encourages athletic spirit
Ted Fox
Fox Sports...Almost
A week or two before I set out from home to become a student at Notre Dame, I placed a phone call to a Mike Shiel, one of my roommates-to-be in a Morrissey quad.
Mike wasn't home that day, but instead of getting some sort of standard response from his mom, like "He's at a movie," or "He's at work," she told me that he was playing in the Ultimate Frisbee Junior World Championships in Minnesota.
Come again?
Here I was, playing stickball with my neighbors while this guy was at a tournament where he and his team, the lone representatives from the United States, ended up going undefeated and bringing home the gold medal. I wasn't even sure what ultimate, shorthand for ultimate frisbee, was, but I was most definitely intrigued.
The sport itself originated in the late 60s at a high school in New Jersey. I always assumed Mike had been playing a long time to reach the level that he has, but he only started about four years ago.
"I had an uncle that played that I used to go watch, not real often, but occasionally," he said.
He saw the first of these tournaments in 1993 and was playing by his sophomore year of high school, in the spring of 1996. In his opinion, this little-known sport, a club activity at the colleges where it is played, has been catching on more and more in recent years.
"In the past, most people didn't find out about it [ultimate] until college."
Citing a noticeable increase in interest at this year's Activities Fair as opposed to our freshman year, the sophomore said now "Whether [students] have played or not, they know what it is."
A lot of us probably have at least a general idea about how the game is played: two teams, one on offense with possession of the frisbee, only allowed to advance the disc to the endzone-like goal by passing, while the defense counters with either a man-to-man or zone strategy. (So he told me some of that, big deal.) But what is behind ultimate frisbee?
For Mike and many others, it is this: "Playing for the love of the game, and not a win at all costs mentality."
He also told me about one of the most unique aspects of this sport: The golden rule of ultimate, which, in his words, embodies the spirit of the game. "Ultimate has no refs. If there's a disagreement, a compromise is reached, and play is restarted."
Just because the desire to win isn't the only reason driving ultimate frisbee, both the men and women's Notre Dame teams hope to win as they pursue their biggest goal: making it to this year's national tournament in Boise, Idaho.
Neither team has ever made it past the regional round. That doesn't mean they haven't been close.
The men's team has spent the last five years a win or two away from qualifying. The more recently-established women's team has, in the words of Shiel, "emerged quickly as a powerhouse in their region," missing nationals by mere points in recent years.
Both squads look to advance fairly easily through the sectional round, which takes place the weekend of April 15 at Purdue. Then, the weekend of April 29, they travel back to Purdue for the tougher test at regionals. To get to Idaho, the Irish will have to get through tough teams from Oberlin, Illinois and Michigan.
Still, despite the team's focus and drive to win, the fundamentals of the game remain in the front of the player's minds.
"Obviously, everybody wants to win," Shiel said. "[But] it's not the be-all-end-all of ultimate.
"A lot of the reason I play ultimate . . . I think it's the people.
It's founded on spirit . . . If you're not going to obey that [spirit], what're you playing ultimate for?"
That, my friend, is a good question.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Sports Stories for Wednesday, April 5, 2000
