More Haiku From Frank

This common illegal play is probably the biggest impediment in bringing the game to respectability

Jul 10, 2024

I haven’t watched a point of the UFA this year (for obvious reasons), but this clip came across my feed the other day and I could help to comment.

In this play, Alex Atkins changes his pivot foot, resulting in an approximate 36” traveling violation.

Now, I don’t know Alex, wouldn’t recognize him if he walked past me down the street so this isn’t personal, but this simply is not a legal play. It’s grotesque. And it’s mediocre Ultimate.

If anyone on the rules committee(s) understood the dead-ball catastrophe, they’d shut this cheating down immediately. Unfortunately, no one seems to understand.

Let me explain. What Alex did here on a dead-ball stoppage, is no different from a pitcher in baseball taking his foot off the rubber and continuing his pitch. In baseball they call it a balk but in Ultimate Frisbee, Evan Lepler calls it the play of the year.

Oh, and guess what, in Ultimate Frisbee, it’s a dead-ball stoppage after every reception. This is always illegal.

From what I hear, the UPA literally made a six inch traveling violation like this legal this year. Complete morons.

And you want the game to get respect? Are you being serious about that? How is a marker supposed to play defense on a player who commits a 36” travel? Impossible.

The entire basis for the rules of ultimate are oriented around a dead-ball paradigm. Every single rule.

You can’t just allow players to break the most central philosophical tenet of the game’s ruleset on virtually every throw. It’s hideous. It’s boorish. It’s stale. It’s stagnant. Where are innovations going to come from when all you have to do is cheat to win?

Learn to play the fucking game without cheating if you want to consider yourself an elite player. Learn to shred for God’s sake.

Look, we all want the same thing.

We all want to tell people about Ultimate Frisbee and have them know what the hell we are talking about instead of asking us the same stupid old questions about dogs and baskets.

There’s a reason nobody knows what Ultimate Frisbee is after almost 60 years.

Obviously, I don’t expect anyone to stop cheating like this. That’s asking too much.

But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to overhaul the rules to remove the dead-ball catastrophe so we can bring the game to respectability.

Comments from the Youtube video (and my responses)

I’ll continue to cut and paste the YouTube comments here. The bottom line is very simple:

Ultimate gets no respect. You know it, I know it and the whole community knows it.
Ordinarily, this might seem no different than a rolling stop at a 4-way stop sign in rural America at midnight—But within the Dead-Ball paradigm, this is a complete violation of the foundational philosophy. Either get rid of the dead-ball rules (which are nearly all of the rules) or get rid of this cheating.
100% of Alex’s weight was on his right foot when he threw. 💯Stop saying the travel was only a few inches. HE SWITCHED HIS PIVOT FOOT.

Interesting comment here (below). He’s basically saying that since rampant cheating has gone on for over a generation, and that the current generation has grown up cheating, now they’ve all condoned it “communally”. “Yeah Frank, we’ve been cheating so long that we finally said, ‘fuck it, let’s just legalize it’ and move on.”