The Richmonder 25: Keys Pattie is the glue holding Richmond's ultimate frisbee scene together

Ask anyone in the region's ultimate frisbee scene who keeps it running, and they'll give you the same one-word answer: Keys.

Keys Pattie organizes the pickup games. He runs the leagues. He coaches college and high school teams, coordinates tournaments, manages every social media account Richmond Ultimate has, and spends his evenings emailing PE teachers and parks departments about getting frisbees into the hands of Richmond kids. Pattie is the glue keeping it together and the driving force pushing it forward. 

Ask Ray Heath what would happen to Richmond Ultimate, the local organizing nonprofit, if Keys Pattie disappeared tomorrow, and he doesn't hesitate: "It would be run by fools like me."

Since Pattie moved to Richmond in 2017, he has become the connective tissue of the region's ultimate frisbee scene.

"If it's Ultimate in the Central Virginia region, he knows what's going on," Heath said. "We are very lucky that he lives here now. It was a game changer for us."

Pattie, 38, didn't grow up playing the sport. He picked it up in his early twenties in Fredericksburg, drawn in after a stint in competitive tournament paintball — a considerably more expensive hobby. Ultimate, by comparison, asked for almost nothing.

"The only thing you need to play is a frisbee itself," he said. "It's so cheap."

Pattie said it’s not just the game itself that hooked him but the culture. Ultimate is almost entirely self-officiated. There are no referees at most levels of play, even at high-level club national tournaments. Instead, the sport runs on something players call "the spirit of the game": an expectation that competitors play hard, call their own fouls honestly, and treat each other with respect.

"You're encouraged to play as hard as you can, but you're also encouraged not to cheat, not to lie, to show compassion," Pattie said. “It's rare that you come across someone playing Ultimate who's a butthole, for lack of a better word."

That ethos seems to have shaped how Pattie approaches everything off the field, too. In Fredericksburg, he started the Hat tournament series — pickup events where players sign up individually rather than as teams — blending the Fredericksburg and Stafford scenes into something he called Staffburg Ultimate.

When he relocated to Richmond for a job with an ultimate frisbee apparel company, he ran for president of the Richmond Ultimate board and was elected in 2019. He has been deeply involved ever since, eventually shifting last November from board president to the organization's operations director, a paid role made possible once the nonprofit secured its 501(c)(3) status.

Rachel Shannon, Pattie's girlfriend — the two met at a pickup game at Battery Park — says the sheer volume of what he does often goes unnoticed.

"He does so much for the community and gets very little recognition for it," Shannon said. "I was imagining a world where Keys was not running RU and these events, and I just feel like a lot less would happen. I think a lot of small communities are like that, and that's Keys for RU."

Shannon says that instinct extends beyond the games Pattie organizes — he's constantly recruiting, even off the clock. On a random afternoon not long ago at Petronius S. Jones Park, he spotted a group of strangers throwing a frisbee around, clearly beginners, clearly having fun. He walked over, introduced himself, and told them about Richmond's pickup games and leagues, playing for a while with them before he left. The group was so taken with Pattie that they invited him out to their disc golf course so they could keep talking ultimate.

Shannon says that moment in the park is typical of him. "Keys is very grassroots," she said. He runs weekly pickup games at spots like Byrd Park that are open to anyone — no sign-up, no cost, just show up.

"That for me is awesome, because that's how I got super into ultimate," Shannon said. "You know, playing and going out for a beer afterward."

The catch, she says, is that those games can be hard to find out about unless you already know someone in the scene — which is exactly the gap Pattie spends much of his time trying to close.

Growing the sport among younger players is one of Pattie's current priorities, and one of its toughest nuts to crack. Unlike soccer, ultimate has no built-in pipeline through schools or recreational leagues. "The youth that do play, play mostly because their parents played or still play," Shannon said. 

Pattie now spends much of his operations-director role on outreach — contacting schools, parks and rec departments, and PE teachers, and coordinating with USA Ultimate to build a youth scene that has historically lagged behind areas like Charlottesville and Northern Virginia.

Beyond the administrative work, Pattie still plays and coaches at a high level. He spent three years coaching the University of Richmond's team, a perennial Division III national contender. This year, he competed at the Masters World Ultimate Championships in Nottingham, England, playing for a team based out of Guam.

“I would say I have stayed in it because all of the people I know, all of my friends, they are all frisbee players,” Pattie said. “I might have two friends that don’t play frisbee or don’t play frisbee anymore.”

For a sport with no referees, Richmond's Ultimate community has, in Pattie, something arguably more valuable: someone willing to do the thankless, crucial work of holding it together.

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