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I’ve always been a sucker for personality tests. I sometimes lean on those assessments to navigate moments of madness when my inner voice screams “Why are you like this??!!”. Where some may reject being defined by a ‘personality type,’ I find clarity when I read the tendencies of my Myers-Briggs label:
For ENTPs, no belief is too sacred to be questioned, no idea is too fundamental to be scrutinized, and no rule is too important to be broken or at least thoroughly tested. This may make ENTP personalities seem overly cavalier or defiant, but at their core, their innate tendency to test boundaries has more to do with their desire for innovation and change.*
Of course we all bring our personalities into our jobs, where many are measured by work-focused personality tests like CliftonStrengths.** Two of my strengths depict a professional enthralled by the intersection of ideas and individuals:
Ideation - You are fascinated by ideas. You are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
Individualization - You are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. You have a gift for figuring out how different people can work together productively.
As we imagine the future of ultimate, which of these - ideas or individuals - will have the greatest impact on the direction of our sport?
Every person in the ultimate community knows the impact of individual personalities on how we experience the sport. We have all had teammates or coaches or opponents that impacted our participation in good and bad ways. But while the influence of personalities in competition is self-evident, we tend to ignore the impact of personality among the people doing the work to make ultimate happen. Folks too readily reduce an entity like USA Ultimate to some artificial construct devoid of human thought or emotion or values. In fact - when considering the future of ultimate - the personalities pulling the strings at disc organizations have the greatest impact of all.
There is no questioning if the nuances of my personality impacted the Washington Area Frisbee Club as its first paid staff. The real question is how much or how little my personality influenced the organization. To some unknown degree, my strengths, flaws, and values had an impact on the frisbee-playing lives of hundreds of people I will never personally meet. As the only paid staff for much of my WAFC tenure, my personality was omnipresent, looming over the other volunteer personalities supporting the org, for better or worse.*** This reality was not without angst - any organization hiring new staff experiences an evolution of “doers” and “deciders” which involves inescapable judgment on the personalities involved.
It is not controversial that a small nonprofit would be vulnerable to the oversized personality influence of one or two staffers or perhaps a small number of key volunteers. But in ultimate this dynamic extends to the highest level. As a niche sport, ultimate is heavily influenced by a small number of key personalities who make decisions for our community and our competitions. Changes in governance, strategic planning, and community feedback all have an impact, but the personalities doing the work have the final say on how our sport evolves.
Confronting this truth raises some sensitive questions. When do we make the dialogue personal? When analyzing key decisions over the future of ultimate, is it kosher to include our understanding or assumptions about the people making the decisions? When advocating for change, what has a bigger impact - focusing on ideas alone, or focusing on the people who decide when and how ideas are implemented?
As one who has “done the work”, making things personal in any public way seldom feels productive. This path can quickly taste like hypocrisy. Running a disc org was my livelihood for eight years. I relied on that salary to support my growing family. And while professional accountability is essential in any field of work****, the notion of “calling someone out” in any potentially harmful manner never feels constructive, even if their individual modus operandi is a crucial factor in how the sport exists.
Even more complicated is trying to define the boundaries for accountability between paid staff and unpaid volunteers. Subtract the latter and the sport would crumble. But the impact of personalities in ultimate’s volunteer landscape is certainly not universally positive (which requires its own analysis).
So why even go down this rabbit hole? Why emphasize the importance of influential personalities but hold back from dragging those key people into critical analysis of the sport?
The hope is to find some middle ground. The future of ultimate will not be decided solely through competing ideas over strategy and sport development. And the decision-making powers-that-be don’t operate in a vacuum - they are influenced by community dialogue. A goal of this project is to thread that needle, to explore ideas in the context of the human dynamics which exist in ultimate. In a world where public dialogue too frequently devolves into putting people on blast, trying to understand different perspectives and meet people where they are feels like a more effective way to advocate for change.
Of course that is all easier said than done. I cannot control how different folks will react to my perspectives. And trying to find common ground is not always possible, especially when engaging with bad faith actors and bad faith arguments. Even in trying to focus dialogue on abstract ideas, poking holes in the status quo will always ruffle some feathers. I have to hope my ideas and advocacy provide a net benefit to our community despite the inevitable pushback.
The reality is that people always supersede ideas. There is no plan or system that is invulnerable to the sway of human behavior. This truth is magnified in recreational sports - when engaging in their passion, folks unleash their personalities more brazenly than in other parts of their lives. Ignoring the impact of personality does a disservice to any dialogue about the future of ultimate. But making things personal can sabotage dialogue entirely, when more dialogue about the future of ultimate is exactly what we need.
There are people behind every decision that shapes the future of ultimate. Acknowledging this dynamic is essential to make any dialogue about policy and sport development into something real. This is a challenging approach to take, but in order to build any aspirational future that ultimate can achieve, empathy and understanding are the tools we must use to make progress.
Footnotes & References:
*https://www.16personalities.com/entp-personality
** 1) Strategic 2) Ideation 3) Responsibility 4) Communication 5) Individualization
*** Depending on who you ask
**** Perhaps less now amidst the current state of things
(Original date of publish = June 27, 2025)
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