“It is a surreal feeling and a super emotional one,” says Sahana Arvind, one of the Spirit captains—responsible for the sense of fairplay—of Airbenders, a Bengaluru-based Ultimate Frisbee club, which won gold on July 5 in the ‘mixed’ category at the TRIO Invitational Tournament 2026. The club competed against 13 other teams from various countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, and Malaysia, at this recently concluded event held at the Equestrian Park in Putrajaya, Malaysia.
As someone who has been part of the club for over a decade, joining it in 2015, around three years after its inception, she believes that this club’s success stems from its legacy. “This wouldn’t have been possible without the foundation that the previous players of the club have laid, contributing to the team we are today,” says Sahana, who also reveals yet another reason for the club’s victory: their hunger to succeed.
One of the team members who shares that drive for excellence is Sagarika Ghanagam, who co-captains the team with Ajay Yadav. “We have been practising as a club team for years, and have been pretty dedicated to the sport, training every weekend,” she says. “The fact that we have a common goal and passion drives us to do better and stick together.”
The victory is also “hugely significant” for Ultimate in India, according to the tournament’s Spirit Director and the vice-president of the Asia Flying Disc Federation, Abhinav Vinayakh Shankarnarayanan. He adds that while Indian national teams, which bring together the best players from across the country, have done well internationally, a club team doing so on the international stage is particularly special. “A club is a group of people building together over time—training together, creating systems and developing players. So, for a club to travel abroad, compete against strong international teams, and win is a really meaningful marker of how much the domestic game has grown,” he says.
The winning team
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And while this time it was a Bengaluru team that won, a result like this belongs to the larger Indian community in some way, feels Madurai-based Abhinav. “Players here have grown through playing each other, coaching each other and pushing the level up together.” Airbenders actually winning gives the rest of the community a very visible benchmark: “That this level is possible from here.”
Abhinav is delighted that not only did Airbenders win, but that three Indian clubs made the trip to compete in various categories, the others being Air Traffic Control and No Fly Zone. “ This says something about where the community is now,” he says, pointing out that Indian teams are increasingly willing to travel abroad not just for the experience, but because they genuinely believe they can compete, unlike in the past.
“Increasingly, Indian teams are going out believing they can beat good teams. For those of us who have been around for a long time, there is definitely a sense of progression here,” he says.
For Ong Ben Jin, the TRIO Invitational Tournament’s director, the fact that Airbenders took home the gold in the ‘mixed division’, arguably the toughest division this year, according to him, is “awesome. I hope they’ll come back to defend the crown in the next instalment.”
His words are particularly heartening when one considers that in India, where Ultimate is believed to have arrived in the late nineties or so, it is still an emerging sport. “Globally, it is a much more established sport than a lot of people in India realise. There are world championships, continental championships, major club championships and participation in the World Games,” explains Abhinav, who is aware that India is not yet at the level of countries like the US, Canada, Japan or Australia in terms of systems, resources or depth.
Having said that, “we are no longer outsiders either. Indian teams are increasingly competitive internationally, and over the last few years, we have had some really encouraging results,” he says, pointing out that “the playing level is improving faster than the systems around it,” in spite of the gap in infrastructure and resources.
An Ultimate experience- the rules, the spirt and more
Ultimate Frisbee, commonly called Ultimate, is a fast-paced, no-contact team sport played with a flying disc that draws on elements of several other traditional sports. “The easiest comparison is probably that it has some elements of football, basketball and American football — except you are playing with a flying disc,” explains Abhinav.
It is believed to have begun with pie and cookie tins being flung around for fun in the early 20th century, with manufactured frisbees arriving soon after. But Ultimate, as a sport, was likely introduced by a few students, including the American film producer Joel Silver, at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1968.
The sport, played on both grass and sand and scored by catching the disc in the end zone you are attacking, is completely self-officiated. Players call their own fouls and violations and discuss disagreements with each other, while being asked to compete as hard as they possibly can while also taking responsibility for fairness and the rules
Ultimate is played regularly at Chennai’s Besant Nagar beach
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R. Ravindran
As a game that emerged in the sixties, the age of free love, the hippie movement, civil rights and rock and roll, Ultimate has a rather unique foundational ethos: Spirit of the Game, something that Abhinav describes as “ the most unusual part of Ultimate, and also the hardest to believe until you see it.”
“Spirit doesn’t mean being nice or not being competitive. Some of the most intense games I have ever played have also had excellent Spirit. The idea is that competitiveness and integrity are not opposites,” he says.
Another aspect of the game that draws many players is its inclusivity, most visible in its gender parity. “Mixed Ultimate is not a token version of the sport where one or two women have to be on the field. The playing ratio is built into the game itself, so gender equity isn’t a nice value outside the competition; it directly affects tactics, team building, and who gets to play in important moments,” agrees Abhinav.
But for him, what is also more interesting goes beyond gender. Since the basic barrier to starting is quite low, just a disc and open space, and because so much of the sport grew through community clubs rather than traditional sporting institutions, he says “We have seen people from very different economic, social, linguistic and cultural backgrounds end up on the same team. I have played for a long time, and I have seen people become teammates who, in almost any other part of their lives, might never have met.”
This is not to romanticise Ultimate and say it magically removes class or gender inequality, he says. “It doesn’t. Money, access to grounds, the cost of travel, English as the dominant language in some spaces—all of those can still create barriers,” says Abhinav. But he does think that the community has, at its best, been conscious of those barriers and has tried to actively work across them. “There are people and organisations around the country who have used the sport very deliberately to bring communities together,” he says.
One aspect of the game that draws many players is its inclusivity, the most obvious being gender parity
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Derrek Lee
For the love of the game
Among the biggest challenges for Indian Ultimate are getting funding and finding a field to play on, according to Akhil Khatri, the other Spirit Captain of the Airbenders. “This is pretty much a self-funded sport. There is no government support yet,” he says. The club, which has members ranging in age from 15 to 49, he adds, ends up going all the way to a ground located near the Bengaluru international airport, in the wee hours of Sunday mornings, because “we get full grounds to use only then…and because it is a lot more affordable than a ground in the city.”
To excel in Ultimate also requires hard work, which in turn requires time. “We come with a wide range of personal commitments—school, work, college—but because of the excitement we get from playing the game, we make time for it,” he says, adding that while the players come together on the weekend, they are working on themselves all through the week, “be it strength training, caching up to get throws, sprinting…people do it on their personal time. There is a constant expectation that people set for themselves to get better.”
But what every Ultimate player agrees on is this: despite the struggle and hard work required to sustain the game, it is worth it. “Just the fact that all of us could travel, stay together and compete at the level we have been training for is one of our biggest highs. Also, when we achieve something in the field, even if it is just one or two points, it is a big high for us since we have been working towards it,” says Sahana.
The sense of community that the game fosters, adds to the appeal of the game. “For me, especially, it is about the people I play the sport with. This community is my biggest community of friends,” she says.
The sport also teaches the players an important lesson: to compete hard while ensuring that it is done in the Spirit of the Game, adds Sagarika. “The Spirit of the Game means that you have to hold yourself accountable for the calls or fouls you are making, but you still have extremely intense games. It is probably my reason to keep playing.”
