Your Chemical Romance

Organic Ultimate
by Jean Gaetan

Ultimate has existed always—at least since the dawn of man’s capacity to feel joy and elation. They will tell you that Ultimate started at a New Jersey high school in 1968, but that was simply the scratch that satisfied an itch millions of years in the making. The bigger questions are: Why does it exist? And what is it about Ultimate that inspires an almost euphoric obsession towards the sport? This article makes the case that despite of our rage we are still just a rat in a cage.

Springing from Barton

Click the Austin Ultimate website menus labeled Club and College Teams and you’ll find no less than 13 Austin-based teams. That number more than doubles when you enter the Youth page and count the High School and Middle School teams. Then there’s another half-dozen unlisted teams that periodically spring to life for special occasions before receding again to the back burner. Add all of these together and Austin can rightly claim more than 30 distinct squads that meet regularly enough to legitimately be called a “team.” And these are just the ones that we know about.

Conservatively, there are a half-dozen additional organic pick-up games percolating in the space between. You won’t find these games on any website or see these players in any league. They are the church groups, the fraternity brothers, and the after-work tech-heads, all linked by a shared appreciation of the beauty, elegance and challenge of the Ultimate.

We know these games exist because occasionally one of them reaches a critical mass that can no longer be contained within the parameters of a bi-weekly pick-up game and emerges onto the grid like yet another downtown condo.

At the Historic Riverside Classic Tournament held in June, a team of “unknowns” appeared under the name Barton Springs. Just when you think you know everyone in Austin Ultimate, a whole new cadre of knuckleheads leaps out of the woodwork. The genesis of this group dates back to the summer of 2005 when a group of Austin High School students began playing pick-up several times a week on the field located at the back entrance to Barton Springs. Fast-forward four years and we find many of the same core students, augmented by a dozen or so regulars that similarly found hot Ultimate and the cool of Barton Springs to be an unbeatable mix. [Barton Springs pick-up currently takes place Sunday afternoons. See http://pickupultimate.com/map/city/austin for the exact location of this pick-up game and others]

Bearing witness to the birth of the Barton Springs clan is like viewing a microcosm of Ultimate’s overall growth. The UPA (Ultimate Players Association), Ultimate’s member-driven umbrella organization, reports an increase in membership of 168% over just the past five years. In fact, since its creation, no other sport in the world has grown as rapidly as Ultimate. It is now played in more than 42 countries around the world by an estimated 300,000 – 400,000 players. Contrast this to, for example, lacrosse, a centuries-old sport first played by Native Americans at the time of European contact. Despite its long and storied history, lacrosse is still only played in the US and Canada, plus a few European countries and Australia. Without a doubt, there are passionate and loyal lacrosse players everywhere, but in terms of growth and expansion, it—like every other sport--pales in comparison to Ultimate.

What’s in the Secret Sauce?

There is a pure and elegant beauty to the arc of a disc gliding through the air with blue sky above and green grass below. It is a simple beauty, like the ripples of water flowing over rocks--compelling to watch, simultaneously mesmerizing and thrilling. If a flying disc made music it would sing like a violin.

The disc in flight is just one place to start a discussion about why Ultimate has such a strong hold on certain people. The allure of Ultimate is rooted in psychology and, deeper still, in chemistry. The good feeling a player gets from making a great play is the sly release of endorphins straight into the veins. It’s subtle enough so that most can make a play and still look cool. (How annoying would it be if players giggled each time they made a good play?)

However, making big plays in Ultimate is not guaranteed to any player. Within the framework of Ultimate, players must battle the elements of physics, their own physical limitations, and a human opponent simultaneously striving to make plays of their own (at your expense). Studies show that the absence of guaranteed or regularly scheduled rewards (of endorphins, in the case of amateur sports) actually increases the motivation to earn them. This is the hook that keeps you coming back. The applicable terms within behavioral psychology are scheduled and unscheduled reward. Unscheduled means the reward for the action is an imminent possibility, but not assured. The unscheduled reward is the home run in baseball, the strike in bowling, even the jackpot at the slot machine.

There was a famous experiment involving rats that were rewarded with food for certain behaviors. One group of rats received regular rewards of food for each completion of a particular task. For a second group, food was dispensed only sometimes when the task was completed. When the reward was halted, the rats that were conditioned to expect a regular reward quickly gave up the task. Rats conditioned to expect a reward at random intervals persisted for far longer, demonstrating that they were “hooked” to a much greater extent.

All sports contain an element of unscheduled reward. But it’s quite possible that the structure and dynamic of Ultimate fosters that phenomenon to a greater extent than other sports... and distributes larger doses of that feeling to greater numbers of its players.

Lest Ye Forget…

I hate to pull out the pom-poms and extol the virtues of spirit-of-the-game...yet again. But we cannot ignore the role that SOTG has played in Ultimate’s amazing growth. For players coming to Ultimate from the basketball courts and soccer fields, it must be like hearing the Beatles for the first time.

Many of you will already know Austin-based Ultimate player extraordinaire and 2006 L.B.J. High School grad Erec Hillis. Erec is currently a student at Berkeley in California where he plays on the school’s A team. Growing up, Erec was always into sports and played the full gamut including soccer, football, basketball and especially baseball. During his junior year of baseball, Erec became largely disillusioned by the team’s style of coaching. The coach was hard on the players--and not at all in an endearing Mike Ditka way. He’d yell and berate the players as a form of motivation. Erec instinctively knew there was a better way. Around this time someone invited Erec to play Ultimate for the first time. It was that proverbial moment when the clouds parted and a beam of sunlight shined down from the heavens while the angels sang in unison. For Erec, Ultimate was the answer. It was the scratch to his itch that instantly reoriented his relationship with sports and opened up a whole new path to his future.

Is Erec’s story unique? Hardly! Perhaps not everyone has “found religion” in quite the same dramatic fashion, but we should all recognize that SOTG (and all that comes with it) is a distinguishing characteristic of Ultimate that helps further explain its broad and dramatic appeal to the senses.

Creating Monsters

Will exposing Ultimate’s chemical appeal harm its popularity? Not likely. If anything, it might alleviate the worry and confusion of parents who wonder if their child has joined a cult; of children who languish on the sidelines unable to yet comprehend why their parents don’t act like normal people; or of the non-playing partners of Ultimate players that sacrifice their schedules to accommodate an afflicted partner time and again.

Understanding that the core of Ultimate’s appeal is grounded in human nature--perhaps even in the bloodstream itself--means that each time you invite a friend out to play Ultimate for the first time, you may be setting him or her up to become hooked like you and so many of your friends already are. As the story goes, it was atomic radiation that turned an iguana egg into Godzilla, but only by activating what was already there. Exposure to Ultimate...can have powerful consequences.