I gingerly walked back from Campus South Athletic Field with bruised knees and a pair of battered cleats on a Tuesday evening. For the last three hours, a team of 20 or so teammates had drilled complex offensive sets and defensive schemes while simultaneously concentrating on perfecting footwork and timing. An observer watching such a practice might have assumed that this group of guys was playing more commonly recognized sports, such soccer or football—that is, until a Frisbee streaked through the night air, cutting through 15-mile-per-hour winds into the hands of the receiver. As I reflect on three years of playing Ultimate Frisbee on UChicago’s competitive team, I find our culture mirrors the values of academic rigor and tradition ingrained in the University.
Ultimate Frisbee is a team sport where the main objective is throwing and catching a plastic disc in the opponent’s endzone. It is non-contact and self-officiated, and college teams commonly don names and uniforms disaffiliated from their university. With players described by a former Maroon reporter as “victim to characterization as glassy-eyed slackers,” Ultimate Frisbee has long been a mainstay of counterculture, existing at the margins of popularity. One would not expect the hardworking, academically focused UChicagoan to spend their time doing something seemingly silly and unproductive. Ultimate players are still the first to populate the quad on a sunny day and are often found sweating during intramural games to get our annual T-shirts. However, the structure of Ultimate requires strategy and discipline, and the sport brings out qualities synonymous with the spirit of our institution.
UChicago’s Ultimate players flex our academic muscles most visibly in our team names: Fission (men), Supernova (women), and Half Life (developmental). During weekend tournaments, it’s commonplace to see players finishing a problem set or studying for a midterm after a game. Finding challenging competition means long drives to destinations as far as Mabank, Texas, and Tallahassee, Florida. During these car rides students taking the Core Curriculum meet seasoned Ph.D. candidates in immunology and physics, nerding out together on topics like the angular momentum of a Frisbee disc. When the intellectual curiosities dwindle, we fall back on games like “My Cow,” in which you have to spot and claim as many cows as possible.
We also cling onto traditions that feel as zany, brilliant, and esoteric as Kuvia and Scav. For one, we can and do sing. Our men’s team, Chicago Fission, has a carousel of scientifically oriented chants (“U-two-three-eight, chain reaction, chain reaction”). We even have a physics quiz (come to our games to figure out what this is)! Another chant is “Walk sign, Lake Park; walk sign, 55th Street,” which references the intersection many of us cross on the way to class. Game timeouts are split between strategy and belting out “Home on the Range” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” During our Chicago Jeopardy night, rookies had to identify all of the alumni in a video. Those same alumni came to watch us play at the last tournament of the season. We end tournaments with a “shoutout circle,” which gives us a space to highlight one another’s gameplay. Our huddles at the end of practice always end the same way: “Fission on three, best friends on five.”
We ended our season this April at the Great Lakes D-I Regionals tournament, where only the winner goes to Nationals. Each of our past three seasons have ended in heartbreak at this tournament: a two-point loss to the eventual winners, a two-point loss in the semifinals, and a loss on universe point (our terminology for a “winner-takes-all” scenario) with our two best players injured. Every freak injury and soul-crushing loss felt like an insult to the hard work we had put into an endeavor few can appreciate. In the most UChicago way, we focused too much on past results rather than celebrating the team and players who had made their mark on the program.
The Fission team this year sang the same tune once again: injuries plagued our top end, and we came up short to the eventual winners. As I and the 14 other players in the Class of 2026 stepped off the field on Sunday, though, the feelings were different. What we’ll remember in 10 years isn’t the missed throw, blown coverage, or results of coming up short once again; we will remember the three-hour practices in 30-degree weather, Fourth Meal shenanigans, and amazing trash talk to our opponents. As I graduate with a class of fourth-years who built their entire college experience around Frisbee, I am appreciative of how the sport became the vehicle to demonstrate how disciplined we are and how committed we are to each other. We will continue to field comments like, “Is that the same as disc golf?” or “I play that with my dog,” because, ultimately, the game was worthy of our time.
Derek Hsu is a fourth-year in the College and a former deputy News editor for the Maroon.
