The Death of Dodge Ball by Bobby Herodes

Author:Bobby Herodes [Herodes, Bobby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781728306292
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2019-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Funball

At this point in my short story, I would like to thank you for taking some of your valuable time to look at one man’s view as to why dodgeball is very near extinction. And now, I am looking for your honest opinion of the game I have created that has slowly evolved from dodgeball over the past seventeen years.

At the beginning of the book, I mentioned that I had an exciting game to talk to you about. That exciting game is called Funball—although it wouldn’t become officially named Funball until ten years after I created it. This evolution started as a result of some pressure that I was receiving as an elementary school gym teacher. Sometimes, the pressure came from a photocopied article about a school district being sued by a family over a dodgeball injury, which someone placed on my desk. Or it came from a subtle comment one of my administrators made in walking through my gym to get to the stage, where all our PA systems were stored. As a result of this pressure I felt, I started doing some research on the Internet about dodgeball and how it was doing around the Northeast.

Years ago, and to a certain degree today, school districts developed and implemented their own curriculum when it came to gym, art, music, and so on. Even seventeen years ago, some school districts were forcing gym teachers to change their curriculum to eliminate dodgeball. Dodgeball was the greatest of childhood games, which we have already discussed at length. But from a curriculum and skill standpoint, dodgeball had throwing, catching, dodging, and movement as its basic skills that the kids used while playing. During my research, I realized that I needed to develop the game so that it incorporated many more curriculum skills and concepts so that I could force the administration to realize that this game was multidimensional, not one-dimensional.

Now, as I watched my kids play dodgeball, I was studying the game in a way that I never had before. And one day, when I was teaching a kindergarten class, inspiration came to me. These kids were five years old, and their throwing skills were horrible. Most of the children’s throws rarely made it to the other side of the gym, even though my gym was only about sixty feet long by forty feet wide. Only three or four students in the class could throw the ball hard enough to eliminate players. Games would go on forever, and the weak, unskilled students never got the chance to eliminate an opponent. How could I increase the excitement of the game while making sure that all the players in the game were capable of achieving success, speeding up the game, and, most important, keeping it safe?

After about one week of studying the game with every ounce of my brain, the solution finally came to me. It had been right there under my nose the entire time, but I only truly noticed it when the kindergarten and first-grade students were playing.

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