Today I went to the first Ultimate Frisbee club meeting of the year. I had a great experience, and would like to briefly share some more about it for those that don’t know about the club. 

Ultimate Frisbee club is a club where you… play Ultimate Frisbee! The club typically meets a few times a month after school until 4:00 or so. If you’ve never played Ultimate Frisbee before, don’t worry! I hadn’t either. The club is very beginner-friendly. At the start of the first meeting, many of us didn’t even know how to throw a frisbee. However, with some advice from the club’s sponsor Mr. O’Donnell, as well as by watching other students, we were able to slowly get the hang of it. By the end of practice, you could tell that everyone had gotten noticeably more consistent with their throws. Additionally, the game itself is easy to learn. It’s kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of other sports, but the rules are simple and Mr. O’Donnell is great at explaining everything. 

What if you’ve never played a sport before though or aren’t “athletic”? Well, Ultimate Frisbee club has you covered there too. Don’t get me wrong, playing is definitely a workout. Thankfully though, the environment isn’t at all competitive. Everyone’s kind of just there to have fun. Nobody’s going to yell at you if you run out of breath, shank a throw, or miss a catch (And trust me, I frequently did all of those things). The nature of the game also makes it so that you can make it as physically taxing as you’d like. Usually during games each team cycles through subs in order to relieve the players. Yeah, you have to do some running, but you can always get a break if you need one. This makes it so that people of any level of fitness can get involved and slowly build up their stamina over time. Plus, the matches are only 20 minutes long, with two ten-minute halves, so you don’t have to exert yourself over a long period of time. One additional note- the sport is explicitly non-contact, meaning you don’t need to worry about your opponents constantly overpowering you or shoving you around. 

As for the primary reason why I’m making this article, the club needs more members! This is the type of club that works better the more people are involved (I’ve heard that the one at the Junior High was one of the largest clubs in the school before COVID shut everything down). Having a high turnout would allow us to run full 7v7 games with plenty of subs, as well as allow us to potentially have multiple games going at once. In addition, if some of the members were interested in playing more competitively, we could have a group of players join a league and face off against other schools. Overall, having more members would also help to ensure that the club could consistently have meetings. Joining the club by no means requires you to attend every practice, but if we could get a ton of people to join, there could always be like 20 kids per practice. 

So, if you’re looking to have fun, exercise, make new friends, and have an activity for your college applications, join the Ultimate Frisbee club! For those who are interested in learning more, contact Mr. O’Donnell to join the google classroom.