This is a little different to my usual work, but it’s something I’ve been reflecting on for a while. I’m quite nervous about stepping outside my lane.
And apologies for the clickbaity title but I couldn’t resist the travel pun. Really what I’m talking about here is the centralisation of competitive play.
What does this mean? Well, by centralisation of competitive play I mean gathering teams from different points to compete at a single location.
Ultimate has always been more prone to this than other sports I’m involved with because the competitive life of the sport has revolved around tournaments for as long as I know.
The explanation for this as I understood it was as a minority sport teams were few and far away from each other so tournaments made sense as a way for these teams to meet up and play games. My understanding was also that as the sport grew that the need for tournaments would reduce because more localised play would be possible, but it seems like the opposite is happening. The sport is growing, there are more teams, but teams still don’t play local opposition so everyone travels for tournaments. And rather than travelling to the most local tournament as used to happen teams are now being more selective of the type of experience they want so are travelling further.
Why do I have a problem with this? Lots of reasons, but there’s two big ones and one small one I want to discuss.
The climate
The Ultimate community is one that is in general quite progressive on social issues (painting with a massive brush here I understand), but one glaring blindspot is climate issues.
Ultimate loves nothing more than creating new ways for players to have to travel more and for longer distances. This can be seen in the proliferation of world and continental championships taking place - all the different age groups, grass, beach, indoor adds up to a lot. But also this year we have worlds with teams deciding to travel increased distances to prepare - USA and Canada flying to Europe to play Windmill to prepare for Worlds as an example. We also have a new European season structure which replaces regional events with centralised ones.
This never seems to come up in discussions about season plans for players, teams or organising bodies. Some players and tournaments do try to mitigate the damage by contributing to carbon offset schemes. But you still could do that and not travel as much.
Listen - I’m not a saint. Far from it. None of this is an attack on anyone. I love the tournament experience too! It’s super fun. I get it. It’s a structural issue with the organisation of the sport. You love the sport and want to play it, and to do that you gotta go to tournaments. I understand.
But should we pare back a little? I feel like we’re at the point of excess. Am I just an old man?
(and would it help if I told you - in my capacity as a self-appointed expert on improving performance - that you DON’T need to always play against the most competitive teams to improve? If you believe the common refrain that the only way to improve is by playing against better players then I’m freeing you from that thought now.)
The cost
All that travel is expensive. That puts up barriers.
a. Exclusivity
If a season costs a large amount of money, who can play and who does it exclude? Well, it’s simple: only the players that can afford it can play. Sure: at the very elite levels of an amateur sport there’s no way around the cost - the best players in the world will have to travel to play each other. But it should be possible for everyone else to have a fulfilling competitive experience in the sport without being wealthy or putting life plans on hold to afford it. I’m not really sure that’s true right now.
b. Opportunity costs
There’s two opportunity costs that I see:
i. There’s the actual monetary opportunity cost. There’s a LOT of money being spent on ultimate by players every year and almost none of it is going into developing the infrastructure of the sport. It’s mostly going to airlines and hotels.
To put this into perspective the total annual budget of the Irish Flying Disc Association is less than the budget of any of the international teams it sends to tournaments, of which there are in the region of 5-10 every single year. That’s separate to the competitive club teams that spend a similar amount.
In danger of a rant here, but the membership for the IFDA is €25 per year and that hasn’t changed since around 2009. There are comfortably over 100 players (that’s conservative) in Ireland that spend at least €1000 on ultimate every year. Yet there’s huge sensitivity around any suggestion to raise memberships.
Now: naturally it doesn’t mean that if players stopped going to tournaments that hundreds of thousands of euros would be donated to the IFDA! I do understand players are much happier to pay money that directly benefits themselves. But it doesn’t help when you want to ask for money for development, or coaching, or streaming that players are already spending so much just getting to tournaments.
ii. the opportunity cost to your local scene.
If a large number from your community are prioritising their money and their time travelling to tournaments, there is consequently going to be fewer opportunities for local teams to play each other. That feeds a self-perpetuating cycle where you feel there isn’t local opportunities so you need to travel for tournaments, so you’re not as available for local opportunities…
Rosters
All this travel usually means teams feel under pressure to have larger rosters. There is a noticeable trend over the past few years for roster inflation - even in USAU where there are caps on rosters there are increasingly teams adding large numbers of practice players.
This really isn’t the biggest issue in the world but I really don’t like big rosters so I just wanted to say it. I don’t believe they are good for the players - it’s logistically impossible to give all players the same opportunity so the more players you have the fewer opportunities everyone gets. I really don’t ever want to have more players on a team than I feel I can honestly give proper opportunities to.
It’s also not good for your community - if everyone plays for the same team then it’s hardly surprisingly you don’t have any competition locally!
I’d be very interested to hear other’s thoughts on this. I’m certainly no expert, and coming from a smaller community that’s on an island (so we have to fly to tournaments all the time!) it is very possible that these problems are worse here than everywhere else.
Hey Ian,
I really appreciate you writing this up as I definitely feel the same way. I touched on this super briefly as well in a post I wrote about my own frisbee career:
https://someflow.substack.com/p/my-ultimate-frisbee-journey
> "I felt—and still feel—awkward about the idea of traveling to play frisbee. I don't own a car, partly out of a desire to do right by our environment. I would never travel to another city to play basketball or soccer, so doing lots of travel just to play frisbee has always felt a little off to me."
My reasons are pretty much the same as yours — environment and money — so I really appreciate that you've written up a longer version.
My one other travel-related comment that I don't think you touched on: I live in a small city where the best players mostly play for club teams an ~hour away in a larger city, so there's an opportunity cost (and environmental cost) there as well — an extra 2+ hours of driving every time you go to practice. If all the best players stayed here, we could put together a pretty strong team and save hundreds of person-hours on practice commutes.
I've struggled with this a lot myself. The biggest thing that I've felt that pushes toward this structure from the individual level (ignoring larger organizational decisions that support it) is folks prioritizing being on the best team that they can be on over say prioritizing smaller rosters, less travel, and more local competition.
My USA experience is from high school in Massachusetts, YCC in Massachusetts, a nationally competitive Division 3 college team in New England, club ultimate in Wisconsin, and UFA in the central division.
High school was the best and most enjoyable format by far.