In a self refereed sport such as Ultimate it is important to continuously teach and measure Spirit of the Game.

For this reason a Spirit Scoring system was developed. Directly after a game, players rate the other team, as well as their own team, on the five fundamentals of the sport.

Competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of respect between players, adherence to the rules, and the basic joy of play.

Spirit Captains

Each team has a dedicated Spirit Captain to ensure the game is played in good spirit.

The objectives of the Spirit Captain and (SOTG) Scoring System are to:

1) Educate players on what Spirit of the Game is

2) Help teams to improve specific parts of their Spirit

3) Celebrate SOTG by awarding a prize to the team that gets the highest score

For an extensive outline of the Spirit Captain role, see the WFDF Spirit Captain Role Manual (pdf).

Guidelines for Players

• Filling in the score sheets is a team effort. This helps in educating new players and reinforces the fundamentals of SOTG with the more experienced players.
• While filling in the form might take several minutes the first few times, it will take only a minute after you get used to it.
• The system was designed in accordance with the expectation that teams generally display normal, good spirit. Therefore the baseline in each category is “Good” which equals 2 Points. For each game, determine if the other team was better than, worse than, or the same as just a regular game and score accordingly.
• Focus on each question and answer that question only. Do not start with an overall score in mind and work backwards to get that score.
• There might be many times that nothing out of the ordinary occurred at a game. As such, each category should get 2 points. A final score of 10 points is considered normal, Good Spirit.
• Give a real score that reflects the items detailed on the sheet.
  • Do not give teams higher scores because they made a funny joke in the circle
  • Do not give lower spirit scores out of retaliation or prejudice
• Self-scoring is highly encouraged. Did everybody show good Spirit in your team?
  
  

Here is a guide for when your team are scoring Spirit of the Game.

For more information about Spirit of the Game, WFDF’s Spirit of the Game website