PORTLAND, Maine — Maine has another professional sports team to root for – and it just might be a sport you’re not all that familiar with. Portland Rising is the new professional Ultimate Frisbee team based in Portland. Ultimate players require athleticism, endurance, and strength ... qualities that were also needed to get the team on the field.
Maddie Purcell, the team's general manager, is in a bit of a state of shock.
"It’s just barely starting to sink in that we’re finally here, she said. "Like, honestly, there’s still three hours that something could happen? That I haven’t foreseen that we need to game plan for that we didn’t expect, you know? I kind of am in that mind space now."
She is the general manager and co-owner of Portland Rising, a brand new professional Ultimate Frisbee Team with women and non-binary athletes. Non-binary people identify as neither male nor female. This team is the first of its kind for Maine.
Portland Rising was ready to launch, days before the pandemic hit, when everything shut down. All they had worked for – practices, tryouts, fielding a team – came to a stop. Maddie describes the last two years of sustaining the energy – hanging on to the vision of a professional Ultimate team in Maine – as a fight.
"There was this emotional energy and rise in the community, in the team, everyone around and ... then ... it wasn’t the stopping that was the hardest part?" she said. "It was the not knowing when we would get to start again."
Turns out, it would be nearly a year and a half before the team would finally realize its dream and get its chance to take the field. On this night, Portland Rising is hosting an international tournament with teams from Texas and Columbia.
For Maddie, this team is the next obvious step for the sport.
"The sport of Ultimate in Maine is gang-busters compared to everywhere else in the country, basically," she said. "There’s a lot of places with great Ultimate scenes? There’s nowhere where there are as many people per population playing as there are in Portland. It’s practically a mainstream sport already."
Nowadays, Ultimate teams are fielded at the middle and high school levels, and there are elite teams, summer leagues, and clubs. It might be mainstream, but you also might not know exactly how Ultimate is played.
Megan Wilson is a player on Portland Rising.
"It’s a field with two end zones, you’re playing 7 v. 7, and you are trying to keep possession, and move the disk down into your end zone," she said. "And you can’t run with it, so you’re throwing the frisbee. If there’s an interception, or the disk touches the ground, it’s a turnover, possession changes and you’re going back the other way. And that’s the barebones of the sport."
Technically, Ultimate is not a contact sport, so you won’t see tackling, but you might see some jostling as the players go for the disc. Points are scored when the disc is passed to a teammate in the end zone, and games are usually played to 15 points.
"And then the sport of Frisbee itself, it’s just a beautiful game," Megan continued. "It’s the perfect mix of strategy and just athleticism. You’ll see smart plays, and you’ll see all out athletic full-extension bids and do anything to keep the disc in your possession so I think it has a little bit of everything."
Ultimate is unusual in that it typically has no referees, although this tournament has observers who keep track of things like time between points.
What can you expect as an Ultimate spectator?
"Big grabs, big layout grabs, a lot of big skies, people going up for discs," said Rachel Kramer, another Portland Rising player. "It’s fun and exciting, it moves quickly. I think it’s easy to pick up as a watcher of this sport. You’re not trying to learn a lot of rules. It’s mostly straightforward, so I think you can become a fan quickly and enjoy the excitement. Our fans are here and we have the best fans in the world."
This game marks the first of a three-day tournament. On a hot August night, under the lights at Fitzpatrick Stadium, the fans cheered the arrival of a new professional sports team in Maine.
"The opportunity that you can have teams that you can root for, that young people can be looking up to, that are just representing more opportunities, it’s more representation," Purcell said. "It’s more people seeing folks like them doing things that maybe they didn’t know they could do before and now they can see it. Portland Rising is a pro Ultimate team, but who we’re featuring are people who haven’t been featured enough in sports. We’re excited to get to start doing that now. It feels like the culmination but it’s just the beginning."
Click here if you would like to learn more about the Portland Rising Ultimate Team.