The Ultimate Frisbee community at Monarch is one that has always stood out. Although it’s not talked about as much as soccer and doesn’t get the same crowd as football, its unique rules and the valuable connections between Ultimate players, teams, and coaches make it a life-changing sport.

Since Ultimate Frisbee is a club sport and not a CHSAA sport, there’s a community built into it that not many other sports have.

“No one hates each other,” Cailin Kennedy ‘24 said. “Everyone knows each other and is friends with one another. We’re all very encouraging.”

This community expands beyond Monarch to connect schools from all over.

“We have an outside-of-the-school community,” Kennedy said. “For example, after the Marshall Fire, a bunch of other schools started donating and raising money for people on my team who lost their houses, jerseys, cleats, and discs so that they could replace them.”

While the main focus of any sport is to win, the Ultimate Frisbee community likes to highlight a different goal: having fun.

“Coaches emphasize players working hard in practice so that they can execute what they’ve worked on in games,” Coach Finlay Waugh said. “When the competition is not as strong, then the wins come out of that, and that’s what makes it fun.”

“My coaches are very positive. They want me to get better and build skills, but they do it in a way where it’s not demeaning,” Kennedy said. “They work hard to stress that the other team isn’t our enemies; they’re our competitors, but that doesn’t mean we can’t treat them with respect.”

Playing Ultimate Frisbee is much more than just playing with a plastic disc.

“There are seven players on each team in the field and they each start out in a line,” Elijah Fox ‘25 said. “Someone throws a disc then they try to get it to the other end zone.”

Then there are other specific rules after the disc is thrown. Once someone catches the disc, they can’t run with it, and they have ten seconds to get rid of it. The defender marking the player must count the time and call it on their own.

“It’s a self-officiating sport, which means players have to deal with the other person on a sort of a peer level and treat them fairly when they make calls,” Waugh said.
Another thing that makes Ultimate Frisbee unique is the fact that it’s a co-ed sport. It’s not split up between boys playing in the fall and girls in the spring; they play two seasons with both boys and girls.

“It’s co-ed, which makes it a good experience for everyone,” Waugh said. “We do things to teach players about how to interact with each other cohesively.”
Since Waugh brought Ultimate to Monarch twenty years ago, everything has stayed the same. The same values and emphasis on having fun, the same community, and the same sport.
“I’ve seen a lot of evolution in the sport, and I’ve had a lot of time to figure out how to teach it right so that people enjoy it,” Waugh said.
Since Kennedy joined the team her freshman year, she hasn’t turned back once.

“My mom told me that I had to do a high school sport. She made me do Ultimate, and I hated her for it,” Kennedy said. “Now I love it.”