We are professional ultimate for women and non-binary athletes.
Our journey began with a simple goal - to create an inclusive and competitive league that showcases the incredible athleticism and spirit of the game. Our mission is to achieve equity in the sport of ultimate by increasing accessibility to the sport for, and visibility of women, transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, and genderfluid people* through high-quality competition, leadership experiences, and community partnerships. Our league strives for gender, racial, and economic diversity in the sport of ultimate.**
* This terminology is and will be continuously reevaluated to accurately reflect the inclusivity of marginalized people that the league works to support.
** Several people of color from the NYGL team were involved in the creation of the original PUL mission statement. We would like to recognize and thank them for their contributions, including: Khunsa Amin (primary contributor), Luisa Neves, Stazi Tangherlini, Lauren Woods. While white women from NYGL and PUL were also involved in this process, we are striving to be intentional about lifting up the work of women of color, work that is often unnoticed and unrecognized.
Accessibility
We aim to increase the accessibility of ultimate and the number of women, transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, and genderfluid adults and youth playing ultimate. We host clinics and programming and build partnerships to assist in these efforts.
Impact
We strive to leave an impact. We promote the participation of marginalized people in ultimate and showcase them to an audience that wouldn’t otherwise get the opportunity to watch them in action.
Visibility
We aspire to increase the visibility of players of marginalized genders locally, regionally, and nationally. We provide marginalized groups with ways to participate within a professional sports organization at all levels (athlete, coach, manager, owner, staff, commentator, etc.).
Access and Support
We recognize that gender is a continuum and exists beyond the binary. While many professional sports still operate within the binary, the PUL employs best practices to maximize inclusivity and gender diversity on the gender continuum. We also recognize the trauma of non-binary people living in a binary society. We keep focus on mental health dialogue and neuroatypical inclusion.
We improve access for everyone to play ultimate at the highest level and showcase their talents to the world as a way to strive for gender, racial, and economic diversity as a critical component in making the sport the best that it can be.
National Anthem Statement
In an effort to connect all elements of the PUL experience to our mission statement, which calls for “gender, racial, and economic diversity in the sport of ultimate”, the PUL will allow each host team to decide how they want to start their games – whether that means playing the national anthem, another song, or doing something completely different.
We understand that the anthem means different things to different people, and we acknowledge that not playing the anthem is a departure from what is now normalized in professional sports. However, we also acknowledge the history of using the song began during one war and was then institutionalized during another. All of this happened before the song became officially adopted by Congress as the country’s anthem in 1931. Read about the history of the national anthem in sports.
For further reading on women and national identity, we recommend reviewing chapter 2 of Seven Faces of Women's Sport. “National identity is never fixed or static as a professional enterprise, nor in how the individuals connect to the nation through social praxis. Sport provides one social space in which this can be explored. Developing those explorations in conjunction with feminist theories of nationalism may challenge the persistent problem, that in structures and cultures, discourses of nationalism and of nations are gendered and still curiously rare.”