It’s another spectacular play on a night full of them, witnessed by a fervent crowd overflowing the stands at Gallaudet University despite an hourlong thunderstorm delay.
As the fans cheer, a voice rings out from the beer garden: “That’s why you’re paid the double digits!”
Welcome to professional Ultimate, which is slowly but surely carving its way into a crowded sports landscape as a friendly alternative to pro sports that full of bad attitudes. (You may know the sport as “ultimate frisbee,” but “frisbee” is a trademark. The AUDL stands for “American Ultimate Disc League.”)
Make no mistake ― these players are legitimate athletes. From this game, the first round of the AUDL playoffs, DC Breeze player Alan Kolick made a leaping catch that made ESPN’s Top 10 plays of the day.
The visiting New York Empire kept it close with plays such as a leap forward as a player caught the disc, landing over the 10-yard line that serves as the Breeze’s end zone.
Then check out Breeze player Jonathan “Goose” Helton, who did a Reddit AMA that included offbeat questions such as the percentage of a typical day he wears a shirt (35%) but focused on training tips that would challenge any pro athlete.
Helton, like the overwhelming majority of his professional teammates, doesn’t make a living in the sport. The top pro players are also the top club players ― roughly half of the DC Breeze roster also plays for Truck Stop, a successful club that recently announced its 2016 roster with asterisks for “Rookie” and “Came crawling back, begging.” That sense of humor pervades the sport ― a top women’s team in Seattle gives its players’ ages, hometowns, colleges and Hogwarts Houses.
The sport evolved on college campuses with a “Spirit of the Game” ethic. Even as athletes have taken the sport more seriously, that spirit still reigns. Players respectfully slap hands after challenging for a high, floating disc. Arguments are rare and end with handshakes, as if governed by a Quaker insistence on consensus.
Which is not to say the sport is without controversy …
First of all, the AUDL is one of two pro leagues. Major League Ultimate (MLU) follows the centralized league model of Major League Soccer’s early days.
The pros feature people who leave traditionalists aghast ― actual referees with the power to call fouls. At the first AUDL game I attended, an Ultimate-playing kid in the stands asked, “Why do they have referees?”
That’s one of the reasons some purists may prefer the club game. USA Ultimate, though it draws its championship-winning players from teams like the Breeze (and Truck Stop), thinks Ultimate loses something unique when referees take foul-calling power away from the players. Their tournaments use “observers,” empowered to resolve disputes.
On the Gallaudet campus, these arguments over the direction of the game can be heard in the stands, but for the most part, fans are caught up in the action. A group of African-American kids with summer camp T-shirts yells in pregame to get the attention of Rowan McDonnell, a Breeze player who did a clinic with them. He looks up, spots the kids and gives a thumbs-up. Before the game, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser thanks the team for its community outreach and happily accepts a Breeze jersey with No. 51, a not-so-subtle nod to the District’s eternal quest for statehood.
And just as soccer made huge strides in the USA as the Internet was woven into daily life, Ultimate is also a viral sport with a strong presence on YouTube as well as games on ESPN’s online streaming service, which is carrying both the AUDL and USA Ultimate tournaments. Some pioneers are trying to pull the sport into the 21st century world of analytics, in case the “D efficiency” and “average pull hangtime” box scores aren’t enough for you.
A thriving site called Ultiworld has so much content that jumping into it is like drinking from a firehose. It has painstaking details on college club tournaments, an AUDL mock draft, and some debate over an incident in an AUDL game and its effect on the Spirit of the Game.
The issues might not go away any time soon. But they’re a sign that people care about this sport beyond just tossing a disc around a campus quad. The sport itself isn’t going away any time soon, either.