A Global Sport

by Xtehn Titcomb

Yo Huddle Readers,

My experience with global Ultimate partially revolves around the local tournaments I've attended in Italy, Germany, Canada, China, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States, but mostly from the international tournaments I've attended in Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Canada, and the US. At each of these latter tournaments, I was surrounded by teams and players from all over the world, and learned a thing or two about Ultimate outside of the USA.

First of all, we're dealing with smaller bodies of players. This means fewer teams, smaller tournaments, and much tighter communities. Though, the effect of these attributes depends hugely on the geography and culture of the given country. I mean, there are more teams in Switzerland than in Russia. In the same vein, the few teams in Italy have access to more teams and tournaments than the many teams in Australia.

Every country has a totally different composition of youth/university/adult players. In some countries, sports at the college level are an afterthought unless a student is attending a sports university. In some countries, there are entire leagues devoted to high school and college teams. This translates to incredibly different goals for teams and organizations, and incredibly different mindsets on what makes Ultimate fun to play.

There is a lot more size and diversity than people think. There are thousands-big leagues of youth players in the Southeast Asia. There are beach Ultimate clinics in Italy. Though no one hears about them, there are annual Club Championships and College Championships in countries around the world. Because Ultimate is so young and small across the globe, there are very few avenues for finding out about what goes on in other countries.

There are some amazing things just taking root.

Xtehn Titcomb is a University of Chicago alum and currently plays for and captains Seattle's Voodoo. He is also the co-founder of Five Ultimate with his four brothers and sisters.