What is Ultimate?
But what is it?
Ultimate is a field sport played by two teams, with seven athletes on the field per team at any given time. The objective of the game is to score points by completing passes to your teammates in the endzone
which you are attacking while preventing the other team from scoring points in the other endzone.
Ultimate Playing field (green - endzones, black - playing field)
History of Ultimate
In 1967 Joel Silver introduced his idea of Ultimate Frisbee to the Columbia High School student council in Maplewood New Jersey, USA. The next year, the first game was played between two groups of students. They used a Wham-O Master disc.
In 1969 a team had been formed at the school and they played in a parking lot. The only lines that existed were the goal lines, usually marked by the piles of the players' coats.
The first and second set of rules were written in 1970 by Joel Silver, Buzzy Hellring and Jon Hines. On Nov 7th, CHS played the first interscholastic game. They won over Millburn High School by a score of 43 to 10.
The first college ultimate game was played between Rutgers and Princeton on November 6, 1972. Rutgers won the game 29-27. The two universities had played the first intercollegiate football game on the same ground exactly 103 years earlier. Rutgers also won that game by 2.
The first organized tournament was played on April 25th in 1975. Eight teams took part in a tournament in Yale. Rutgers University won the final against Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with 28-24. In 1976 the Yale tournament was expanded and renamed into the National Ultimate Frisbee Championship. Rutgers won again.
Ultimate was also in 1975 introduced into the World Frisbee Championships.
In 1983, the first true World Ultimate Championship was held in Gothenburg, Sweden. Two club teams, representing USA, won open and womens divisions. The European countries were represented by national teams.
In 1989, ultimate was shown as an exhibition sport during the World Games in Karlsruhe, West Germany. This year also saw the first World Club Ultimate Championship, in Cologne, West Germany.
In 2001, ultimate was included as a medal sport in the World Games in Akita, Japan along with disc golf. Six countries were invited ta compete based on their finishes in the WFDF 2000 World Ultimate Champioship in Germany. Canada won the World Games gold medal with an overtime victory over the United States.
Ultimate is now played by an estimated 100,000 players in over 30 countries, with the Ultimate Players Association in the US having over 15,000 members. The 2002 WUCC in Hawaii was the largest ultlmate meet to date, with over 2300 players and 120 teams from 24 countries participating.
