Piecing Together the Puzzle: Building an Organization Out of Multiple Leagues
Zach Hochstadt

For many years, the Bay Area has had multiple leagues with little communication or coordination between them. Players may play in just one league, or they might play in several. Couple that with the challenge that the leagues in SF are over subscribed, and the leagues outside the city are undersubscribed. Finally, there are challenges around funding; each league runs on such a small budget that no individual league could consider expanding programs or hiring staff.

All of these challenges called for a new group to be developed that combines the talents, knowledge, assets and resources of each league. Over the past 6 months, we have merged 5 leagues, created a youth league in earnest, created financial plans, strategic plans, a mission statement, formed a board, and laid the groundwork for a much larger league. Essentially, this is a lesson is quick expansion: how do you take a few small leagues and transition into something like DiscNW or BUDA. We haven’t done it all yet, but there are good lessons in the process.

Strategies for Sustaining Spirit at League Level
Jeff Malmgren

Who knows how to make spirit stay, or even better, grow? As the sport evolves and ultimate comes closer to the mainstream, leagues are becoming more difficult to manage in terms of spirit, because their size and the influx of players from other sports.

The Vancouver Ultimate Leagcue faced this is in 2001, when there were about 1,200 players in the league and the character was changing. A proactive stance led to a series of strategies and specific programs that ensured that, even with growth that almost quadrupled the league membership over the next six years, league spirit remains high and growing, and the number of spirit issues or specific incidents is still almost non-existent.

Jeff Malmgren, league coordinator then executive director from 2001 to 2008, was the architect of the overall strategy, and also oversaw its implementation. He'll present the philosophy behind it along with the individual elements and their rationale.

Taking Spirit Beyond the Field - Value Based League Management
Jeff Malmgren

The strength and growth of an Ultimate league is often based as much on  how it is perceived from outside as it is seen from within. As businesses trying to become sustainable in every way are learning, operating from a value base can make decision making easier at every level. For Ultimate leagues, the fortunate part is their core values are built into the rules of the game.

Taking spirit as the touchstone, league staff and directors can navigate almost every undertaking - with the greater community, at all levels of government, with independent businesses and with other sporting organizations. In doing so, they build strength and credibility at every junction.

In the last eight years, the Vancouver Ultimate League has taken this approach in all of its dealings, and succeeded in growing to almost 5,000 members and the largest single adult sports league in the city, with significant accumulated capital funds, and city-built Ultimate primary fields open for play.

The tenets of spirit can be applied to all level of operations and governance, as case studies within the presentation will illustrate.