Lisa Siregar

Discindo began in 1996 when about 10 expatriates started playing at the National Monument park in Central Jakarta. (Photo courtesy of the team)

Jakarta Catches On to Ultimate Frisbee

For members of the Discindo Ultimate Frisbee team, Sunday afternoon is not a time for lazing around.

At 4 p.m., when the sun is lower in the sky, they head off to the hockey field in the Senayan complex, across the road from Hotel Mulia Senayan in South Jakarta.

The social aspect of Ultimate is a large part of why they play.

“The beauty of Ultimate is that it’s physically active, competitive and it engages men and women equally in the game, we don’t actually separate them,” said Edwin Pieroelie, who has been playing the sport for 11 years.

Pieroelie likes to bring his family along with him to games. His wife, Martini, joins in, while his three children play on the side of the field with their nanny.

Pieroelie said Discindo began in 1996 when about 10 expatriates started playing at the National Monument (Monas) park in the absence of a regulation Ultimate field in Jakarta.

In 1998, they moved to a football field near the Jakarta-Hilton Convention Center and then to an archery field in Senayan, before finally making their home at the hockey field.

A regulation Ultimate field is 100 meters by 37 meters, with 18-meter-deep end zones.

“Therefore, the actual playing field is 64 meters,” team captain Gamboa Higgins explained.

The hockey field in Senayan is slightly under regulation size, with a series of bright orange traffic cones marking out the boundaries. But the captain said it was adequate to play on.

Higgins added that Discindo was Jakarta’s only Ultimate Frisbee team. She said she became a fan of the sport after playing her first Ultimate game in Manila about six years ago.

Ultimate Frisbee is a non-contact sport played with teams of seven. The object of the game is to score goals by getting the frisbee over the line at the end of the field. After you grab the frisbee, you are not allowed to run with it, but have 10 seconds to pass it to another player. In Ultimate Frisbee there aren’t any referees, with players settling differences of opinion on their own.

“We don’t play rough. Players call their own fouls,” Higgins said. If the player committing the foul disagrees with the foul call, there is a replay.

“It happens a lot in tournaments that players foul intentionally,” Pieroelie said.

“But usually the audience know and they will yell at the cheating players,” he added.

“There’s an Ultimate club in [many] major cities in Asia and there’s a tournament every month,” Higgins said.

Each year Discindo hosts the annual Bali Nusantara tournament, held over Easter weekend in Bali. The tournament has been running for 11 years.

But the biggest tournament in Southeast Asia is the Singapore Ultimate Open, where about 24 teams from Asia and Oceania compete.

At the Singapore tournament in August 2008, Discindo received the prestigious Spirit of the Game award — Ultimate’s sportsmanship code is known as the Spirit of the Game.

Tristram Perry, another Discindo member, said he used to play football but prefers Ultimate because players stay true to the spirit of the game.

“It’s an honest game. You see a football game and there is a lot of arguing going on, but here that rarely happens,” he said.