by MOSES LEOS III
Fast movement, quick feet, up-tempo play, contact – those terms normally describe a vigorous spring time football scrimmage in the final months of the school year.
Yet walking onto the Barton Middle School football field on a Wednesday afternoon, visitors may be surprised. The fast and furious play of the Hays High School Ultimate Frisbee club is reminiscent of a full-fledged professional sport yet devoid of pads, helmets and cleats.
The Ultimate club, started by Hays High English teacher Billy Norton, is a way for students and teachers at Hays to appreciate the sport they love, as well as teach it to a new generation of players.
“We have been doing this at Hays since last year,” Norton said. “We are a very informal group. Formal Ultimate (Frisbee) involves implementing plays and schemes. Out here, we have just a little bit of that.”
Norton, who played Ultimate while attending Princeton, knows the game is competitive. He has seen the sport grow by leaps and bounds.
“When I was (at Princeton), there were 125 college club teams; now there are 620,” he said. “ It has really grown in popularity. Austin, Chicago, Washington D.C. – any city that has over 100,000 people normally will have good Ultimate teams.”
Ultimate is a splice of several sports all in one. It contains the speed and agility of soccer, the precision of lacrosse, the physicality of football and the mental quickness of rugby. During a game, players toss the Frisbee down field to teammates, stopping when they catch the disk. They must transfer the disk to another teammate before moving again, or lose possession.
Once the disk is in the air, it is free game. Players are encouraged to leap as high as they can to acquire the disk. The goal of the game is similar to scoring a touchdown in football – to throw the disk into an end zone, with a teammate catching it before it goes out of bounds.
“Ultimate Frisbee falls somewhere between soccer and football. You move like you do in soccer, but you do not have the breaks that you would in football,” Norton said. “The fact that you have end zones instead of goals makes the sport fall into the football category.”
While the sport involves a lot of athletic ability, a background in athletics is not necessary to excel in Ultimate, though previous team sports experience doesn’t hurt. But Norton says a diverse group of students loyally follow the club.
“A lot of these kids are athletic, but they are not that much into team sports. They don’t involve themselves in team competition,” Norton said. “A third of them are into sports, but not football or baseball, with the rigidity it entails. This is for people that like to run hard, but do not like as much structure. “
Intense play follows this sport, as the students fly down the field, jostling for position and, occasionally, knocking each other down.
“I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve ran into a couple of people,” said junior Jacob Dotterer. “We’ve done flips and people have been blindsided. It can get pretty intense.”
While there is a learning curve to Ultimate, Norton said students are quick to pick it up.
“It takes a some time to learn little nuances of it; that’s the hard part,” said Hays student Taylor Herselman. “Once you understand the rules, you get it. That’s the transition. Once you learn it, you can keep going with it. You can pick it up quickly. No one is bad out here.”
Norton said students also pick up the notion that everyone is equal on the Ultimate field. Teachers, like English Department Head Chris Gardner, point out that the teacher/student mentality is gone once the disk is in the air.
“It took a little while to get to that point. In the first year, the kids played a little bit soft against us,” said Gardner. “They took it easy when they saw the Frisbee in the air and the teacher going after it. When they realized that we were not going to take it easy, they started to play more aggressively.”
For Gardner and other teachers, the ability to work with students and witness their achievements outside of the classroom element is important.
“You can see kids make progress every single year. Every week, you see someone do something (on the field) they have never done before. It’s the same rush you get out of teaching,” Gardner said. “It is great to see somebody do something and get it, especially when they did not expect it. It’s the same kind of ‘flashing lightbulb’ moment you see in the classroom.”
