The football field at John Carroll Catholic High School in Birmingham, Alabama looks like just about any other in the south-eastern United States.

A bright red athletics track rings around a long rectangle of scuffed green grass, trodden thin over the past ten days, with two American football goal-posts poking up like forks into the golden afternoon sky.

White marquee tents are dotted around the field's perimeter, beneath which rows of tables and chairs hold towels and medical kits and bottles of water.

Hundreds of locals with home-made posters and t-shirts and flags have shuffled into the plain concrete stand that flanks one side of the field, humming excitedly for the match that's about to begin.

But there's something different about today. While the setting is typical, the teams – and the sport they're about to play – are anything but.

Men and women of varying heights and builds stand shoulder-to-shoulder as they sing their national anthems. Some wear hats, others are in bandanas and face-paint. There isn't a single referee or umpire in sight. And the object they will be contesting over the next hour isn't a football – it's a frisbee.

This is the Flying Disc final of the 2022 World Games, and a glimpse into what the future of sports could look like.

Indeed, the entire World Games program is an upside-down sporting universe.

Started in 1981, the tournament has become 'the Olympics of non-Olympic sports', featuring almost three-dozen activities that seem more suited to mucking around in your childhood street than something you'd contest a real-life medal for: floorball, roller-skating, sumo, tenpin bowling, drone racing, tug-of-war, orienteering, snooker, breakdancing, lifesaving, parkour.

Flying Disc – or Ultimate Frisbee, as it's more commonly known – is one of the highest-profile sports at the World Games. And it's fitting: the history frisbee is about as counter-culture and anti-establishment as you can get in sport.

Invented by a bunch of college students in the mid-1960s, frisbee borrows several concepts from more mainstream sports including American football, basketball, and soccer like end-zones, no travelling with the disc, and single points for 'goals'.

The first games were played in empty campus parking-lots before moving to grass fields, with the first sanctioned match played between a group of students and the staff of their college newspaper in New Jersey in 1968.

The word "frisbee" can be traced back to a late-19th century Connecticut bakery, whose owner, William Russell Frisbie, allowed Yale University students to toss around his empty pie tins after emptying their contents, yelling "frisbie!" to warn each other of the flying metal pan.

The disc has taken many forms over the years, with a California carpenter named Walter Frederick Morrison designing the prototype for the plastic shell it is today. He cycled through names like the "Flyin' Cake Pan," the "Whirlo-Way," and the "Flyin' Saucer" before deciding on the otherworldly "Pluto Platter". And in 1957, toy company Wham-O bought and renamed Morrison's design to the "Frisbee", and since then, over 200 million have been sold.

Frisbee has become increasingly popular as a free-spirited, non-contact alternative to more traditional organised sports.

It's a fast-paced, athletic game, usually made up of two teams of seven, and has one of the lowest barriers to entry: all you need to play is a patch of grass or sand and a disc.

The game has evolved physically and technically, adding offensive and defensive moves, formations, tactics and styles. But it has always retained what its players call "The Spirit Of The Game": a set of principles harking back to it early laid-back years, and something which its participants fiercely defend, including being self-officiated by the players themselves.

According to the 11th edition of The Official Rules of Ultimate, the sport:

"has traditionally relied upon a spirit of sportsmanship which places the responsibility for fair play on the player. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of the bond of mutual respect between players, adherence to the agreed upon rules of the game, or the basic joy of play. Protection of these vital elements serves to eliminate adverse conduct from the ultimate field. Such actions as taunting of opposing players, dangerous aggression, intentional fouling, or other 'win-at-all-costs' behaviour are contrary to the spirit of the game and must be avoided by all players."

Further, while it was dominated by male players during its college beginnings, women have gradually come to occupy a central place in the sport. Now, even at world championship level, Ultimate has a four-to-three ratio of men and women per team, which can flex depending on the game phase.

It's a striking contrast for Catherine Phillips, the co-captain of Australia's national team, the Crocs, who are contesting the 2022 World Games final against the USA.

The democratic officiating, mixed-gender teams, and community-driven culture is especially jarring compared with the other sport she plays: AFLW.

"There are a couple of things within footy [AFLW] that I look at and I really want them to be done differently or to be done better, and Ultimate really shows how it can be done," she says.

"I've done a lot of work over the last couple of years with the AFLW Players' Association, working on our collective bargaining agreement, trying to negotiate better playing conditions for women. And it was really helpful having my frisbee background to have a couple key pillars that are really foundational to what we're asking for.

Phillips, now in her early 30s, began playing frisbee when she was in year 11. She had no idea such a thing existed until her oldest sister, who played it at Melbourne University, asked if she could come along and fill in for a missing teammate.

"I loved it," she says.

"I played a lot of netball growing up, I did a lot of running and other sports, but frisbee was so much fun. It was a great group of people. And it was quite unique, with no umpires at any level. So it's a really different vibe and mentality and camaraderie with the people you play with.

"When I first started, there weren't many under-18 or youth pathways in Australia. There was probably me and a handful of other players who weren't at uni that were playing. So I was kind of accelerated into representative teams because of that: I played in the under-19 Australian team four months after I first picked up a frisbee.

"I went over to Canada and I had no idea what I was doing, but that experience was completely unbelievable. We went there and came second. And I was like, 'awesome. I've been playing for four months, but I've got a medal from a World Championship.' Off the back of that, I just kept going. I've loved it ever since."

A big part of the appeal for Phillips, who, like many Australian kids, grew up with gender-segregated sports and all the judgement and stereotypes about women athletes that come along with it, was that frisbee is largely free from all that.

"It's like nothing else that you've ever done," she says.

"The feeling of equality that you get being on the field at this level, with men and women playing together, is completely incredible.

"What I love most about it is that, in other sports that have men and women playing together, they normally have different roles that they can do: they're not on the field at the same time, or they're modified roles to make it work.

"But Ultimate is nothing like that. You've got men and women playing exactly the same roles on the field. If you watch the teams that do really well at the international level, they're the teams that use all their players really effectively. The top three teams at this World Games – Australia, America, and Colombia – have all got the strongest women on their teams.

Tom Tulett, Phillips' co-captain at the Crocs, agrees. He started playing frisbee in high school, too, discovering it at a 'come and try' gala day.

Like Phillips, he loved the social side of it and the laid-back culture: he made friends all over the country and around the world, and had opportunities to travel abroad with representative teams when he would otherwise be stuck at home studying.

Having grown up on the other side of gender-segregated sport – the side that gets more funding, more coaching, more cultural approval, and more visibility – he didn't know there were many mixed-gender team sports in Australia until he started frisbee.

"For me, growing up, that's what my first and most of my exposure would have been," he says.

"Coming into the sport, it was quite a nice change. I came from male-dominated sports like footy, rugby, that sort of thing, so it was definitely refreshing.

"And then carrying that through to the highest level has been really cool. It has a lot of challenges in terms of team balance and dynamics, and then being thrown into a sport with a different gender that you're not used to playing with.

"There's so much that can be learned from interacting and respecting the way the other gender plays the game. You'll probably learn stuff about your own game and your team's game by watching and working with those players.

"I think women's sport is more entertaining and better to watch than a lot of men's sport anyway, so I really like this side of it. We've got a really good community and we're really focused on pushing the gender equity side of things, making sure we're being proactive and not just watching it as it happens."

Mixed-gender teams are just one of the elements that make Ultimate Frisbee different from most other team sports. The self-refereeing is another. Typically, sports are officiated by an independent, objective individual (or team of individuals) who uphold rules or laws that all players adhere to – and can be punished if they don't.

But in frisbee, that power structure is flipped on its head: it's the players who hold themselves and each other accountable to the rules that they have been responsible for developing over time.

Not only does it ensure that all participants are educated on the laws of the game they're playing, but it also maintains respectful communication and the positive, collegial culture that the sport was built upon.

When there's a dispute during a match, such as a foul from dangerous contact, the game pauses so that the relevant players can discuss the situation and decide on an outcome. If they agree, play continues in favour of whoever was fouled; if they disagree, the disc is returned to the previous thrower. There are, however, objective 'game advisors' available to deliberate if required — though they rarely are.

And at the end of every game, both teams come together in a huddle to talk about how they experienced the game: what went right, what went wrong, how they could improve if they were any problems that weren't in line with the 'spirit of the game.'

"It really helps to create a human element to it," Phillips says.

"I couldn't even imagine doing that in a footy environment; everyone would laugh if I wanted to do that.

But the sport currently finds itself at a crossroads.

As its profile continues to grow, attracting sponsorship and funding and more resources to create stronger pathways, national team programs, and even some fledgling professional leagues, some of its players are worried that the principles which make Ultimate Frisbee special could be lost as it becomes more corporatised; as more rules, teams, divisions, and financial stakes are added to the equation.

That's one of the existential questions the sport is asking itself as it applies to be in the Olympics proper after its governing body, the futuristic-sounding World Flying Disc Federation, was recognised by the IOC in 2015.

It's putting up its hand to join sport climbing, surfing, skateboarding, and powerlifting (among others) as sports that have made the jump from the niche to the mainstream over the past few cycles.

From an Olympic perspective, Ultimate's booming participation base — particularly for women — and its growing television audience (the American college championships are aired on an ESPN sub-channel, while Ultimate has appeared on SportsCenter "top plays" more than once) is the perfect sport to freshen up an outdated competition that's losing money, eyeballs, and relevance.

But more investment could come with a different kind of cost.

"I don't have a firm opinion on whether I want it to be an Olympic sport or not; I can see the pros and cons in both sides," Tulett says.

"But I also see how awesome the World Games event was. The stadium was awesome, the conditions were perfect, the teams played really high-level frisbee. It was a really great advertisement for the sport in general, especially as it's self-refereed.

"I don't know if I'll ever land on an answer. It's sort of the carrot dangling in front of me, and if they did include it in the 2028 Games – which is the big discussion at the moment – that's another seven years invested in the sport, so why not have a crack?"

Phillips is a little more hesitant, especially about the ripple-effects that Olympic inclusion could have on the sport's trajectory elsewhere, like at club level.

"I am worried," she says.

"Like, the thought of being able to play in the Olympics is the pinnacle of what you can do as an athlete. So that's very appealing to me. But on the other hand, I do think the elements that make Ultimate unique could very easily go away if you brought in more money and made it mainstream.

"I know the IOC really loves the elements of Ultimate that we all do around the 'spirit of the game': self-refereeing, fair play, respecting one another, the mixed gender teams. Those are all big pillars within the Olympics, so I think they'd want to retain those things.

"I think a lot of people wouldn't want the sport more broadly to go down that path. If that's supposed to be mainstream, then we don't want to do that."

Right now, Ultimate frisbee is caught between two worlds: desperately clinging to the grassroots elements that make it unique, but equally ambitious to enter the professional world in order to attract more participants, establish pathways, and potentially become full-time careers - even if that sits uncomfortably with the anti-establishment principles frisbee was built upon.

But it's not there yet. For Phillips and Tulett, their attention has turned back to club-land and their personal lives, where each works and studies in other fields. As far as the Aussie Crocs are concerned, following their silver medal in Birmingham, their sights are now set on the World Ultimate Championships next year, followed by the 2025 World Games in China, with the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 on the distant horizon.

The question of whether it will look the same when it gets there, though, is still up in the air.