It’s springtime of senior year and Josh Ziperstein – “Zip” to everyone – is tossing a disc with his closest friends on the Brown University campus in Providence, R.I.
But Zip doesn’t look happy.
“Work harder!” he barks.
This is no lazy afternoon on the quad. It’s a late-season practice for Brown’s ultimate Frisbee team, one of the nation’s best, and Zip has gathered everyone together after a passing drill breaks down.
It could be the wind, but Zip blames lazy fundamentals. As perhaps the country’s top college player, it’s his prerogative to say so.
“You won’t drop it if it’s in your breadbasket,” he says sternly. His teammates head back out and run the drill again.
Not so long ago, such a scene would have seemed out of place in ultimate, a sport known for much of its history as the laid-back national pastime of the “Hippie Kingdom.”
At Brown, the team’s cheer used to be “have fun,” players traveled New England in a beat-up VW van and they once went a year and a half without winning a game. Mostly, one player from the late 1970s recalls on the team’s website, “We drank a lot of beer and smoked lots of pot.” But over the last decade, Brown has become one of the country’s top college teams – the No. 3 seed in this past weekend’s Ultimate Players Association College Championships in Corvallis, Ore.
Players insist they still have fun, but their attitude also shows that what once was a laid-back way to kill a few hours has gotten serious.
The number of college ultimate teams has tripled since 1995 to more than 500, according to the UPA, which now has a contract with the College Sports TV network. Top teams such as Brown now have coaches, training regimens and set offensive and defensive schemes.
Though ultimate is still not an official NCAA sport, informal, word- of-mouth high school recruiting is gathering steam.
The marks of popularity are being welcomed by players, but they’re also straining the mellowness of the sport – an ideal that’s enshrined in the UPA’s “spirit of the game” mission statement on sportsmanship. Games are still self- officiated, but top tournaments recently added an “observer” to settle disputes players cannot resolve themselves. Two college teams were disqualified this year for using ineligible players.
Players and fans say the spirit was never meant to preclude playing hard. But as the game gets more popular, it does get tougher to make sure everyone hears the message.
“The culture gets diluted a little bit, so we have to really focus on teaching it,” said Will Deaver, the UPA’s director of championships.
In the final Sunday, Brown beat defending champion Colorado 15-14 to win the title.
Ultimate emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as something of a countercultural anti-sport.
Like most sports, its origins are fuzzy – but it seems to have emerged out of Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., according to Adam Zagoria, a sportswriter and ultimate historian. From there it followed its first enthusiasts to various colleges.
The sport’s founding fathers include Joel Silver, film producer of “The Matrix,” though Zagoria says the precise origins of the name “ultimate” are “lost in the marijuana smoke.” The game has evolved into a fast-paced sport with elements of soccer, basketball and football. The goal is to advance the disc into the end zone by passing it. Once they catch a pass, players must stop running and look for a teammate to throw to. If the disc hits the ground, it’s a turnover.
Frequent diving catches – “laying out” – make the sport exciting, and the emerging West Coast powers play a wide-open game with long, risky throws. But Brown’s more methodical “East Coast” game, relying on sharp, mistake- free passing, can be tough to stop.
“It’s an amazing transformation,” said Zagoria, co-author and editor of the forthcoming book, “Ultimate: The First Four Decades.”
“When I was in college, Brown was a joke. They were not a serious team. I don’t know if they played barefoot but their reputation was they played barefoot,” he said. “They went from a hippie program that no one took seriously to one of the best teams in the country.”
