BY WENDY CARLSON

Ultimate began as a club sport in the late 90s, but it wasn’t until 2004 that it gained varsity status. Achieving that that recognition wasn’t easy, but today, Ultimate is one of the most successful team sports at Hotchkiss.

From the time students began throwing frisbees on college campuses in the 60s, die-hard sports traditionalists cast it as just another fad, relegating it to the ranks of whiffle ball and hacky sack. Today, the phrase “Ultimate frisbee” still conjures images of lanky, long-haired teens wearing tie-dyed T-shirts, tossing discs back and forth to the music of the Grateful Dead.

At Hotchkiss, Ultimate went from being a club team to an interscholastic sport in 2000. Back then, team members were a pretty colorful lot. On the field, they played up their countercultural image by competing in plaid polyester thrift shop skirts and boas, regardless of gender. Boys wore their hair in top-knots long before it was cool. They had nicknames for each other, including “Gross” and “White Castle,” and they cheered each other on while taking turns beating a primitive leather drum. “We were weird, but not in a popular way,” recalled Xtehn Titcomb ’01, who, along with his four siblings, went on to found an Ultimate apparel and disc company.

Players adhered to the ethos of the Ultimate rules, which place equal emphasis on competition and “The Spirit of the Game”. That was yet another departure from the “no blood, no foul” mentality of some other competitive sports, said Dave Thompson, director of international programs and the Ultimate coach since the sport’s inception at Hotchkiss.

But it was the game’s laid-back, quirky reputation that attracted athletes from traditional sports, like Young So Ellen Rim ’08, who played basketball her prep year and took up Ultimate as her spring sport on a whim. 

“One of the reasons I picked it was because I thought it was going to be super chill. But then I stuck with it because it turned out to be really competitive and athletic,” said Rim, now a Ph.D student at Stanford. She captained the Hotchkiss team and went on to play for the women’s team at Harvard, where she was also captain. Later, she played professionally on the San Francisco Flame Throwers during its final 2018 season and continues to play on Mischief, a co-ed Bay Area club team.   

 Like other Hotchkiss athletes who took up the sport as an afterthought, Rim found Ultimate more physically challenging than she had imagined. Players say that it requires the endurance of a cross country runner, the leaping ability of a wide receiver or basketball player, and the quickness of a soccer player. 

Despite the level of athleticism required, Ultimate is not sanctioned as a NCAA sport. Recently, the International Olympic Committee recognized Ultimate as a sport but has not yet approved it for potential inclusion in future games.  

Ultimate bucks the norms of organized sports, which has been an impediment to its broader acceptance. For one thing, players referee their own games, which can make it difficult for spectators to follow. When a foul is called by a player, members from both teams talk through a decision — a process that can last for several minutes. At the end of the games, both teams perform original cheers and songs, or gather arm-in-arm in “Spirit Circles,” where players on both teams dole out praise and helpful criticism.

In spite of these idiosyncrasies, Ultimate has grown rapidly over the past two decades, with an estimated seven million players in more than 80

At Hotchkiss, Ultimate went from being a club team to an interscholastic sport in 2000. Back then, team members were a pretty colorful lot. On the field, they played up their countercultural image by competing in plaid polyester thrift shop skirts and boas, regardless of gender. Boys wore their hair in top-knots long before it was cool. They had nicknames for each other, including “Gross” and “White Castle,” and they cheered each other on while taking turns beating a primitive leather drum. “We were weird, but not in a popular way,” recalled Xtehn Titcomb ’01, who, along with his four siblings, went on to found an Ultimate apparel and disc company.

Players adhered to the ethos of the Ultimate rules, which place equal emphasis on competition and “The Spirit of the Game” That was yet another departure from the “no blood, no foul” mentality of some other competitive sports, said Dave Thompson, director of international programs and the Ultimate coach since the sport’s inception at Hotchkiss.

But it was the game’s laid-back, quirky reputation that attracted athletes from traditional sports, like Young So Ellen Rim ’08, who played basketball her prep year and took up Ultimate as her spring sport on a whim. 

“One of the reasons I picked it was because I thought it was going to be super chill. But then I stuck with it because it turned out to be really competitive and athletic,” said Rim, now a Ph.D student at Stanford. She captained the Hotchkiss team and went on to play for the women’s team at Harvard, where she was also captain. Later, she played professionally on the San Francisco Flame Throwers during its final 2018 season and continues to play on Mischief, a co-ed Bay Area club team.   

 Like other Hotchkiss athletes who took up the sport as an afterthought, Rim found Ultimate more physically challenging than she had imagined. Players say that it requires the endurance of a cross country runner, the leaping ability of a wide receiver or basketball player, and the quickness of a soccer player. 

Despite the level of athleticism required, Ultimate is not sanctioned as a NCAA sport. Recently, the International Olympic Committee recognized Ultimate as a sport but has not yet approved it for potential inclusion in future games.  

Ultimate bucks the norms of organized sports, which has been an impediment to its broader acceptance. For one thing, players referee their own games, which can make it difficult for spectators to follow. When a foul is called by a player, members from both teams talk through a decision — a process that can last for several minutes. At the end of the games, both teams perform original cheers and songs, or gather arm-in-arm in “Spirit Circles,” where players on both teams dole out praise and helpful criticism.

In spite of these idiosyncrasies, Ultimate has grown rapidly over the past two decades, with an estimated seven million players in more than 80 countries. The international governing body, The World Flying Disc Federation, represents 65 member associations in 62 countries and regularly holds major World Championships in Ultimate, beach Ultimate, freestyle and field events in divisions for men, women, and mixed teams from youth level to grand masters (45 years old and older). 

But to appreciate how far the sport has come, you have to go back to its inglorious beginnings. Like baseball, Ultimate has its roots in America — in Connecticut. In 1871, William Russell Frisbie founded the Frisbie Pie Company in Bridgeport, Conn. At its peak, in 1956, the company baked more than 80,000 pies a day in tin plates embossed with the words “Frisbie.” Employees would fling the metal pie tins during lunch breaks and yell out “Frisbie” to alert bystanders. Since the company delivered its pies to nearby college campuses, it wasn’t long before Yale students discovered that the tins, if thrown properly, could take various trajectories. 

The concept was picked up by Wham-O, the same company that created and marketed the Hula Hoop, Silly String, Superballs, and Hacky Sacks. In 1959, Wham-O began marketing the Pluto Platter, which was eventually rebranded and trademarked as the Frisbee, a protection that requires the sport to be called “Ultimate” and any other brand of frisbee a “disc.”  

Nearly a decade later, an Amherst College student, Jared Kass, took the game to a summer camp at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, where he was a counselor. One of the male campers introduced the sport to his high school in New Jersey, where he was credited with writing the first edition of an Ultimate rulebook. The first official game was played in the high school parking lot. 

At Hotchkiss, the administration first called the quirky club team The Independent Republic of Ultimate. Then, in 2000, when Ultimate was introduced as an interscholastic sport at Hotchkiss, the team named itself the Naugahyde after the faux-leather upholstery fabric invented in Naugatuck, CT. The team mascot was a Naugahyde stuffed animal that had been introduced into the company’s ad campaigns in 1966. The Nauga, as it was called, which looked a bit like a creature out of Where the Wild Things Are, presided over games from a folding lawn chair.  

As Ultimate gained popularity at Hotchkiss, the players and coaches began pressuring the School for varsity designation. “It became a lightning rod,” recalled Robin Chandler ’87, co-director of athletics. 

“This was at a point when people weren’t necessarily taking it seriously, so there was a lot of pushback from students and faculty as to why it should be a varsity team,” she said. 

“They didn’t have a good understanding of the athleticism involved. It took time for Ultimate to prove to the community that yeah, this sport is quirky and fun, but it’s also physically demanding.”

To help speed the process along, Thompson launched the first tournament at Hotchkiss, which, in recent years, has become the CT State Championships, featuring 26 teams from 22 schools across the state. Finally, in 2004, the athletics program decided to drop boys thirds hockey, which freed up funding for transportation and uniforms for a varsity Ultimate team. In the years that followed, the team fielded junior varsity and varsity teams, and its popularity has continued to grow. 

“Since 2007, we’ve won three New Englands, two CT State championships and have a 218-66 record. At the end of last season, we were in the top ten in the national power rankings,” said Thompson. Today, the team competes against 50 teams in two leagues, the CT State League and the New England Prep School Ultimate Leagues. 

Many Hotchkiss Ultimate alumni have gone on to play at Bowdoin, Bates, Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Tufts, Williams, and other top universities and colleges. Hotchkiss has six alumni who have worn the national uniform on the world stage; five of them have ended up with gold medals around their necks.

 “One of the things I’ve always loved about Ultimate is that it is co-ed,” said Thompson. “And the players that have gone the farthest with Ultimate in college, club, and national teams have been our female players.”

As it has grown in popularity, the Ultimate community has tackled the issue of gender equity, especially since the growth of professional leagues.

“Gender equality is a very big part of the Ultimate culture,” said Rim. “I remember a discussion we had with our national governing organization about why ESPN was broadcasting only men’s games, and since then, they have been working at shifting things around.”

The Titcomb siblings — brothers Zahlen ’00, Xtehn ’01,Vehro ’03, and sisters Rohre ’05 and Qxhna ’11 — all of whom played Ultimate at Hotchkiss and beyond, have been integral in pushing the conversation on equality forward through their ownership of the Seattle Cascades and leadership meetings with the American Ultimate Disc League, which oversees the professional teams.

Qxhna, the youngest of the clan, is training to earn a spot on the 2020 U.S. National team. She helped create more visibility for female athletes through organizing the 2015 and 2016 All-Star Ultimate Tours for top players from women’s college teams, and by adding both an all-women’s roster and a mixed roster to the Cascades 2018 season. 

In addition, the siblings founded Five Ultimate, an apparel line designed for players with the aim of creating a recognizable brand to distinguish the sport. In keeping with Ultimate’s quirky reputation, Five Ultimate jerseys and shorts have tags that read: “Do Not Set on Fire” and “Do Not Wear Bungee Jumping.” The company also donates old gear to organizations that support Ultimate around the world. Last year, the siblings launched ARIA Ultimate, which produces discs; for every disc sold on their online store they donate one to an organization that uses the game as a tool for social change. 

Business manager Xtehn, who, at 35, is the oldest player on the the family-owned Seattle Cascades, credits Hotchkiss with sparking the siblings’ business endeavors.

“It was our time at Hotchkiss that fueled our drive to take something we were passionate about and run with it,” he said.

The sense of community and good citizenship, he added, is a big part of Ultimate, which stays with the players long after they’ve left the field.

THE SPIRIT 0F THE GAME

Ultimate is a player defined and refereed non-contact team sport played with a flying disc on a playing surface with end zones. The game combines elements of many other sports: the long throws and end zone catches of football, the zone defenses and vertical jumps of basketball, and the cardiovascular intensity and strategy of soccer. Single games are played to a point total of 15, or a time cap of 90 minutes. Seven players on each team cover an area approximately the size of a football field. All actions are governed by something called “The Spirit of the Game.”

So, what exactly does that mean?

“The Spirit of the Game,” essentially, means a commitment to fair play. To that end, rules state that “highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of mutual respect among competitors, adherence to the agreed upon rules, or the basic joy of play.” Players referee their own games, which teaches them about conflict resolution and self-control. 

What spirit feels like, however, is what draws many people into the Ultimate community. It promotes an atmosphere of mutual respect and inclusiveness. Teams write original cheers and songs for each other at the end of the games, or gather arm-in-arm in “Spirit Circles” and praise other players. The sport has also been progressive in terms of gender, equity, and inclusion, with mixed teams comprised of all genders.