What is Community involvement?

What means community engagement for us? What is the meaning of it all?

In 2017 I read a story about a guy putting his private life decisions up for a vote, but not just anyone, only to people that bought shares of $1 a piece. He put things up for a vote like “should I get a winter beard?” (approved) or “should I get sterilised?” (rejected). It’s a very interesting story, how a man in his quarter life crossroads build a little stock market on his life.

It got very interesting when he moved in with his girlfriend and did not put that up for a vote. His community was furious. He learned that so many things are connected this way. Now he’s considered ‘an artist’ and build his life around community engagement.

It inspires me in thinking about online ownership and engagement at UltiLeague. We don’t want to go as far as the above story (it gets weirder). We want to go further with engagement during live games and the journeys of teams and players.

There’s many examples online like this how the internet took control of something somewhere.

There’s a basketball league owned by the community, it’s called the basketball league and strangely enough UltiLeague has a lot in common. The name, the url and above all community ownership.

We can learn from ideas out there in the world how we want to make the Ultimate league. How we make this is all about us.

We want to interact with people who care about our vision and mission. People who care about the values of Ultimate, that want to help bring those values to the world.

We’re using these online tools and methods to share our ideas so you can react to it and take action. You don’t have to get involved, but you can, we’re open for collaboration!

Let’s make UltiLeague a sport league owned and controlled by the people; the ultimate sport controlled by a global community in solidarity.

What is a league by the people?

It’s probably the last thing you can think about right now, but now is the time to think about the future we want to have. Because the status quo is being questioned, we can invent in sports.

Unfortunately but necessary, tournaments, championships have been cancelled. We’re watching games, we’re analysing strategies and plays online. We’re discussing ideas like no other! By chance have you seen Tokay’s videos by people from the community?

What our (future) members make possible is not just financial sustainability. You create a supporting base where we can grow from, a network to amplify to.

We are a member and mission driven organisation, and we’re just getting started.

We’re just normal people all over the world, with a family, a network a job and maybe even a purpose in life. Every time we go to an ultimate event we dive deep in this community. What if we can share this experience with the world?

Let’s continue dreaming

Of course I’m just dreaming right now. It may just happen that we only start our first season in in the spring of 2021 and not in 2020, it’s likely. But we have the time now to dream and think about it.

Fans of Ultimate and UltiLeague do not just donate, they buy into the league and players success and they get a new positive narrative in the form of sport in return.

They invest in the team in their city, or they can just invest in the future of a player they know (online or offline).

You can invest in the league, control it by voting on decisions we will put up and enjoy the journey of our UltiLeague team forming the ultimate league.

In the end we’re just a group of people that want to see Ultimate grow in the world. We all have ideas how and UltiLeague wants to be the vehicle to make that happen.

When we grow Ultimate, we getting more money in and that means more quality content, more exciting competitions and more examples of women and men respectfully and fairly competing together. A positive story to follow from where ever you are.

All this is just vision and dreams, and we would like to do something now too.

That’s why we’re introducing a spirit game

We’re doing a spirit prediction game to watch a game together while voting on calls and on the overall spirit of teams. Predict closer to the average and win points.

What we’re doing is rerunning relevant spirited games like other channels and tournaments are doing now. What we’re adding is a spirit layer. We let you predict the average spirit scores of both teams, the closer you are to the community average, the more points you score. All this happens during lively controversial chats where everyone can influence other voters haha. I’m so curious what will come from this.

We’ll have UltiLeague memberships and ulti.TV subscriptions as prizes, and we’re in talks to give out special discounts to ultimate brands (Tokay, Lookfly, etc) so that they can stay up and running in these challenging times.

We’re doing a test next weekend (Saturday may 9th), reply to this email if you have ideas, or give a shout out in the comments. You can join by following the ulti.tv channel and turning on notifications for it. We’ll probably do it after noon European time.

On a personal note…

I have been amazed by the people in Atlanta. Because of my love interest here I have been researching and meeting people in Georgia for the last months. Their pro scene is huge and a future UltiLeague chapter in Atlanta wil very likely happen in the future. The diverse people here and the amazing weathered Hotlanta is great for a high quality of life. I’m going back to Amsterdam this Sunday… wish me luck ♥️.