"I didn't know that we were creating a game that was going to be on going to have a life of its own," Jared Kass ’68, who recently spoke with National Public Radio about his role in the creation of Ultimate, the soccer-like sport played with a Frisbee.
Working at a camp for high school students the summer before his senior year at Amherst, he taught a group of students a Frisbee game that he'd learned at Amherst. One of those kids was Joel Silver (who would later become a producer of Hollywood blockbuster films), who returned to his high school in New Jersey, where he and his friends developed a set of rules for Ultimate.
The game is now played worldwide, and in 2015 was officially recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and more recently there's been talk of adding the free-flying sport to the Games. Kass is now a professor of psychology at Lesley University in Boston.
UPDATE: Kass and the history of Ultimate were the subject of an extensive article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “The whole thing happened to me as a big surprise,” Kass says of the game in the story. “It’s wonderful the way it all kind of happened in an organic sort of way.”