All About Frisbee
I realized while I tend to blog a lot about my life on the frisbee field, everyone might not understand the rules and thus appreciate how AWESOME ultimate frisbee truly is. The rules took me a while to understand (and they are constantly changing, which isn’t exactly helpful) but once you get it, the sport becomes so much more fun. So here’s an elementary explanation of the most important rules. Let’s start with the basics.
How to Score: Catch the frisbee in the endzone. The frisbee field is set up just like a football field, and after a team scores, they switch end zones to keep it even.
Defense: There are two main defensive strategies: man and zone. In man, everyone picks one person that they stick with the whole time. If your person catches the frisbee, you say “stall one two three..” until you reach ten. Essentially your person has ten seconds to throw it to another person, or else it’s a turn (aka your team gets the frisbee). Zone is more complicated since everyone has to be talking to each other to know what’s happening, but if run correctly, it can be very effective. Basically everyone is assigned an area of the field to cover.
Offense: There are also two main offense strategies used: vertical and horizontal. In vert, there are two handlers who touch the disc (frisbee) the most. They throw to each other so that they don’t hold it for ten seconds. The rest of the team is in a line (stack) and they make cuts from the back of the stack, trying to get the disc. In horizontal, there are three handlers and the four people standing parallel to them, cutting and trying to get the disc. This is much less methodical and requires more field awareness and practice.
A point normally starts by the team who just scored throwing from their endzone line a huck, where you essentially throw the disc as far as you can (like a punt for football). The other team picks the disc up on offense and the point begins! Games can be played to anywhere between 11 and 15 points depending on time. Probably my two favorite things about frisbee are the fact that there aren’t referees, so people are honest and that we get to play against schools from all over.
I hope this made some sense and helped you understand frisbee more. I have truly grown to love this sport. The Women’s team at Vandy has two more tournaments this semester and I’m super excited to play more ultimate! And if you are so intrigued as to want to see this in action here’s a video of some really good college teams playing: Ultimate Frisbee 2011 College Championships.