It may be a marathon ... but they’re not going far.
For the frisbee team at the University of Huddersfield is throwing a frisbee for 100 hours non-stop to raise charity cash.
The club competes in the game Ultimate – formerly known as Ultimate Frisbee – which is pushing to become an Olympic sport. The game is played on a court with seven players outdoors and five indoors and the aim is to catch the frisbee in the ‘end zone.’
The American game is closely linked with a cancer charity called Early Recognition Is Critical – or ERIC for short – so the Huddersfield team has decided to support it too with its marathon.
ERIC uses Ultimate as a means to teach youngsters about the symptoms of cancer and how to spot them. One in 285 children in the USA is diagnosed with cancer and one in five do not survive.
The University’s Ultimate Frisbee Team is known as Castaway – and the name came from the time of the Tom Hanks film Castaway where he turned a volleyball into his best friend.
Team member Rebekah House said: “It has become one of the fastest growing sports in the USA and UK and hopefully it will become an Olympic sport.”
The team’s social secretary, Matty Phillips, added: “Everybody has a link to cancer, whether it be battling the disease themselves or knowing a friend or a family member unlucky enough to be afflicted with it.
“ERIC as a charity has found a way to increase knowledge of the problem and we, as Ultimate players, would really like to help them achieve their goals in the fantastic manner that our sport allows them to.”
The marathon is taking place now on the University plaza outside the Student Central building and will continue all this week until they have been throwing for 104 hours.
The team has buckets so passers by can donate, or donations can be made online at http://www.earlyrecognitioniscritical.org/
The Huddersfield team has 25 regular players but has just signed up another 100 during Freshers Week. They compete against other universities indoors until Christmas and then outside afterwards.
The club won Most Improved Sport Of The Year at Huddersfield University’s Student’s Union Awards before summer and a tournament they hosted called Double D brought 12 Ultimate teams to Huddersfield University and was nominated for Student Led Event Of The Year.
Ultimate frisbee factfile
Ultimate, originally known as Ultimate Frisbee, is a no-contact team field sport played with a flying disc. Points are scored by passing the disc to a teammate in the opposing end zone.
Basic rules are that players must not take steps while holding the disc.
From its beginnings in the American counterculture of the late 1960s Ultimate has resisted empowering any referee with rule enforcement. It relies on the sportsmanship of players and invoking the “spirit of the game” to maintain fair play. Players call their own fouls and dispute a foul only when they genuinely believe it did not occur.
In 2012 there were just over five million ultimate players in the United States, but it is now played worldwide.
