Ultimate TV

Can I tell you how cool it is to be able to watch Ultimate on television?  So, so cool.  It would be overstating to say that having a sport of TV brings it into "the bigtime" or "the mainstream."  I'm old enough to remember the early days of ESPN and hour after hour of Australian Rules Football.  I don't think that sport ever caught on in the US even though it was on TV quite a bit.  Still, seeing the sport I prefer to play on a TV in my TV room is pretty cool.

This really isn't totally new.  I've been watching Ultimate on TV for a while.  Usually it has been either the open or collegiate national championships.  And mostly it had been on ESPN 3 or ESPN U and the only way to get it on the TV screen was to use the Roku or stream it on a laptop.  In most of those cases it was just the finals and the semi-finals that even got to those channels, with the earlier rounds streaming on the tournament website.

Lately though it has been different.  Now there's an AUDL - a professional Ultimate league - and they appear to have an actual TV contract.  The AUDL is showing up in my cable guide on Eleven Sports (which I don't get) and the Stadium channel (which I do).  Stadium is on a part of the dial mostly populated by the alternate digital broadcasts of our local TV stations - the world of MeTV and GetTV and Bounce and a half dozen PBS channels.  Not that anyone probably notices, but I checked and Stadium is actually available over the air in Pittsburgh.

So this is a different experience than the prior appointment viewing on ESPN.  This is channel surfing and coming across the Indy Alleycats vs. the Chicago Wildfire midway through the third quarter.  I've yet to stumble upon the Pittsburgh Thunderbirds - maybe that's because they're 3-10 on the season.

The production end of things is small.  Ultimate is difficult to show on TV.  Either you are too close to see what is happening or too far to be able to make out the details.  These telecasts are getting better though.  The people doing the play-by-play actually know something about the game and the players.  The camera angles are improving, and the instant replay is invaluable just like it is in football.

AUDL has some interesting rule variations.  The play to a clock rather than to a point total.  THat's probably better for TV.  They know how long the game will be and there's no soft-cap, hard-cap stuff (although I guess they lose the drama of universe point too).  There are referees - active referees - zebras, with whistles.  Some things that would just be a restart in the game I played are yardage penalties in the AUDL game.  But overall it is Ultimate, and it is on TV.

It does make me wonder if had it come along at the right time would I have been good enough to play professionally.  I guess the answer is probably no.  There was a time when I was probably one of the top 100 college players in the country.  I'm not sure I ever would have cracked the top 20 players in Pittsburgh.  The year after I graduated from CMU the Pittsburgh club team went to worlds and there's a chance I might have snuck on as the last or second to last man on their roster.

There appear to be on the order of 850 players in the AUDL.  I guess it is possible that at the very apex of my playing career I might have been one of the top 850 players in the country.  Although just as possible I wasn't.  I had great disc skills, but I never really had the all around athleticism or the hops or the physical size a professional league would require.  Good throws, field sense, and reading the disc will take you far but they don't get you there faster or let you soar over a defender.  Probably even if it had happened then I would have been watching on TV rather than from the sideline.

If you haven't seen it, you should check it out.