It's a mix of netball, NFL and touch football. It's fast, athletically demanding, and famously self-refereed, where players collectively agree to adhere to the "spirit of the game" rather than rely on an independent arbiter.
Ultimate Frisbee was born around the middle of the 20th Century when college students at the United States arts school Middlebury College developed a pastime of tossing the pie and cake tin lids of Frisbie's Pie Company. By 1957, the Wham-O toy company had picked up the rights to a plastic flying disc design, and by the mid- to late-960s, Jared Kass and a few students at Amherst College had devised the rules for a game.
The sport has since spread worldwide, and according to the national association for the sport, there were almost 3000 players on the books in NSW last year.
Frisbee is big. And it's getting bigger (state numbers have grown by a few hundred annually since the COVID pandemic).
Luke Prosser, who has been playing in the local league for the past eight years, had tried his hand at a handful of sports growing up before he found himself roped into a social game on a Wednesday night around the time he turned 15.
He had been a soccer player for about 10 years, played baseball for a season, and tried volleyball, but Frisbee ultimately stuck.
"I had a mate from high school who asked if I wanted to come and play frisbee," he said, "He had been playing with his dad, and I said yeah, for sure.
"I've been hooked on it ever since."
Prosser, who has been balancing his sport with retail work while he navigates open foundation studies, is bound for Portugal to represent Australia at the world championships for beach frisbee in October. It will be his third representative trip abroad; he has been training on Newcastle Beach.
The sport is typically played in a seven-a-side format on a grass field slightly narrower than a standard football pitch. As in netball, players can't run with the Frisbee but work it up the field as a team and score (like the NFL) by catching the disc in the end zone. On the beach, everything becomes harder.
"Playing on the beach is a bit of a different beast," Prosser said, "You feel slower, you can't jump all that high.
"It becomes more about how smart you can be with your cuts; it's more of a thrower's game."
The Portugal championships will be the first of their kind in the beach code. In 2022, Prosser travelled to the US to play in the World Ultimate Championships, where the local competitive team - the aptly named Pie Wagons - had secured a spot and saw the quality of the competition on the world stage. Seeing how the competition will shape up in the new format will be somewhat of a mystery until the team arrives in Portimao to contest the title.
Billed as the "creme de la creme of Beach Ultimate", the week-long contest will include teams from Europe, the Americas, and Africa who had qualified in their respective national codes.
Organisers are expecting as many as 2000 players from over 30 countries to converge on the beaches of Praia da Rocha from October 14, competing across three divisions.
The beach format condenses the teams to five-a-side on a 45-by-25 metre field capped by 15-metre end zones. On average, a player can expect to run a cumulative five kilometres in an intense offensive-defensive match.
COVID was a kick in the shins, as it was for all sports, but since then, the local scene has been on the rise with numbers enough to make up a pair of divisions, as well as a university and women's side, and socials which met of a Wednesday.
The code has been recognised by the Australian Sports Commission and, in 2015, was acknowledged by the International Olympic Committee.
