Introduction to Ultimate Frisbee for Beginners by Dominick Smyth

Quick Introduction: What is Ultimate?

Ultimate is a team sport played with a flying disc. It is played on a rectangular field, with an end zone at each end. The objective of each team is to score a goal by having a player catch a pass in the end zone that they are attacking. When in possession of the disc, throwers must stay on one spot (they are allowed to turn around), but may pass the disc in any direction to any team-mate. Any time a pass is incomplete, a turnover occurs, and the other team shall take possession and attempt to score in the opposite end zone.

Ultimate is self-refereed and non-contact. The ‘Spirit of the Game’ guides how players referee the game and conduct themselves on the field; our guide to Self-refereeing & Spirit of the Game will give you a good overview.

Guide to Ultimate for Beginners

With our introduction to ultimate frisbee for beginners, we’ll guide you through everything you need to know to get started. We’ve also got a series of tutorial videos that will teach you the basics of How to throw a disc and How to catch a disc. So whether you’re a budding coach with little knowledge of ultimate, or if you’re keen to start playing yourself, you’ll find everything you need right here to learn the skills you’ll need to get a game going, plus loads of recommendations for fun games that will help you to learn key game concepts.

Lesson Plans

Each lesson is designed to help beginners develop skills and knowledge of ultimate. They can be repeated as needed to give participants time to learn and can be supplemented with a warm up of the coaches choice as well as additional, unrestricted, game time to finish where players can experiment and guide their own learning.

While the initial lessons use a simplified rule set, including a reduced pitch size, as players ability and understanding of all aspects of play increase, so should the level of rules application and size of pitch used.

A Quick Overview of “What is Ultimate?”

Here’s a great little video that gives an overview of Ultimate:

With our throwing tutorials, you'll be playing in no time!

Click the link to the bottom to go to the first section of our guide, or use the menu on the right to jump straight to a particular section.

Note: this chapter wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of Nick Sampson, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.