Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the role of “spirit of the game” in negotiating community and the work/play binary, at various scales and venues, in ultimate frisbee, with the goal of better understanding how and vernacular and institutional practices are entangled, embodied, and contested in adult play forms.

Paper Abstract:

“WORK HARD, PLAY HARD”—so reads the caption of a jersey this author won at the 2011 USAU college ultimate frisbee national tournament in Boulder, Colorado, USA. While the “work/play” binary is representative of many embodied forms of adult play, “ultimate frisbee” presents a unique opportunity to understand the tension between emergent, utopian grassroots play and codified play-turned-work. A team-based, non-contact lifestyle sport founded in 1968, ultimate frisbee has long been understood within and outside the sport as counter-cultural, with concepts like “play” and “community” serving as cornerstones for all levels of competition (including recreational, collegiate, and club ultimate). Yet, ultimate frisbee is complexly and increasingly institutionalized—televised and professionalized, branded and commodified. Nothing exemplifies these tensions more clearly than discourse surrounding the sport’s concept of “Spirit of the Game,” an ethos of fair play that dictates on-field assessments of play and off-field performances of sportsmanship and camaraderie. This paper asks, what is the work of community in adult play forms, and what sorts of vernacular and institutional practices are used to negotiate and (re)define spirited play, and to what ends? Based on observation and fieldnotes from over ten years of play (international, domestic, collegiate, and recreational), this paper charts preliminary paths for ethnographic study of the role(s) and performance(s) of “spirit of the game” in negotiating community and the work/play binary, at various scales and venues, in ultimate frisbee, with the goal of better understanding how vernacular and institutional practices are entangled, embodied, and contested within and through adult play forms.