This article was first published today in our bespoke Sports newsletter The Fixture. You can sign up in seconds to receive it straight to your inbox every weekday here.  

Every once in a while something flashes across your screen on Twitter and you've got to remind yourself that you have not entered some parallel universe. Of course, those instances have been increasingly common since Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion last year and turned it into a kind of virtual playground for QAnon conspiracy theorists and Nazi-sympathisers, although some cynics might argue that not much has changed since the days when Donald Trump roamed the Twittersphere whipping up insurrection.

The Fixture uses the social media channel for much more benign purposes: keeping abreast of the respective shambles at Tottenham Hotspur and the Las Vegas Raiders while simultaneously fending off the nefarious advances of – checks list of suspiciously monikered female followers – @rhondahurd5010, among others.

This was one of those occasions, though, when Twitter generally provided something informative, a new world opened up and I was left genuinely perplexed. The final scoreline read 'Colorado 8 North Carolina Pleiades 15', and the sport was, well, how do you describe it? Here was a team of females running around an American football pitch tossing a frisbee in the general direction of each other while another team attempted to stop them. A point appeared to be scored when one of the teams entered a box that was marked out with orange traffic cones. Apparently the Pleiades were recording their 112th successive win in the sport to secure their third consecutive D-I College Championship title. At any given moment it was possible to imagine that White Goodman might lead out his Globo Gym Purple Cobras dodgeball team wearing pantomime snarls and matching spandex but there was, nevertheless, something vaguely beguiling and yet equally bizarre about the whole thing. This was the sport of Ultimate Frisbee in all of its beach holiday glory. 

I'm sure some sports physiologist somewhere will have crunched the numbers and managed to demonstrate that Ultimate Frisbee is played by some of the fittest athletes in college sports and, indeed, The Pleiades official website provides insight into what is clearly a pursuit that helps harness mental wellbeing stating that: “it has been a team that brings together fun, driven and relentlessly supportive athletes for an experience that fosters leadership, commitment, development and friendship” since its formation in 1995.

So it all feels a tad flippant to say that it genuinely looked like something you might concoct in an attempt to get outdoors after sitting for too long in a sweltering caravan during an increasingly fractious family holiday to the south of France.

There is a danger that one can sound like a dilettante when dissing minority sports, of course. The Fixture isn't completely oblivious to their existence having helped to preside over the production of The Herald's long-defunct digest page – which surely made multi-millionaires out of a number of Glasgow's freelance sports journalists – for a number of years. This page – more esoteric than a Harry Potter spell sheet – contained a cornucopia of events. Ultimate Frisbee, as far as The Fixture can recall did not make the cut, but there was everything contained from parkruns that you might ordinarily pass on your weekend stroll while out with the dog to table tennis results from some far flung corner of Hungary where a low-ranked Scot just happened to be playing. 

Judging by the volume of complaints when the page was eventually put into cold storage (there were at least two people who mourned its demise) it was missed – even if it is my firm suspicion that at least one of those plaintiffs was the author of several weekly entries into the page.