

By Craig Haley
PlaySportsTV Managing Editor
 
It may feel uncomfortable for an athlete accustomed to playing baseball, basketball, football or soccer to suddenly be playing Ultimate Frisbee. But Meredith Tosta, youth development director of the Ultimate Players Association, often sees how kids are put at ease because of their familiarity with a Frisbee.

“There’s something about the flight of a Frisbee that is very captivating,” Tosta says. “You don’t really know where it’s going to go. A football is going to take a path, a soccer ball is going to take a path. But when kids first get started, the easiest thing to do is say, ‘Hey, I’m going to throw it as far as I can. You go run it down.’”

The action-packed, non-contact sport known as either Ultimate, Ultimate Disc or Ultimate Frisbee fields seven-player teams which try to pass the flying disc across roughly a 70- by 40-yard field and into an opponent’s end zone. The sport combines athleticism, stamina and speed, and resembles the passing of football, endurance of soccer and defensive skills of basketball. It’s fun to be creative when making the disc soar.

The sport is played in over 50 countries. In the United States, the UPA, the sport's governing body whose headquarters are in Boulder, Colo., has made a push to expand Ultimate Frisbee on the youth level. The UPA has over 27,000 registered members and holds sanctioned statewide tournaments in 20 states and regional championships on both the high school and club levels.

In the birthplace of Ultimate Frisbee – Maplewood, N.J. – a Sunday morning program is run to develop youth players.

One of the advantages of Ultimate Frisbee is that it is an inexpensive sport because it requires little equipment. Plus, youngsters with a background in other sports – especially soccer and football - tend to adjust to Ultimate Frisbee quickly, Tosta says.

“Definitely, if you’ve played a field sport before and you’ve developed a sense of field awareness, that can be helpful,” she says. “But I wouldn’t say that you need to play other sports to play Ultimate. A lot of the kids that start it because they don’t like soccer or another sport doesn’t fit for them, and there’s something about Ultimate that drives them in."

“So when I hear from PE teachers (physical education), more often than not, is that teaching Ultimate is a lot of fun because it’s the great equalizer because they’re still at the point where there aren’t a ton of kids who picked it up when they were five. By the time you get to middle school, PE teachers love it because there’s often not a lot of kids who are jocks at it yet and they can actually teach them things that everyone’s learning and everyone’s participating in it and getting better.”

A disc generally weighs 175 grams and is 10.75 inches in diameter, but to increase the sport’s growth at a young age, UPA lets players under 12 use a disc that weighs 145 grams and is 9.5 inches in diameter. Let the non-stop movement of Ultimate Frisbee take over from there.

“Once you get your basic throwing down, the learning curve is so steep,” Tosta says. “You can start picking up more and more and you can do so many different things with a disc. Kids really latch onto that.”

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