I'm just gonna take this opportunity to say how much I love ultimate frisbee. My son plays in a middle school league (EMSU - Eugene Middle School Ultimate), and as a parent of a sporty kid, I'm pretty confident in saying that there's a pretty big difference between the ultimate frisbee experience and those "other sports." My experience is only in EMSU, along with the tournaments around that state that we've attended. So maybe it's not an accurate assessment of the sport in general, but I kinda think that it is.
My son played soccer, basketball, and baseball for several years before discovering ultimate. Those sports were fine, and we all had a lot of fun. But early on, we started noticing some rather unpleasant attitudes among the kids, families, and coaches. My son's coaches were always pretty great, and they focused strongly on sportsmanship, being kind, and having fun. But it wasn't uncommon for us to play against a team that had an entirely different attitude. It was most obvious in soccer, although we saw it in all of them.
Ultimate frisbee is different. At the heart of the sport is something they call "spirit of the game." As I understand it, the general idea is: don't be a jerk. And the crazy thing is, these middle school kids really do it. Just for context here - middle school kids are jackasses. Not all the time, but I'd say it's never too far away. I don't think they can help it - it's just a part of growing up. But when they play ultimate, they're about 400% more sportspersonship-y than they are in other organized sports. I arrived at that number through some pretty involved math* that I'm not going to try to explain here, but trust me** when I say I'm pretty sure it's accurate.
This isn't an accident. And I don't think it's just because someone said, "hey, this is ultimate - don't be a jackass." When my son was much younger, I tried to guide him with that one simple rule of life: don't be a jackass. It didn't work. So I'm pretty sure that isn't how "they" got it to work in ultimate. Instead, they do stuff like having the game be self-officiated. I think that, to some degree, it's self-officiated even at the higher levels. So when a kid calls a foul, there are a series of well-defined steps they follow in order to figure out how to proceed, depending on whether the other kid contests the foul call or not. In either case (contested or not), there's a rule that defines what happens next, and they continue with the game. If there's a dispute about whether someone was out of bounds, or in the end zone, they in turn ask each of the kids who were close to the action whether they saw what happened and what they think. And again - the amazing thing is that these half-human-half-monster-not-quite-kids-and-not-yet-adult-things work their way through it with a surprising amount of honesty. They figure it out, almost always without any arguing or hard feelings. They high-five players on the other team after a good play. They help each other up off the ground. And at the end of a game, they get together in a circle and each team gives a player on the other team a "spirit award" for being the best not-a-jerk that game. Then they usually all play a silly game together before they move on to the next game or go on with their lives.
As a parent, this is refreshing. The kids seem like they're really having fun. They're getting a lot of exercise. They're meeting lots of other kids around the city without turning them into enemies. At this level, all the kids get playing time, even if they're still just learning how to throw a frisbee. The teams are co-ed, and the league has both male and female coaches. As they get older, some of that might change. But in middle school, I really like the way my son is exposed to a situation that mixes all of these things together, in an environment that's really driven around the spirit of the game.
Also, one of the definitions of "ultimate" is: the best achievable or imaginable of its kind. So, like it said, it's (literally) the best.
So there.
* no I didn't
** at your own risk