CHS Girls Place 3rd in Ultimate Frisbee Eastern Championships

Does the spirit of ultimate frisbee—its laidback vibe relative to other team sports and lack of official status live on at Columbia High School?

At the High School Eastern Championships, held near Buffalo, N.Y., on May 14-15, the CHS girls' team placed third. The tournament features the top teams on the East Coast. This was the best finish for the team, formed in 2005. They work hard and focus on playing their best.

Yet, there's a connection to the past. Many of the current players go to the alumni games. "We are definitely proud to play frisbee for the school that started it all," said freshman Maggie Woodruff. Good sportsmanship, camaraderie and overall niceness seemed to be valued as part of athleticism. "The atmosphere is never stressed," Woodruff continued. "There are no enemies on the team."

The lore of the game is well known at Columbia High School. Founders Joel Silver (now a famous Hollywood producer), Jonathan "Jonny" Hines (an international attorney) and Bernard "Buzzy" Hellring (killed in an automobile accident in 1971) were CHS students in the late 1960s. After playing "varsity frisbee" at a college summer program, Silver convinced the student council at CHS to introduce frisbee into the curriculum. Silver, Hines and Hellring got together a group of students and started playing the game. Silver came up with the name, "Ultimate Frisbee", and the friends developed a rulebook, that according to the USA Ultimate organization, continues to inform how the game is played today. It spread like wildfire to college campuses around the country. The Ultimate Players Association was formed in 1979 to oversee the sport, which now has divisions and national championships. This month, the organization became USA Ultimate.

Yet, at the local high school, as a non-funded sport, it maintains a somewhat outlaw status. "I think this is both a negative and a positive," said Woodruff. "On the one side, it's kind of hard to be the origin of Ultimate and not be an actual sport at the school. There are lots of debates over whether frisbee is actually a sport or not too. But at the same time, if you play frisbee, you know it is a sport, and not being part of the school means we have more control over what we do. We can go to out-of-state tournaments, and we can have longer practices too."

This June, the CHS girls team will compete in the New Jersey State Tournament, a fitting end to the season in the state where it all began.