Friday, February 8, 2013

The Creation of Ultimate and the Frisbee

            Ultimate Frisbee is a sport played by two teams of seven on a 120 by 40 yard field and consists of trying to move the Frisbee up the field by throwing it to teammates. It is very popular at many colleges due mainly to it's origins. In 1871, William Russell Frisbie founded the Frisbie Pie Company near Yale University. The students there would allegedly purchase pies, eat them, and then throw the pie tins back and forth to each other. Then, in 1951, Fred Morrison created the "Pluto Platter", a plastic flying disk that would become the blueprint for the modern Frisbee. The design for the Pluto Platter was bought by Wham-O in late 1955 and gained popularity as Wham-O's "Hula-hoop" became a national craze. The name of the Pluto Platter was changed to Frisbee after Richard Knerr, one of the founders of Wham-O, reported that students at Harvard had been throwing pie tins to each other and called it Frisbie-ing. Because Knerr didn't know the origins of the Frisbie Pie Company, he spelled it Frisbee.

            Ultimate Frisbee was born when Joel Silvers, a student from Maplewood, played and adapted the rules to Frisbee football and created Ultimate. It was called this because he described it as "The ultimate sports experience". Then, in the Fall of 1967, Silver proposed that the student council create an Ultimate team as a joke. By Spring of the next year, members of the student newspaper and the student council were playing the first form of Ultimate. Then in the Fall of 1968, the student newspaper played the first formal game of Ultimate against the members of the student council. The next year, Silver and his friends Bernard Hellring and Jonny Hines refined the rules of Ultimate which were then printed and sent around the world.

http://www.thesportjournal.org/article/origins-and-development-ultimate-frisbee
http://www.whatisultimate.com/history/history_game1_en.html

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