“You Do What?” is one incredibly unathletic girl’s journey to explore alternative sports. Check back every week for my take on sports I once knew nothing about and now find fascinating.
Ultimate Frisbee is not just tossing around a disc with some friends in the backyard, it’s a sport that requires endurance and strategy and has rulebook.
The goal of the game is to score points by getting the disc to the end zone, similar to football. The catch is that players aren’t allowed to move once they have the disc, so they must pivot and pass to a teammate.
Ultimate is not a contact sport, so there are no penalties for physical contact but there can be fouls for various situations like going out of bounds. There are no penalties for fouls at the college level; the play is just reset.
Games are played when a team either reaches 13 points or the game reaches the time of 1 hour and 30 minutes – whichever comes first. Half-time occurs when a team reaches seven points.
Ethan Culler, a senior mechanical engineering major and the president of the Ultimate Club, explained the positions that players can take in ultimate, “You have three people called handlers, they’re throwing the disc constantly on the field. Then you have four cutters down field like in soccer.”
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Ryan Cicioni, a junior mechanical engineering major and captain of the Wilkes ultimate team, said, “It’s seven-on-seven and we bring about 15 players to tournaments. We go to tournaments in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania.” Tournaments are completely optional to team members. Some players never go to a tournament and prefer to play on campus.
There are professional teams, college teams and community teams. The Wilkes University Ultimate team has played against the Wilkes-Barre community team which included some 30-40 year old players. Ultimate is co-ed and can be played at any age.
There is a professional league called Major League Ultimate with teams that represent big cities like the Philadelphia Spinners and the New York Rumble. These players are, “not full-time, they have real professions but they also play as professional athletes,” said Cicioni.
Cicioni shared a unique fact about the sport, “It’s all student-run. There are no coaches or referees. Each play is basically [called by] whoever saw it best.” The term for this honor system is called “Spirit of the Game.”
Cody Logan, a junior political science major, shared a story from one tournament involving an unusual break in the Spirit of the Game rule, “A kid got kicked out the day before [the game] for getting in a fight and his mom had to go talk to the guy who was running the tournament. The next day we played them and he was back playing and his mom was on the sidelines talking trash.”
The Wilkes team consists of a hefty number of mechanical engineering students and pharmacy students, with a handful of various other majors. Cicioni said that the team will take players of any experience level. “We don’t kick people out if they aren’t good,” he said.
Students interested in joining the team can join the Wilkes Ultimate Facebook page and attend any practice, which takes place at 8-10 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Marts or UCOM.
