26 SPORTS FOCUS
American Ultimate Disc League
The Frisbee was launched in 1948 by American inventor Fred Morrison. Originally called the Whirlo-Way and designed to be made of metal, Morrison’s disc was upgraded to a plastic version called the ‘Flyin-Saucer’. In 1958, Morrison sold the rights to Wham-O, which gave it the name ‘Frisbee’ (a name Morrison originally despised) after the Frisbie Pie Company, whose empty pie tins were favoured by students at Yale. And the rest is discoid history. Morrison’s flying disc generated competitive sports almost immediately, imitating golf or various field sports, and Wham-O itself did much to promote organised activity around its product. In 1967, Wham-O vice president and inventor of the ‘Frisbee’ brand name, Ed Headrick, founded the International Frisbee Association (IFA), and also helped to establish the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) to which he devoted the rest of his life. The World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF) is the international sports federation responsible for governance of flying disc games, including ultimate, disc golf, freestyle, guts and overall. The first record of ultimate being launched as a sport was in 1968 when New Jersey schoolboy Joel Silver (not the famous producer) created an after-school team. Organised university tournaments, starting with a game between Rutgers and Princeton Universities, began in 1972. Ultimate games can be played on grass, beach, sand or indoors. Grass games generally have teams of seven players; beach or indoor games, five players. The field is similar to a football pitch, 73m long with end zones 18m long. The disc may be advanced in any direction by passing to a teammate. Players can’t run with the disc. After catching a disc, the thrower ON THE TRAIL OF THE SAUCERS
DISC JOCKEY AUDL TV has streamed every single game of this season’s ultimate to try and promote the sport
homegrown streaming set-up and began to stream via Vimeo’s Livestream platform. “We started doing tutorials at our owners’ meetings, trying to help the local teams to grow their own streaming,” says DeByl. “We had this idea we would have a game of the week, Monday night football-style. We would send a full streaming team there and announcers. We hired Evan Lepler in 2015. He was announcing baseball, but was a former ultimate player. He now does all of our biggest games.” A production company, Fulcrum Media Group, was created, which is now responsible for producing all the top-level games. AUDL TV Last year, the AUDL decided to put all the remaining games onto a service called WE’VE ALSO FOUND THAT ANNOUNCERS ARE A VERY BIG PART OF THIS. YOU CAN HAVE BAD CAMERAWORK AND REALLY GOOD ANNOUNCERS AND PEOPLEWILL STILL BE PRETTY HAPPY
AUDL TV, which meant 130 games were livestreamed last season. The channel can be accessed via a monthly fee of $10, giving access to every game played across the league. The challenge now is to make sure that every ultimate team across the league – some of whom have little video production experience – is able to contribute high-quality content. “We put in a lot of work to try to get the teams’ base-level streaming up to speed,” says DeByl. “We had Evan work with the teams’ announcers. We’ve written a lot of tutorials, and we’ve met with a lot of the stream teams. This season, we’ve managed to stream every game.” He continues: “We would do a call with each stream team the week of the game to verify who the camera people were, who the announcer was and we did a stream test to verify they knew what they were doing. For a lot of it, we were already pretty happy with what they had done. A lot of teams had already been doing streams on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube.” Pooling their experience of ultimate, there were discussions about how to best shoot different recurring moments in gameplay, including the choice of lenses and the height of the camera. “We generally have a 50 high, a 50 low and two end-zone cameras. But we’ve had to narrow it down sometimes for the stream. A lot of teams just have a high 50 cam and some sort of replay cam on the field,” explains DeByl. For high-end games, the AUDL has also used drone coverage, which lends itself particularly well for a sport focused on an object that hovers. “We’ve also found that announcers are a very big part of this,” he adds. “You can have bad camera work and
has ten seconds to throw it on to someone else. Points are scored when a team catches a pass in the
other team’s end zone. The sport is recognised by the International Olympic Committee, but has yet to secure a spot in an Olympic Games. Uncommonly in sports, flying disc games of all kinds generally have no referees. The games, even at high levels, are entirely self-officiating.
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