About Skills and Drills

Skills and Drills is a repository for drills, plays, tips and tricks for the sport of Ultimate Frisbee. For information about Ultimate Frisbee, you should check out the most excellent site for the Ultimate Players Association.

The skills and drills found here have been contributed over the years by many ultimate players all over the world. Browse through them to learn learn strategies for improving your game. Animate your favorite drill or play and submit it to the archive!

How did Skills and Drills start?

I'm an avid ultimate player. As it happens, I worked at Sun Microsystems in 1995 when Java was just getting started. I was captaining an ultimate team at the time and was having a hard time illustrating plays, so I gave myself the task of writing the PlayMaker applet as an exercise in learning Java that would help my ultimate game.

The applet was cool, but by itself it wasn't all that useful. So, I coerced several local players into animating plays and put them together on a website. Before long, other folks wanted to use it to create plays so I had to set up a way for you to submit plays. Before I knew it, there were 20-30 plays on the site and it's been growing ever since.

Can I install PlayMaker on my website?

I get this request all the time. As it happens, I released PlayMaker as an open source project so you can install it on your site yourself. But that's just the Java source code. What most people want is the entire site; the drills, the web pages, the java, etc. With the latest rewrite, it's possible to drop the archive onto a new site. Or to syndicate it. But, I don't know exactly how I feel about that, though so if you want a copy we should talk about how to make it mutually beneficial for all involved.