Spirit Of the Game

Spirit of the Game is one of the core elements in flying disc sports. It is similar to fair play and sportsmanship, but there is a much higher emphasis put on it in Ultimate. It is summarised in this preamble to the rules of play:

“All players are responsible for administering and adhering to the rules. Ultimate relies upon a Spirit of the Game that places the responsibility for fair play on every player. It is trusted that no player will intentionally break the rules; thus there are no harsh penalties for breaches, but rather a method for resuming play in a manner which simulates what would most likely have occurred had there been no breach. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but should never sacrifice the mutual respect between players, adherence to the agreed-upon rules of the game, or the basic joy of play.”

Actions such as intentional fouling, cheating, dangerous plays, disrespectful conversations, and other ‘win at all costs’ behaviour are contrary to the Spirit of the Game. Often a player is in a position where it is to his/her advantage to foul or commit some violation, but that player is morally bound to abide by the rules. The integrity of the sport depends on each player’s responsibility to uphold Spirit of the Game, and this responsibility should not be taken lightly.

As Ultimate is a self-refereed sport, maintaining Spirit of the Game is essential. Players must know the rules, be fair-minded and truthful, explain their viewpoint clearly and briefly, allow opponents a reasonable chance to speak and resolve disputes as quickly as possible, using respectful language.

Examples of Good Spirit

  • Informing a team-mate if you think they have made a wrong or unnecessary call or caused a foul or violation
  • Retracting a call when you no longer believe the call was necessary
  • Complimenting an opponent for good play or spirit
  • Introducing yourself to your opponent
  • Reacting calmly towards disagreement or provocation
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Video Explainers

Spirit Rules & Scoring

In a self-refereed sport such as Ultimate it is important to continuously teach and measure Spirit of the Game. For this reason a Spirit Scoring system was developed.

Directly after a game, players rate the other team, as well as their own team, on the five fundamentals of the sport:

  1. Did they know and abide by the rules?
  2. Did they avoid body contact?
  3. Were they fair-minded?
  4. Did they show self-control and a positive attitude?
  5. Did they communicate properly and respectfully?

How does Spirit scoring and management work?

Spirit Scoring is especially recommended for leagues and larger tournaments. In these events a team’s Spirit Captain should be responsible for collecting Spirit Scores and giving them to the Spirit Director. The Spirit Director reviews the scores for possible issues and determines what team has the highest score to be to be awarded the Spirit of the Game prize.

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Committee

Wolfgang Maehr (SGP)

Chair, SOTG Committee

After his first game of Ultimate in 1999 and struggling to organise local games, Wolf decided to make the availability of Ultimate one of the factors in his choice of location. Since 2004 he has played Ultimate in Europe (Sweden, Switzerland, Norway) and in Asia (India, Singapore) and been fortunate to be able to participate in tournaments at across the globe at all levels from fun tourneys to world championships. The community is what makes Ultimate special and SOTG is what creates the community. Wolf's views on SOTG had been reinforced by his time involved in building India's Ultimate community: Seeing how Ultimate and SOTG more than any sport teach (young) minds about conflict resolution, responsibility and not winning at all cost inspires how Ultimate can change mindsets, behaviour and thus society for a better. He's been an active member for the SOTG committee since 2018, aside from his involvement in Beach Ultimate and organising teams. His goal is to make sure that SOTG survives as an integral and reliable part of the game as the sport gets more popular and more professional. Professionally, Wolf is working as a product, system and organisations architect tackling the exciting challenges and opportunities that a globalised and digitalized world creates. He graduated a software architect from Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences (AUT) and an interaction designer from Chalmers University of Technology (SWE).

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Chihiro Ono (JPN)

Chihiro "Senco" Ono started Ultimate in 2001 at University of Tokyo. Since her early stage she has been into Ultimate rules and loved to discuss on and off the field. In 2006 she met a diverse pick up community called "Tokyo Ultimate", which gradually formed itself into IKU, a mixed club team. IKU played WUCC 2010 in Prague. Senco also played WMUCC 2018 in Winnipeg, where she captained a master mixed team Wasabi and won Spirit Award. It was one of the most memorable tournaments for her and she started sharing the knowledge and experience in Japan Ultimate community. Around the same timing she founded JFDA SOTG Committee and joined WFDF SOTG Committee as well. She was also a Game Advisor and served at WU24 2019 in Heidelberg.

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Kate Kingery (USA)

Kate started playing ultimate in college and has been playing and coaching ever since. She has had the honor of competing nationally and internationally over the past two decades. She values Spirit of the Game and hopes to find ways to share her passion through her work on this committee.

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Guo Yang (CHN)

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Samir El Ajraoui (MOR)

Samir is a great fan of flying disc sports, more famous as " SAM SOTG '', he started playing ultimate in 2013 in Morocco. He is the founder of the club ULTIMATE CASABLANCA of which he is a coach and player. In 2015 he was champion of the first ultimate tournament organized in Morocco, in July of the same year he organized the first Hat tournament in the city of Casablanca, and began to participate in tournaments in Spain and Portugal, 2017 he participated in the WCBU in France with the UAE GrandMaster team. Sam has participated in the organization of several local and regional tournaments and has volunteered to run several clinics for the benefit of young people in order to popularize the practice of disc flying sports in several villages. Samir is currently a volunteer member of the SOTG committee and has the goal of playing ultimate on all five continents. In July 2022 Sam flew to Atlanta, USA for a tournament and a game against the German national team that was preparing for the 2022 World Games. He only has Australia and Asia left, to be continued

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Anna Grunewald (GER)

Anna Grünewald is a 25-year-old Ultimate Player from Germany. She is a member of the Spirit Committee of the European Ultimate Federation (EUF). Her home team is Next Generation from Nuremberg. The team is playing in the first league of the mixed division. Besides Ultimate, she is an engineer, working as a project manager for a meter company.

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