Over the summer, a group of Islanders have gathered at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School to play pickup Ultimate Frisbee — an activity that gets people to exercise, build camaraderie, and be outdoors.
But this week, members of the group got a special treat: on their home field, they had the privilege of playing with Jonny Hines and Joel Silver, co-creators of the niche sport.
“It’s kind of a dream come true,” said Island resident Charlie Shipway, an organizer of the summer pickup game.
The Monday event stemmed from a meeting over the summer between Shipway, who is also a sailor who represented the U.S. Virgin Islands in the 1992 Olympics, and Hines. Shipway helped fix Hines’ Sunfish sailboat and told him about the weekly Ultimate Frisbee games.
This week, it just so happened Silver was visiting the Island. With his friend in town, Hines asked Shipway if they could organize a game and they jumped at the opportunity.
While Silver himself didn’t play on Monday, he regaled the players about the founding of ultimate. Hines, for his part, did play — the first time in five years.
“I feel lucky that I’m in good shape and I can run,” Hines said. “I hadn’t played in a while … but it was fun.”
As Hines explained it, Silver — a film producer who was involved with various blockbuster movies like “The Matrix” and “Lethal Weapon” — Hines, and their friend Buzzy Hellring created Ultimate Frisbee in 1968 while at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. Silver was the one who brought the idea to his friends after a summer camp in Massachusetts. After more revisions to the rules were made, the first inter-high school game would be played between Columbia and Miller High School in 1970.
Speaking to the Times from his family’s Katama home, Hines said while they didn’t anticipate how big the sport would become, but “we knew we had something good.”
The first intercollegiate game was played between Princeton University and Rutgers University in 1972 on the same spot where the first collegiate football game was played 103 years earlier between the two schools. Rutgers won both times.
Over the decades, Ultimate Frisbee has grown in popularity; Hines was even a part of an effort to get the sport added to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, which ultimately was unsuccessful. There are three professional leagues in the United States, the largest being the Ultimate Frisbee Association, or the UFA.
The sport has been in the lives of many people with Vineyard ties. Emmet Shipway, Charlie’s half-brother, is a pro Ultimate Frisbee player with the Seattle Cascades, a UFA team. He spent his childhood summers on the Island, largely in Chilmark, and was introduced to various sports from sailing to ice hockey. But after throwing frisbees on the beach, “It became clear to me that was the sport I wanted to do,” Emmet Shipway told The Times. After graduating from Bates College, he played in various parts of Europe and honed his skills in California, before arriving in Seattle, a “hotbed for Ultimate Frisbee.”
Emmet said Ultimate Frisbee, while growing in popularity, is still a niche sport and only a handful of players can live off of playing professionally. He’s also a lead at a video production company in Washington. While there isn’t much pay from competing, he’s in it for the love of the game; he’s also part of a Seattle, mixed-gender ultimate frisbee club called Mixtape. The team’s played in various parts of the globe, from Columbia to the Philippines.
“It’s more and more a global game,” Emmet said. “All you need is a frisbee.”
While Emmet didn’t know the game on the Vineyard would include the founders of the sport, his name made a showing. He’d sent his jersey to Charlie, who wore it while playing.
“It’s so cool,” Emmet said of Charlie playing with the sport’s founders.
Back on the Vineyard, Charlie said interest in Ultimate Frisbee has grown since the pickup games in the 1970s. He first started playing on the Island as a teen in 1981.
“It’s just been getting stronger the last few years,” he said, highlighting that more college and high school students had been joining. “We have a nice cross section in our community who shows up.”
Hines said he’s happy to have been a part of making a sport that is enjoyed by so many people. He told the Times that many people don’t believe that he was one of the inventors of Ultimate Frisbee and search him on Google. After all, many inventors of sports, like basketball or baseball, were from bygone eras.
“People are amazed … and it’s nice to play that role,” Hines said with a chuckle.
Hines said he hopes his grandchildren will play the game in the future.
How can you play Ultimate on MV without Jim Feiner? He is MV Ultimate.
PS I do believe that that “same spot” where the first football game was played was a parking lot by the time Ultimate came along.
that’s right
and we invented / forst played the game on a parking lot at CHS
Jim, unfortunately, had another commitment that night