Research Results

I began this survey and research by contacting Ultimate team coaches. These coaches came from high school, college, and even recreational middle school teams. I asked them in person during tournaments, like the Seattle Invite, or simply cold emailing them after finding their information online, such as websites like Ultiworld. Using these methods, I was able to generate eighty responses from players from across the country. In the rest of this post, I will discuss my findings on whether Ultimate Frisbee benefits the well-being of the youth who play it. 

In my survey, I made sure that the players included their age, sex, and where they lived. I did this so that later I could sort the responses by these variables, and see if that changed anything with the results of the survey. I didn't discover any differences in this regard. In fact, all of the results were relatively positive. Each question I asked about aspects of psychological and social well-being received responses that peaked in the range from 7-10 (0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest). Many had 10 as the mode. The only question that did not follow this pattern was about the risk of injury, which peaked at 6-8. With Ultimate being an athletic and physically demanding sport, this makes sense: every point you are on, you are almost always playing at speed. In conclusion, I found that playing Ultimate was highly correlated with a positive impact on a player's well-being.

If I were to conduct this survey again, I could improve it by including additional information such as household income or type of school. It would be interesting to use other information about players to see if Ultimate truly benefited the well-being of those who played it, regardless of other aspects of their lives. Lastly, there may have been too much bias in my survey. The people I collected data from were Ultimate players who might not have had experience in other sports. If they did, however, they may have been biased toward Ultimate, which could make my data less reliable.

In the future, I want to survey people from other sports and ask them to answer the same questions I did with the Ultimate players, to better compare Ultimate's impact on youth well-being to other popular sports that youth play. In addition, based on my findings, I'd like to get Ultimate added to the Healthy Sports Index (healthysportindex.com).