Where is Ultimate, Really? And Where is it Going?
Perspective, from a place that feels uniquely me
Today, I invite us to consider the future of ultimate from a different perspective: its past. Not just the past of ultimate, but the past and history of other sports in the United States that we consider to be cultural mainstays now.
A little bit of background about me: I was an avid reader growing up, and while certain fantasy and science fiction series about far-off lands and adventures caught my eye, the books I kept coming back to were ones about sports and sports history. I had a book published by ESPN that highlighted the most important sporting moment from each day of the calendar, which I read until the cover fell off and then some. I spent hours watching highlights of old NFL games online, and, at a certain point, I could rattle off every single Super Bowl winner in order.
In college, I got my degree in American Studies and pursued sports journalism through various classes and work opportunities, taking my interest in sports history in this country to the academic level. All of this is to say that this might just be the most personally on-brand Breakside piece I’ve ever written.
So what did I do?
For the last two to three days, I have been working to create a timeline of four sports: soccer, football, basketball, and ultimate. I researched the history of these sports, specifically their U.S. history, and put them all on the same timeline so that we could look at their growth, compare them to each other, and think about what lessons we can take to our own sport of ultimate and its growth.
Fifty-Five Years Later
The first game of ultimate took place in 1969. I have chosen to use that as the “year zero” for the sport instead of the idea being had in 1968 or the first set of rules being written in 1970 somewhat arbitrarily, but it feels right.
Sometimes, in certain circles of the sport (and I am guilty of this, too), I worry we can lose perspective about the sport's trajectory of growth and what we should prioritize if we want the sport to reach more people as players and as an audience. So where were soccer, football, and basketball 55 years after year zero of their sport’s modern history? And what does that tell us about ultimate’s future?
Well, the three moments I selected for each sport to have as their modern origin were the codification of the “Cambridge Rules” for soccer, Rutgers and Princeton playing the first-ever collegiate football game for football, and James Naismith inventing the peach basket version of basketball for basketball. Those events took place in 1848, 1869, and 1891 respectively. That means that if ultimate’s first game had taken place in any of those years instead, 55 years into its history would mean we were only in the year 1903 on soccer’s timeline, 1924 on football’s timeline, and 1946 on basketball’s timeline.
Here are some relevant events for each sport roughly 55 years into their modern history. For soccer, FIFA would be created as an organization in 1904, 56 years after the first modern rules of the game were codified. In that time, the idea of a national football association (FA) had been introduced to many countries around the world, handballs had been outlawed after about a decade, and the beginning of a tiered league system was in place. US Soccer (or its predecessor, at least) was 19 years old, and the first men’s World Cup was over 20 years away from happening.
In the football timeline, the NFL was a four-year-old organization by the time the 55-year mark for the sport rolled around in 1924. Teddy Roosevelt had threatened to ban the sport 18 years prior, which helped institute the legal forward pass, and most of the last decade had been spent fine-tuning and adjusting the rules to make the game safer and more exciting. John Heisman had just begun his final college football coaching gig at Rice; we still had the better part of a decade to go before the first playoff games in the NFL would happen and the better part of 15 years until AP rankings for college football debuted.
For basketball, 1946 marked 55 years into its modern history. The National Basketball League was 11 years old, the Basketball Association of America formed that year, and the merger between the two that would create the NBA was still three years away. FIBA had been founded back in 1932, and men’s basketball joined a still pretty new modern Olympics in 1936. Bill Russell was still ten years away from being a professional basketball player, the American Basketball Association and three-point shot were still 21 years away, and the NBA-ABA merger and women’s basketball’s introduction to the Olympics were still 30 years in the future.
This is to say that these three iconic sports looked vastly different from how we know them today 55 years into their modern history.
A More Apt Comparison
Now, is this a completely fair comparison? No, it is not. The thing that is hard to control when considering how ultimate’s growth maps onto the growth of these three massive sports is that because ultimate is so much younger, its growth is warped by the technological advancements made in sports, sports broadcasting, and information dissemination. The first time instant replay was used in a football game, it was shocking to the audience, and now we have the technology available for any random tournament that gets broadcasted. This is an advantage for ultimate and its growth because it is easier to create a product that mirrors how we view popular sports now rather than develop a sports viewing or consumption strategy from scratch.
What is impossible to fully account for is how breaking into an already saturated sports market affects ultimate’s growth versus how a sport like soccer basically had a captive population from the start. Soccer, especially, is hard to compare to ultimate because while its modern origins trace back to the middle of the 19th century, scholars claim it has its origins at a minimum of several hundred years prior to its modern development.
However, even if we consider that a century of growth from these sports is equivalent to 55 years of growth for ultimate, they are still nearly unrecognizable to their state today. In 1948, Soccer’s 100 year mark, collegiate soccer in the US was just ten years old, Pele’s career would begin eight years later, and it was still two years before the United States’ famous 1-0 upset over England in 1950 men’s World Cup. The year 1948 was still 43 years before the first women’s World Cup in 1991.
For football, 1969 (100 years later) ironically tracks beautifully to start the start of ultimate. But it marks just the third Super Bowl ever played, a year before the AFL-NFL merger, and despite college football’s immense popularity, the professional game could not hold a candle culturally to the juggernaut it would grow into in the next five decades.
Basketball’s 100-year mark is right before the sport was going to hit overdrive. In 1991, the sport stood just in front of Michael Jordan’s historic run with the Bulls, the Dream Team winning the Olympics in 1992, the WNBA being founded in 1996, and an intensely successful decade that set the sport up to be what it is today: a global force.
So What?
So, who cares, besides me, who got to do a deep dive into US cultural and sporting history and share my findings with you all? Well, what has been most interesting about doing a deep dive into these different sports is a reminder of just how much not only the leagues and organizations surrounding the sports evolve but also how the way the games themselves are played changes. Many of our sporting heroes, who we consider to define the sports they played, were not born 55 years into their sport’s history. Many game-defining rules were still in development or hadn’t even been thought of yet.
This thought experiment has helped me gain some perspective on just how long a sport's growth can take. It’s helped me manage certain expectations around “legitimacy” or the Olympics while also fostering a lot of long-term optimism and excitement for the sport's future.
What will ultimate look like in another 100 years? What new rules will there be? How will we define the eras of the game? Who will we consider to be the greatest players and teams of all time?
This also connects back to my soapbox about our need to better preserve and share the history of the sport with our current player base, too! We have incredible records of the histories of many sports, and heroes from its early ages are celebrated today. I know we have that information about our own sport somewhere, so let’s market it and get it out to the public more. I still remember how fascinated I was with ultimate’s history when I got to see the movie Flatball, and I wish we spent more resources sharing that kind of history of the sport with our modern audience.
The Full Timeline
If you’re a visual learner, I made a visual timeline for you to check out and think about the history of these sports and how they compare to history of ultimate! Check it out here.
About The Breakside
If you enjoyed my writing, please consider leaving a like or comment, subscribing, or sharing it with a friend.
This newsletter aims to tackle the gap in present coverage of ultimate as a sport. Commentary, analysis, and community are some of the guiding ideals behind the Breakside.
About the Author
My name is Noam Gumerman (he/him). I am from Chapel Hill, NC, and studied Journalism and American Studies at Brandeis University. I am a journalist by trade and have been playing ultimate for over half my life. I love nothing more than combining those two interests. Contact me for discussions, feedback, story suggestions, and more on Twitter (@noamgum) or email (noamgumerman@gmail.com).
Sources and Links:
Information was collected and used from the following sites:
https://operations.nfl.com/the-rules/evolution-of-the-nfl-rules/
https://wfdf.sport/history/history-of-ultimate/
https://www.britannica.com/sports/football-soccer#ref29603
https://www.ussoccer.com/history/timeline
https://www.basketballmindsettraining.com/blog/history-of-basketball
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/lisa-leslie
I appreciate the 1933 Football timeline notes