Writer: Robert Dover
Extra Feedback: Si East
Editor: Harry Mason (he/him)
With the pandemic disrupting how we've normally organised Frisbee, there's a chance to try out some new approaches. For example, we've seen the UKU try out some different formats with their League and Cup structure. But it's worth remembering that organising Ultimate is not the exclusive domain of the UKU - there's plenty of opportunities to get Ultimate going in the local community too! I recently ran a Hat league in North London for the first time (LUSH - London Ultimate Summer Hat), and learned a lot about how to organise local frisbee in the process. In this article, I'm going to try to explain why I think it's a good idea to run your own league and give a rundown of the various formats you can use. You can read Part 2 of this series here.
Why run a local league?
There are many benefits to having an Ultimate league in your own city:
1) You won't have to travel a long way to play.
There are many fun things about the weekend tournament experience. Travel time is not one of them. Personally I find a couple of hours in the car each way painful and I can only imagine what it must be like for the dedicated folks coming down from Scotland! Being able to play structured Ultimate in your own back yard is a huge win.
2) It provides a stepping stone for players who may not have the confidence, spare time or money to commit to playing full weekend tournaments.
For newer players, going away to a tournament can be quite daunting. Do they really want to spend a whole weekend playing this crazy sport? And for some people, a whole weekend away is just not something they can commit to for a variety of reasons. When you play local you can play on a single day (and it can even be midweek during the summer or in the right venue), and go home to sleep in your own bed afterwards. That means less money spent on travel and accommodation. It's lower commitment on people's bodies, calendars and wallets!
3) It's a great way to teach newer players how to play in a low-stakes competitive environment.
Many players learn to play Ultimate at University. This is a great environment to be taught how to play! There will be lots of beginners all starting at once in the same place, and a high probability of some more experienced folks being around to teach them how it all works. But after University, picking up a disc is a bit harder. It's a daunting proposition to go along to a club when you're the only new player there. But it's difficult to find a critical mass of newer players who are all learning together, and even harder to find them alongside some experienced teachers who can show them what to do. A local league can be that place! Sprinkle those beginners in amongst the more experienced ones and watch that learning curve go.
4) You'll meet Ultimate players you wouldn't have had a chance to otherwise.
Is your club the only Ultimate show in town? In a smaller town that might be true, but I'd be willing to bet that any reasonably large city has multiple groups of people who meet to play Frisbee sometimes. Maybe there's a random pickup group in a park, maybe there's a university with a nascent team, maybe there are people who used to play but for whatever reason haven't picked up a disc recently. A league is a great way to bring these disparate groups together. Many people have told me that 'Ultimate is all about who you know' - this is your chance to get to know more people!
5) Visible Ultimate leads to more familiarity with the game.
Most big tournaments are held in big, closed off venues. That means it's not always easy for passers-by to see the sport in action. But a local league can be played in smaller, more accessible venues (maybe a town park or a local sports club), and that means people are more likely to see you playing. If all goes well, a local league is your chance to tick that 4 point Communication Spirit Score box for explaining the game to spectators! And those spectators may not start playing the game right away, but maybe the next time they see it they'll be more open to the idea of giving it a try.
OK, you've convinced me it makes sense to give it a try. What format should I use?
Let's start by assuming you have a space to play and a fixed night (or maybe nights) you can run a league. How do you structure your competition? The format you choose can have big knock-on effects on how much people enjoy it, so it's important to think carefully about how you want to go about it! I'll list all of the league structures I've seen or heard about (I'm sure this is far from exhaustive!).
- Team-based league. Sign up as a team, play matches against other teams.
+ Easy for the organiser to sort out. You take money from a small number of teams and then tell them when and where they're playing, and that's about it!
+ People get to play with their friends.
- High barrier to entry. Getting enough people to form an Ultimate team is hard!
- If you don't have evenly matched teams in your area, it may not be very fun.
- Hat series. Each week there's a mini hat tournament going on. Take whoever shows up and put them in teams and then they play!
+ Easy to adapt based on the number of people available each evening.
+ Low barrier to entry - all you have to do is show up!
- Hard to form on-pitch chemistry if you're playing with someone different every week.
- Not much sense of it being part of a wider competition.
- Plus/minus league. It's like the Hat Series, but you keep track of who plays on each team every week. Each player has their own Win-Loss record and you use this to (a) pick teams, and (b) crown an individual winner who has contributed to winning the most over the set of matches.
+ Low barrier to entry - just turn up.
+ There's something in the structure that adds a competitive edge for people who are motivated by that sort of thing.
- Keeping track of who is on which team each week can be tricky.
- Hard to form on-pitch chemistry if you're playing with someone different every week.
- Hat League. Everyone signs up at the start and then teams are assigned by the organiser. You play with that team throughout the competition, and at the end a team is crowned the winner.
+ Low barrier to entry - sign up by yourself and then get told when to be there.
+ Gives players a chance to get familiar with their teammates as the league goes on.
+ Initially a bit of work to make the teams, but after that a bit less work for the organiser who can delegate to team captains.
- Hard to balance the teams fairly, which can lead to players on weaker teams not having such a good time.
- Risk that some teams might run low on numbers if they only have a fixed pool of players to draw from.
- Draft League. Like a Hat League, but rather than teams being assigned by the organisers each team has a captain and they meet at the start of the league to make the teams via a draft.
+ Gives players a chance to get familiar with their teammates as the league goes on.
+ You can sign up as an individual, don't need to your own find a team.
+ Less work for the organiser as the captains sort out the teams for you.
- Team selection will be heavily weighted towards players the captains know, meaning that it can be less accessible if you aren't part of the organising club.
- Risk that some teams might run low on numbers if they only have a fixed pool of players to draw from.
- Have to provide a 'resume', which can be daunting for less experienced players.
- Can feel bad to be picked last.
- Parity League. Like a draft league, but more complicated! Each player is assigned a fictional 'salary' and each team a 'salary cap'. You keep track of stats from each game and adjust each player's 'salary' based on their performance. Captains have to swap players between teams in order to stay below the salary cap number, which should mean that teams become more even over time as players have to be moved between teams. (Apparently this is what they do in Brisbane).
+ The balancing mechanics should mean that in the long run you end up with very even teams.
+ Low barrier to entry - sign up by yourself and then get told when to be there.
- It's a lot of effort to keep track of stats from every game.
- Needs very committed captains to make it work.
- Having someone keeping track of every turnover can add a lot of pressure that not everyone enjoys.
Wow, that's a lot of options! How do I choose?
Some of it is personal preference. If you're running the league you're going to do a better job if it's a format you are enthused about! Don't discount your own feelings and opinions in this. But having said that, I think it's important to consider the demographics of the Ultimate-playing population in your city. To illustrate this, let me go through the decision process we made for LUSH.
Here's the UKU's map of the teams in London that are registered for the Challenge League this year:
There are an abundance of Ultimate teams in London! But as you can see from the map they are very geographically concentrated in the South, and in particular they all seem to train in the same park - Clapham Common. But my club (Curve) is based in the North of London, where there are comparatively few organised teams. So it didn't feel like a Team based league was really an option in North London. Having said that, there are several nearby pickup groups that play locally but don't really send teams to tournaments or participate in Challenge League. We also had a surge in new players looking to try a new sport in the aftermath of lockdown, so it felt appropriate to try to aim the league at development rather than at creating a high level competitive atmosphere. We felt that we could use LUSH to give these players a chance to try playing at a level slightly higher than pickup, while giving more experienced players a chance to play some fun, low stakes Ultimate.
For these reasons, we ended up choosing the Hat League structure. The theory was that new players would get to play with and learn from the same faces each week, and that in general teams would develop chemistry and possibly even make some new friends along the way! In hindsight, I think it was the right choice for us. What you decide will depend on who plays Ultimate in your city and what they want!
Right, so how do I actually go about running the league?
There’s plenty of things to think about to make a local league a success. Too much, in fact, for this already long article! Read Part 2 of this series here, with a list of things to consider when planning and administrating your league.
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