Ultimate Frisbee Competition at Tor Leisure 10th and 11th September 2011

I watched some of the Ultimate Frisbee competition that took place at the Glastonbury Tor Leisure Centre today (and yesterday), as I came across the games perchance while strolling along the Street Road.

Apparently the sport was invented in 1969 and the competition at Tor Leisure has been running for at least years, although this is the first I'd heard of it, as it doesn't appeared to have been very well publicised, and there weren't a great deal of non-participating spectators.  Perhaps I only hung around because there's a bar, and when the sun shines it's nice to be outside with a pint of cider, but I digress.   As I started watching I'd no real idea of the rules or anything useful like that, although after onlooking for just an hour the rules seemed quite simple to understand, even for a bumpkin like me.

For this competition it seems that there were a total of 32 teams with such names as Team Flange; Mild Mannered Janitors, Nice Bristols, Reservoir Discs, Super Mannschaft and Choke Hazzard.

The matches were played on rectangular pitches of which I think there were 6 marked out today.  Each team could field 7 players at any one time with each game lasting 50 minutes (or up to 13 points) and the aim was to get the frisbee into the endzone of the opposing team.  The team that achieved this the most in the game was the winner.  

Ultimate is quite a fast flowing game, that requires speed, agility and endurance and appears to combine elements of American football and netball.  It is also a non-contact sport in which players aren't allowed to run with the frisbee and have 10 seconds to throw it once they've received it.  Most surprisingly I found that the game is actually self-refereed with members of the participating teams calling judgment on their own fouls, yet despite this I saw no major disagreements between the teams who seemed to respect each other, and there was a great deal of camaraderie between them all.  At times it got quite chaotic with bodies flying everywhere but it was quite good natured throughout.

Unfortunately I've no idea who ultimately won the competition, as I had to leave before the event finished (too much cider can have an adverse affect sometimes), and from what I can tell this is probably the last time it will be held at the Tor which seems a shame as the people playing seemed to be a good natured, friendly bunch who I can't imagine caused any trouble over the weekend.