Excerpts from The Believer: The USA Ultimate Masters Championships

FEATURES:

• Middle-aged athletes
• Scoobers
• Coke Slurpees
• The unknowable future

In July of 2025, I flew out to Aurora, Colorado, with my wife and some friends to see if we were still the best forty-something ultimate frisbee players in the United States of America. We’d been training for months, and for decades. A gold medal from 2024 hung in my closet in Minneapolis, gave a muted clink when I reached for my khakis, but in the meantime, a whole other crop of mid-forties motherfuckers had sprung up or aged into the grand masters division. They wanted to snatch our gold.

I should clarify some things before I tell you what happened at the USA Ultimate Masters Championships—the national tournament for old heads—because I assume the casual reader is not familiar with the inner workings of ultimate. (And, yes, it’s just ultimate; we omit the f-word due to trademark objections from the Wham-O corporation and use the term disc instead.) Ultimate is the only sport whose name is an adjective, and it is a child’s game I’ve been playing competitively for the last several decades of my life. This year I turn forty-five years old. I say “child’s game” with warm-hearted sarcasm, since the burnished animal hide of the baseball or football or basketball has, over the course of a century, acquired a mature and dignified patina that the plastic flying disc has not yet achieved; give the sport another few decades and we’ll reassess.

Ultimate is played seven vee seven on a field that’s 70 percent the size of an American football field. The rules are straightforward: You and your teammates pass the disc until someone catches it in the end zone for a score. Once you catch the disc, you must stop moving as quickly as momentum allows and pass it to another player. You have ten seconds to do this. If the disc is in your hands after ten seconds, or if it hits the ground, your team loses possession. Meanwhile, the other team is trying to prevent you from doing this by any means other than making physical contact with your body, which is a foul. Like any good sport, it is dense with technical jargon, although knowing what a scoober and a skinny break are will not enhance your immediate enjoyment of this report.

The sport is characterized by a fast-paced highlight-reel athleticism—sprinting and cutting and juking and diving to catch a trailing disc before it touches grass—and over the last decade, clips of ultimate have regularly been featured on SportsCenter’s nightly Top 10. The run of play involves such aesthetic delights as watching the smooth slicing parabola of a white disc against pristine Colorado blue, the disc tilted along an axis you didn’t know existed until you watched your friend Alicia send it deep and hit a teammate in full stride in the end zone.

Ultimate’s most salient detail, perhaps, is that it is self-adjudicated: Players, not referees, call fouls and violations. If in the heat of combat two opposing players cannot quickly agree on whether a foul occurred, play simply resets to the previous pass. This system, utopian in nature, generally works, due to the sport’s core philosophy—the “Spirit of the Game”—loftily named and drilled into every new ulty player from the moment they first touch plastic: Compete as hard as possible and don’t be a piece of shit. At the highest levels, and during the finals of major tournaments, there are usually referee-like figures called “observers” on the field, but they are non-interventionists, involved only if appealed to by players mired in an unresolvable dispute, at which point the observer’s decision becomes final. But this is rare. Ultimate still flaunts a countercultural vision, and it’s best to keep the Man out of it.

The sport’s fusion of intense athleticism and weirdo antiauthoritarian vibes results in the kind of people who will humblebrag about their VO2 max and then roll you the tightest little pinner of a joint you’ve ever seen. I’ve played with and against professionals at the apex of their fields: municipal judges and ER docs, forensic biomechanical engineers, physical and mental therapists, C-suite denizens, and military advisers who’ve survived active war zones. These are people who on the field respond exclusively to names like Scooter, Doobie, Pokey, Frenchie, Party, Cookie, Mini, Juggles, Puddles, Pebbles, A$, A-Strike, and Shwa. “Who the fuck is Aaron?” I heard someone say once. “My name is Girth.”

Anyway: We came out to win Nationals again, me and my old-ass friends. The Masters Championships are an age-restricted event, this year featuring 111 teams across eight divisions. Female players age thirty-plus and male players age thirty-three-plus are eligible, with further subdivisions at ages forty and forty-eight. (I know people playing at a high level in their sixties.) I last played a Club season—no age restrictions—when I was thirty-eight years old. I contributed well until an eighteen-year-old jumped over my entire body to catch a goal. It occurred to me then that I might not be able to contend at my fullest ability against a player whose physical peak was still several years into the future.

The teams competing at the Masters Championships tend to acknowledge their age and athleticism with a degree of self-deprecation, which is a thing you can do when you’re still able to beat most twenty-five-year-olds in a footrace. In the women’s division this year, a team from Ohio was playing under the name Night Sweats. One of the Chicago teams was Winded City. The Minneapolis team went by COUGARS (printed in all-caps and representing a goofy acronym not worth enumerating). A women’s team from Indiana—with a nod toward Indiana University’s place in the Big Ten conference—had named themselves Big Tendinitis. In the men’s division there were teams called Johnny Cashed, No Country, and Relics. There were two different men’s teams with Grave in the name.

Ultimate is unique among the competitive fields sports in that it has a mixed division, where teams have male- and female-identifying players on the roster; gameplay alternates between points with four men and three women on the field, and points with four women and three men. And it is here that writing about ultimate becomes a love letter not only in a sports-cliché way, but in a real way: I met my wife while playing ultimate during our senior year of college. It is the origin story of our family, which now includes three children, whom we’ve successfully brainwashed into playing and loving the sport. After the finals at the Masters Championships, I caught up with a Chicago player named Bill Finn. He had a beer in one hand and a toddler notched into the crook of his other arm; his wife, Krisztina, who plays on the same Chicago team, was off wrangling their other two kids. As we talked, Bill’s old high school buddy Vijay popped by to contribute snarky commentary. (Vijay and his wife, Pooja, both play for the Chicago team; this year there were seven married couples on that team, which is called Babymaker.) The squad my wife and I play for has four married couples. It is a rare thing in the sporting world (if you are hetero) to be able to compete at the highest level with your spouse. My wife and I have shared our absurd pursuit across the years and wherever we’ve lived: in Chicago, South Bend, Phoenix, Ann Arbor, Providence, Minneapolis, and Toronto. We’ve found games and ready-made ultimate communities in South Africa, in Italy, in Mozambique, in Zambia, in Ireland.

It was in Ireland where I experienced a highlight of my playing career. At the 2022 World Masters Ultimate Championships, in Limerick, I caught a long pass just shy of the goal, stopped my momentum, and turned to see my wife streaking past me into the end zone, her defender dusted. I put a sweet little IO backhand out on a platter, and when Ellen grabbed the score, I turned to our team’s sidelines and screamed, “That’s how you make a baby!” It was a sentence that, while arguably devoid of meaning, feels pretty fucking cool to yell at your friends.

Read the rest of the essay over at The Believer.