Ultimate Everywhere
Stretch the boundaries of the sport
Help stretch the boundaries of our sport
Every month or two, take your game to a park in a new part of town
Invite the locals to throw and play – give out ARIA discs – create new pickup games
Spread your love of the game!
(7/15/2019) LA Throwback is very happy to announce a new project, Ultimate Everywhere, in collaboration with our disc partner, ARIA Discs.
UE is a program for sharing our sport with others. We hope it will contribute, over time, to making the Ultimate community reflect the composition of the broader communities in the places we live.
The basic idea is this. Most people play Ultimate in the same place, week after week, year after year. If where you live is like where we live, Los Angeles, the places where people play are clustered in particular parts of town, and the demographic profile of the Ultimate community doesn’t match the demographics of the larger community. Simply put, Ultimate skews White, and skews privileged. (More on that below, for those who are interested.)
Ultimate Everywhere aims to get people, every month or two, to take their pickup game or team practice on the road, to a part of their town where Ultimate is not played or known much. And while there, reach out.
Pick a park, schedule your game there, and take your crew. While there, invite people who are checking it out to join you, and take along a bunch of discs to give away to people who do. Take pics and post them on social media. Let folks know when you’ll be back, and where to find games if they’re into it. Come back a month later, and ask those you gave discs to last time to bring their friends. Keep it up until a new game forms there – your sister pickup game!
Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Where are we going to get discs to give away free to strangers?” Good question!
The great folks at ARIA Discs run a 1-for-1 program for social partners designed to expand the boundaries of ultimate and get discs into the hands of people who otherwise could not or would not have a disc of their own. When you buy discs from ARIA, for every one you buy, they let you choose to which of their social partners a corresponding 1-for-1 disc is donated. This year, thanks to our LA Throwback Beach Ultimate Fest, the LA Throwback Foundation has 500 such discs that we get to share. ARIA has kindly agreed to let us use these discs for Ultimate Everywhere. Keep in mind that these discs are not for your personal use, or for your practice or pickup game. They are for you to give away to people who are not presently ultimate players but who might one day become players.
The goal is to get both discs and awareness of the sport to places where they currently are not.
The second part of the strategy is to share pictures and stories of your excursions. We’ll collect them all, and keep track of where Ultimate Everywhere spreads. One of the keys to doing it well will be the vibe you bring with you. Is it welcoming? Is it respectful? As we do this, we’ll learn a lot.
An important note on that point. The reasons for the patterns of housing, of education, and of privilege generally in this society run deep. Take housing for instance. LA is laid out as it is due to a long history of racist economic and housing practice and policy, and LA is hardly unique in that. You can read more about it here, here, here and here. But when I say history, I do not mean to suggest it is now in the past. Most of the factors that have led to these housing patterns are still with us, as surely as the housing patterns themselves that persist to this day. And as with housing, so too with education. And since most people who play or played “structured” Ultimate learned it in college, this helps explain, in part, why our sport has the patterns of overrepresentation and underrepresentation that it does.
We are not kidding ourselves into thinking that this project will or can overturn that. And it will not create change in our sport in a day, month, or year. It will take time, but we do believe it can play a constructive role, both in our sport and beyond. Again, do it with respect, and with consciousness, and then share what you’ve learned.
While we’re on the subject of learning by doing, we should mention that one thing we have learned is that it can be helpful to have pinnies so that onlookers can follow the game better. It also seems to make a good impression, and when they join in, they feel more a part of it. After your crew has done it a time or two and posted pics, you can hit up our Ultimate Community Support Fund for the funds to buy a set of pinnies to take your thing to the next level.
And oh yeah! After you’re done playing in a new part of town, take your crew for food and drink somewhere in the area. Have fun and stretch your own boundaries.
Join us!
Let’s Bring Ultimate Everywhere to Southern California!
If you’re in the Los Angeles area and would like to join us for monthly Ultimate Everywhere events, please contact us using the form below and we’ll put you on our email list to let you know when and where we’ll be doing UE. Follow us @ultimateeverywhere to find out where we’re going next.
Want to do Ultimate Everywhere in your area?
If you don’t live near Los Angeles but you want to get Ultimate Everywhere going in your area, we can provide you with Aria discs to help you to bring ultimate to communities that don’t know about it yet but would love it. Fill out the form below to request assistance and discs and we’ll contact you. When you give out ARIA discs, we ask that you give them to people who would otherwise not be able or willing to buy a disc for themselves, and in exchange that you ask them to follow us on Instagram @ultimateeverywhere (so we can keep them up to date with UE gatherings), and that you share photos of your UE games and the people to whom you give discs in new places with #ultimateeverywhere @ariadiscs!