A new project in Bologna has introduced new players with disabilities to the sport, including one who'll be playing for Italy at the Under-24 World Championships in Logroño this week.
June 20, 2025 by Sean Colfer in News
The development of ultimate has focused largely on bringing young people or students into the game across the world for most of the sport’s existence. It’s only recently that players, coaches and leaders have started to expand into other areas; the first WFDF World Wheelchair Ultimate Championships were held in Italy last year, with two Italian teams facing a team from Germany and an international team comprised mostly of players from Japan. The second such championships will happen in Druskininkai, Lithuania in August 2025.
Another similar expansion of the game is taking place in Bologna. Bologna Flying Disc1 (BFD) has for many years run sessions for children, local schools and club players alongside its elite teams La Fotta and Shout, both previous European champions. For the last year or so, though, they have been running sessions for young people with Down syndrome or other learning or developmental disabilities as part of the club’s BFD All Inclusive project. The project has introduced new players to the sport who would otherwise never have been able to play, and has now also contributed a member of the Italian under-24 contingent competing in Logroño, Spain this week.
Good Morning
The sessions operate once per week, and junior players who are part of BFD are required to attend a certain number of these trainings per month both to ensure they understand the importance of contributing to the community, and to normalize the experience for their teammates with disabilities.
“It’s important to make sure that the players on the team are used to playing with and against all kinds of people at practice,” said BFD founder Davide Morri. “The players with disabilities played in our summer league and will be involved in our winter league as well. We’re going to have more people coming, we hope.”
Morri thinks that ultimate is set up well to welcome such players who might usually focus on more mainstream sports, with football the main disability sport in Italy and across much of the world.
“Frisbee can be used like a tool to include people. Organizing clinics for these players and scrimmages, like we had at Paganello2, has been a success and has shown that we can do a lot in Europe and across the world.”
The team is called “Good Morning,” and the sessions are, like those for most other teams in the world, made up of a mix of drills and games. The drills are all designed to work on a specific aspect of the game while also emphasizing things like cooperation and teamwork, finishing with a hucking drill that allows players to get fired up ahead of the 5v5 games that generally end sessions.
“I’m the coach, with some of the other players helping. Giulia Marchesini, Sara Bonaccini and Matilde Simonazzi are all assistant coaches, and Giulia Cristofolini,” says Morri. “And Irene Scazzieri helped to design the sessions when we were making the team.”
“Coaching a team like this is difficult since you have to develop a structure of drills understandable for the audience, and at the same time try to break them out of their comfort zone to try and teach them new moves and skills.”
While Shout and La Fotta players struggle to make the sessions during the season since their elite sessions are usually at a similar time, the club has a strong culture of helping each other out and players attend during the offseason. Other players from different teams help out as well.
“Normally we try to have a rotation of people during the different parts of the year, so Red Bulls and Cheetahs3 players are used to coming to help since they are normally either under-17, under-20 or under-24 players and the club asks them to organize their spare time to be able to commit to at least two practices per month,” explains Morri.
One of the players on “Good Morning,” Luca Bruni, has made FIGeST’s4 Italian under-24 open team playing in Logroño this week. Bruni, who wears number 99 and plays on the D line, has seen action in big games at warm-up tournaments, including against Clapham at Tom’s Tourney where he played as the only match mark in a targeted zone look. The Italians won Tom’s, pushed the Belgian under-24 team to universe in an exhibition that day before the tournament in May and again look set to challenge for a medal in Spain5. Bruni will be playing against some of the best players in his age bracket in the world, a real sign of progress and success for the project.
The Importance of Inclusion
Using ultimate as a sport for people with disabilities is still in its infancy considering the general youth of the sport overall. Morri says that the players have said that they enjoy playing because it “lets them feel what it’s like to fly like a frisbee.” The families of the players say that they enjoy being part of a sport where they are “included in the community,” unlike larger sports like soccer or basketball where the teams are often separate and “locked into a routine.”
The young players, too, benefit hugely from the experience. “The players that come to help, the volunteers, say often to me that they feel better for helping the All Inclusive group,” says Morri.
“When they are doing the practice drills with them, they feel part of the same team and there are not boundaries that exist anymore, ultimate is a tool that’s including everyone. We have young coaches teaching ultimate in different schools in Bologna every day and this is a chance to get in touch with new students with disabilities that could join the team. The whole community is really finding opportunities with the project.”
Morri is working with the University of Bologna to write a paper on the project in the hope that it will bring more exposure to the efforts being made in the city, with the hope that the work can be replicated across the world. He is working with the local council, too, which he says is “always looking for new opportunities for people with disabilities.”
“We want to share the project with the community to show how you can include people, and to show how important it is to think about diversity and how we can include as many people with social and developmental problems into our sport as we can,” he adds.
The organization was previously affiliated to the local university and called Centro Universatario Spotivo Bologna (CUSB). It is now independent of the university. ↩
A popular beach tournament held in Rimini, Italy each year. ↩
The club’s development open and women’s teams, respectively. ↩
Federazione Italiana Giochi e Sport Tradizionali, the Italian federation. ↩
Italy has reached the semifinals of the last three under-24 tournaments and has one silver and one bronze to show for those efforts. ↩
