This November will mark the 50th anniversary of the first-ever collegiate match of Ultimate Frisbee. Gritty Rutgers defeated the Princeton Tigers 29-27 on November 6, 1972, just four years after a young innovative high schooler, Joel Silver, shared his vision for the brand new sport at his high school in Maplewood, New Jersey. On May 27th, 2022, our very own Fieldston birds of prey will flock from the Nest, located just 32.9 miles away from Silver’s Columbia High School where the sport was born, to the State Ultimate Frisbee championships. But if you ask around the Fieldston campus, most people believe that our school’s spring sports have already concluded. The Eagles’ Ultimate Frisbee squad flies under the radar; few students attend their matches or know even the first thing about the sport.
This doesn’t ruffle the feathers of Eagles’ head coach Vincent Drybala one bit. Drybala, who started coaching the team in 2004, took a two year break when he moved on to other pursuits, then returned in 2010 and has been coaching the team ever since. He isn’t fazed by the lack of support and appreciation on campus for his team’s achievements.
“We play in a very unique league,” he states. “Our games tend to be off campus, or at Van Cortlandt park; we rarely play games here at school. I used to get really frustrated at the lack of practice space here, but then the team actually outgrew the practice spaces here. We go down to Van Cortlandt park and we need three fields sometimes. Which we don’t have here. But I like to think of the difference between problems and complications.”
While it might be a complication that games are not played on campus where fans can easily unite, Drybala does not consider this a major problem. Nor does junior player Bernie Waldman, although he does sometimes wish more students showed support at games. Says Waldman, “I do agree that we play for ourselves and that we bring our own energy to games, but I do think that it would be great for more students to come see Ultimate games. Frisbee is a great spectator sport, and I think people would enjoy watching it, and we can always use more energy on the field. I also think the reason so few people come is that our games are always in Van Cortlandt or farther. It would be great if we sometimes got to use our home fields, and this would also bring a lot more people to the games.”
Drybala’s and Waldman’s passion for Ultimate Frisbee is heartwarming, and goes far beyond winning and losing. Drybala shares: “This was a sport I gravitated to because of how it’s played and the people who tend to play it, and I also happen to be kinda good at it, and I think that this school’s ethos and mission lines up with that of the sport. It’s a little quirky, it’s got sort of a moral center to it, an ideal about how it should be and it doesn’t always meet that, but at the end of the day I’d rather have something with an ideal which is beyond what the final score says about the quality of your team.”
“Quirky” is a fitting word for a sport that originated because of a pie pan. That’s right, a pie pan. In the early 20th century, students at Yale University enjoyed the delicious pies from the Frisbee Pie Company near campus. After they finished the treats, they tossed around the metal tin that the pies sat on. According to the World Flying Disc Federation, in 1948, the first-ever plastic disc was invented by Fred Morrison. In 1951 the Wham-O Toy Company was the first team to mass produce Morrison’s creation. Wham-O called this contraption the “Pluto Platter.” Just one year after the Frisbee Pie Company shut down, Wham-O changed the name of its new possession to the now-beloved “Frisbee.” Whether this plastic disc was called the “Pluto Platter” or the “Frisbee,” one thing we know for sure is it’s a whole lot safer than getting hit with a tin pan to the head.
It’s also clear that being “quirky” doesn’t mean being casual. Drybala and his squad are heading off to states May 27 with high hopes after a successful regular season and a disappointing two-year absence because of COVID. Coach Drybala stresses “It would mean a whole hell of a lot (to win a championship.) We’ve been in the state finals I think 7 or 8 times in my life and lost all but one. We play teams that come from public schools with over 3000 kids who play year round, and we’re a school of 600 that plays one season, and we have these games go down to the wire against teams that play a hell of a lot more than we do…that’s the bar we have to clear. I always want to win every year, it’s that simple.”
Drybala is not alone in thinking this sport is special. Ultimate Frisbee boasts about 130,000 players across 30 countries worldwide. As for the sport’s moral center that Drybala identifies as a strong match for ECFS’s values, Waldman takes the same view: “One of my favorite things about Ultimate Frisbee,” he says, “is its culture of honesty and integrity, which I do think mirrors the values of Fieldston a lot. There are no referees in frisbee, so when there’s a foul called or a play is contested, it’s left to the players to talk it out and decide on how to go forward. Those discussions aren’t about trying to get away with as much as you can, they’re about figuring out what actually happened and whether or not that is allowed in the rules. I think this culture matches up really well with Fieldston’s, since we emphasize ethics and integrity so much here in the classroom as well as on the field.”
Fieldston’s Ultimate Frisbee teams will take its skills, its morals and the history of the sport with them as they attempt to secure the sweetest victory of all this spring: a championship. Perhaps even sweeter than a Frisbee Pie.
