AMHERST — The flying disc sport of ultimate has a rich tradition in western Massachusetts, and specifically in the town of Amherst.
Look no further than the Amherst Invitational, an annual high school ultimate tournament held at the University of Massachusetts. It dates to the early 1990s and is the longest-running tournament in the country.
Several years after the launch of the invitational, the Amherst High School boys’ ultimate team made a run to the national championship game in 2003, solidifying Amherst’s reputation as an ultimate hotbed.
More than 20 years after the Hurricanes’ memorable season, director and producer Lexi Jamieson Marsh decided to chronicle the team’s quest from that campaign with a documentary.
Releasing this Saturday and Sunday, the three-part documentary is titled “I Was a Hurricane.” Jamieson Marsh, an experienced filmmaker and founder of independent film company On Your Feet Entertainment, revealed what initially attracted her to take on this project.
“This project started with a collaborator of mine, Draper White, who is also a Hurricanes alum, Amherst alum, and we both played ultimate together in the Pioneer Valley,” Jamieson Marsh said. “We had finished another documentary, and when you find people you really work well with, and they’re just such quality, both hard workers and with the skill that you need, for these creative projects, you want to find other projects.”
Jamieson Marsh explained that White had sent her a hard drive featuring footage containing Amherst’s 2003 ultimate team. Despite it being “super-low resolution,” White wanted Jamieson Marsh to look and see if there was anything worth pursuing.
“I had been expecting game footage, and what I ended up getting was 200 hours of an unfinished documentary that filmmaker Bob Pollak had made and never finished,” Jamieson Marsh said.
Pollak, now a 71-year-old resident of South Deerfield, was responsible for a majority of the archival footage used in the documentary, despite never intending for it to be used for anything more than a personal keepsake. Pollak’s stepson was on the Hurricanes’ ultimate team that season.
“I just thought that maybe that would be something that would be good to film, that would be good for he and I just to connect over and have a memento for him, essentially, to remember his participation in sport at the high school level,” Pollak said.
The longer Jamieson Marsh sifted through the footage, the more interested the Belchertown native became in telling this story.
“What shocked me the most was just access to life over 20 years ago, where you don’t have smartphones,” Jamieson Marsh said. “It’s very much a story about the high school ultimate frisbee team and it just was this nostalgia overload going through all these tapes.”
Because all of the footage remained on outdated, DV tapes (video cassettes), the first challenge Jamieson Marsh and White encountered once work officially began on the documentary was simply converting the footage to be usable on modern technology.
“Bob had shipped a whole box of like 50 to 75 mini DV tapes to Draper, who now lives in Colorado, and Draper spent 200 hours digitizing because that’s how long each minute of tape is, a minute to digitize, and he did the whole archive,” Jamieson Marsh said.
This digitizing process began in 2022. It wasn’t until a year later when Jamieson Marsh began traveling the country to talk to subjects that would be used as contemporary interviews for the documentary.
Jamieson Marsh tracked down Amherst players, coaches and even players from their rivals from Paideia High School in Atlanta, which will be featured in the documentary.
That stage took about two more years before editing began in the summer of 2025, which Jamieson Marsh admitted is standard for documentary filmmaking.
“Documentaries take a long time,” Jamieson Marsh said. “So as we started combing it together — I’ve described this oftentimes as going down a black hole. Lately, it’s been living in back rooms where you think that you’ve got the piece to the puzzle and you insert it, and then all of a sudden, that single puzzle piece turns into a puzzle in and of itself, and it kind of expands.”
She said the biggest challenge was deciding which direction the documentary should take, given how many “amazing” and willing participants there were who wanted to share their thoughts.
For Pollak, the fact that his footage has not only been unearthed, but is also the backbone of the documentary, has been a rewarding experience.
“I’m really, really grateful to [Jamieson Marsh and White],” Pollak said. “If there was any plan for shooting, it was just get as much as you can and hope that something’s really worthwhile.
“I wasn’t all that knowledgeable about ultimate frisbee until I started filming it and I was really impressed not only with the kids, who I just thought were great, but the sport itself has a really important message and the way in which the community sort of worked together to create one of the strongest programs in the country I thought was really important,” Pollak added.
While the main storyline of the documentary is following the ultimate team, Jamieson Marsh revealed the film also touches on the current culture that surrounds youth sports, which she believes need “a factory reset” on their real purpose. Too often, she said, kids get reduced to stats and travel-team pressure, when what they actually want is simpler: “Kids just want to play.”
“Competition is great, but there are so many other elements of sports that I think that as adults we forget,” Jamieson Marsh said.
The entire community of Amherst will have a chance to experience the world premiere of “I Was a Hurricane” as it’ll be shown at the Amherst Town Common on Saturday, Aug. 8, at 8 p.m. It is a free event and open to the public.
Then on Sunday, Aug. 9, an encore screening will be held at the Eric Carle Museum beginning at 1 p.m., with a panel discussion afterward featuring Jamieson Marsh, Pollak and several of the subjects of the documentary.
“With documentary filmmaking, independent filmmaking especially, you have a lot of projects that just never see the light of day, just because the post-production takes so much work,” Jamieson Marsh said. “You have all these other costs … so this is absolutely a dream come true to have this in Amherst, to have it free and available to anyone who wants to come to Town Common.”
