Ultimate (sport)

Ultimate (also called Ultimate Frisbee) is a limited-contact team sport played with a 175 gram flying disc. The object of the game is to score points by passing the disc to a player in the opposing end zone, similar to an end zone in American football or rugby. Players may not run while holding the disc.

While originally called Ultimate Frisbee, it is now officially called Ultimate because Frisbee is the trademark for the line of discs made by the Wham-O toy company. In fact, discs made by Wham-O competitor Discraft are the standard discs for the sport, because they are more streamlined and have a softer curved edge for easier handling. In 2008, there were 4.9 million Ultimate players.

In the fall of 1968, Joel Silver, then a student at Columbia High School proposed a school Frisbee team to the student council on a whim. The following summer, a group of students got together to play what Silver claimed to be the "ultimate game experience," adapting the sport from a form of Frisbee football, likely learned from Jared Kass while attending a summer camp at Northfield Mount Hermon, Massachusetts where Kass was teaching.[2] The students who played and codified the rules at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, were an eclectic group of students including leaders in academics, student politics, the student newspaper, and school dramatic productions. Key early contributors besides Silver included Bernard "Buzzy" Hellring and Jonny Hines.
Another member of the original team was Walter Sabo, who went on to be a major figure in the American radio business. The sport became identified as a counterculture activity. The first definitive history of the sport was published in December 2005, ULTIMATE: The First Four Decades.

While the rules governing movement and scoring of the disc have not changed, the early Columbia High School games had sidelines that were defined by the parking lot of the school and team sizes based on the number of players that showed up. Gentlemanly behavior and gracefulness were held high. (A foul was defined as contact "sufficient to arouse the ire of the player fouled.") No referees were present, which still holds true today: all ultimate matches (even at high level events) are self-officiated. At higher levels of play 'observers' are often present. Observers only make calls when appealed to by one of the teams, at which point the result is binding.