In the New Jersey parking lot where high school students invented Ultimate Frisbee nearly 60 years ago, some of the original players are still throwing the disc every week.
In the New Jersey parking lot where high school students invented Ultimate Frisbee nearly 60 years ago, some of the original players are still throwing the disc every week.
In the New Jersey parking lot where high school students invented Ultimate Frisbee nearly 60 years ago, some of the original players are still throwing the disc every week.
On hallowed ground in Maplewood, N.J., a small group of impassioned athletes braved the January cold to fling a disc. Some had gray hair beneath wool caps. Some were in street clothes. One wore shorts and a beard to rival Father Time’s.
They can be found there most Thursday nights, even in the bleakest midwinter, their sneakers slapping out a staccato beat that echoes the invention of their sport, almost 60 years ago, on the same spot: the parking lot of Columbia High School.
As the players warmed up, a group of high school students wandered by. They noted the camera flash from a news photographer and, as they surveyed the curious scene, wondered what was up.
“Oh,” one of them said, with a teenager’s almost audible eye roll. “The stupid Frisbee rock.”
In a corner of that nondescript parking lot sits a stone the size of a backyard grill, with a small plaque commemorating the birthplace of Ultimate Frisbee in 1968, and the three students credited with inventing it.
The teenagers did not know it, but two of the guys in the game that night have a direct connection to the players mentioned on the plaque, the founders of Ultimate Frisbee as we know it. Joe Barbanel, 70, and his good friend Ed Summers, 71, both grandfathers, have been playing the sport in this parking lot for more than half a century.