Growing up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, it was maul ball. Extra points if you could hit someone so the inflater valve left a mark (ie: a redder or whiter donut in the middle of a red welt)
Dodgeball was a much more sedate game in comparison.
In junior high, we had “warball”. the coach would line up about six dodgeballs in the middle of the basketball court. Both teams would line up on opposite sides and, when the coach blew the whistle, each team would run towards the middle to get the balls and immediately pound the crap out of the other team.
One day I was with the group of kids who were having PE outside and came in to change clothes and forgot there was a warball game in progress. I got hit a couple of times in the head, but I survived. I think.
When I was a kid (b. 1969) it was always bombardment. I don’t remember when I first heard it as dodgeball.
Where I teach, my sixth graders play “benchball” in p.e. It’s not some new PC term…when one is “out,” one goes to the bleacher benches. When someone on his or her team catches a ball, not only is the thrower out, but someone from the bench gets to go in.
This game lasts forever and when I play with them I always get ganged up on and spend most of the game on the bench. I think because of me there’s a new rule that when someone leaves the bench to go back in the game, you can’t throw until the player has taken five steps…
In the version we played at school we used tennis balls and it was called “brandings”.
Ah! I forgot about
Ah! I forgot about that variant. We called Ultimate Bombardment, though there were milk crates at the rear of each team’s half. If a player landed a ball in the opposing team’s crate, their team won.
This was in middle school
Damn it! Middle school in the late 90’s, in a small suburban Philadelphia private school.
In my childhood, there were three variants on violent ball games:
Bombardment - Gym class. Two teams, lots of balls (our school usually used weighted nerf balls. Enough heft to get good speed and distance, but pretty much painless). Get hit - you’re out, catch the ball - thrower is out. Play until only one side is left.
Dodgeball - Recess only. X number of kids would get against a wall and X number would throw balls and try to hit them. If you got hit, you were out and joined the throwers.
Kill the Man with the Ball - Recess only, and the teachers would stop us whenever they caught us playing it. Essentially it was rugby with no goal, and teams divided into “whoever has the ball” vs. “everyone else.” Strangely, we all tried to get the ball.
My school had a bastardized version of dodgeball, called “Prison Ball”. It was basically a 50 v. 50 full court version of dodgeball using similar rules except the difference was when you were hit with the ball you had to go behind the other team in the “prison”. If a ball made it through to you, while you were in prison, you could hit the other team players and get out of prison and return to your side. I guess the fun was while you were playing, you had to watch out from balls coming from either side. Nice little anxiety attack at 7:30 in the morning.
Hijacking this thread a little…Did anyone else play a game called “Melonball”? Basically it was Volleyball, but the difference was, in lieu of hitting the ball on the fly, you had to let it bounce once before trying to knock over the net.
“Do they have Krusty brand partially gelatinated non-dairy frozen beverages?”
We played a game called “dodgeball”. It worked like this: there was a mêlée, then you sat down.
Okay, to expand on that, we started in a ring with several “balls” (actually wads of tissue paper taped roughly into ball-shapes) in the center. At the beginning of the game, the aggressors in the group would make a mad rush for the balls while the rest of us would more or less stand still or start to wander around.
When one was holding a ball, he or she had to stand still, the option being either to drop it to the floor or throw it at someone’s torso (limbs and head were expressly verboten). If that person was hit, they were out and sat down. However, if they caught it, the thrower was out and had to sit down. This had to be done at fairly close range as wads of tissue paper aren’t especially known for their ballistic properties. I always thought foam balls would work better–at least they’d be spherical–but no.
In theory, there’d be only one person left at the end and they’d be the winner. However, by this stage of the game, “stalemate” would be the best descriptor for what actually happened. You’d have two or three people left, one grabs a ball, the others take off to the other end of the room, and the first has no hope in hell of throwing it that far and actually hitting a target. Repeat until nobody cares.
Just chiming in to say that I, too, have experience with dodgeball and bombardment being two separate games (except the latter was more often called bombardo), played pretty much as Harriet the Spry and others described.
Another vote for Bombardment as being a two-sided affair with occasional capture-the-flag overtones. Dodgeball was played in a circle, although I occasionally heard Bombardment called Dodgeball as well.
Which brings to mind a truly evil dodgeball variant my summer co-workers and I came up with back in the late 1980s: Biff.
It’s essentially circled dodgball, but instead of a ball, you use a frisbee to try and hit the lone victim in the middle. Once a hit is scored, the circle pig-piles on the victim culminating with a “biff” of the frisbee, broadside, on the noggin. After which… the same victim is still in the middle. They can only extract themselves by catching the frisbee, putting the thrower in the middle. And, believe it or not, girls did play this game as well.
This game was played at weekly barbecues, and really got interesting after the sun went down. No glow-in-the-dark frisbees allowed in Biff.
No, no, no, no, no. Trench, although like dodgeball, is different. Man, am I the only one who actually played all three as three seperate games?
Dodgeball was pretty much like it was as presented in the Dodgeball movie. Two teams, X number of balls, try to eliminate the other team.
Bombardment was our schools answer to a “less violent” version of dodgeball. As someone else said, blwling pins were involved. The goal in our version was only to knowck down the pins, so in theory, since you weren’t trying to hit the other person, just a pin, it’s less violent. Yeah, right.
And finally, trench was like dodgeball, but when you got hit, you didn’t become out, you crossed over to the other side. (the other side, not the other team.) You, and all the other team members that were “out”, have to stay in a narrow portion behind the other team (the same team you were against earlier.) You can still throw balls at them and get hem out, but obviously with less area to move around in it’s harder to get a ball. But you can’t get “re-out”, once you’re in there, you’re there for the rest of the game.
Trench is by far the hardest of them all, because you can have people on both sides of you throwing balls. So you try as best you can once you get a few people out to keep the balls from rolling to the end of your side.
Yeah we used to play “warball” too in 10th or 11th grade, except I seem to remember that we lined up on opposite sides of the gym and most if not all of us had dodgeballs. Whistle blew and chaos ensued. We didn’t play that game for long, too many injuries. That and hockey, people would just hack at the ball with the (hard) plastic hockey sticks. People were getting hit in the legs, groin, back, face. Good times, good times.
In our neck of the woods, this was known as “Smear the Queer.”
Naturally, I never learned of the homophobic implications of that phrase until much later in life. Never occurred to me.
Our version of bombardment was called slaughterball…there is apparently an International Slaughterball Federation today, but I don’t believe they’re playing the same game that we did.
That’s how we played the two also. And we used different balls. Dodgeball was with those sissy red rubber balls. Bombardment was volleyballs, and as Spectre of Pithecanthropus pointed out - they hurt like hell.
I for one, loved playing Bombardment. We used to play unsupervised games at recess. We had a much smaller arena, basically a two lane road. One side backed up to a brick wall, the other to a chain link fence. The closeness made for some very intense games. We had to switch sides each game so no one had the advantage of throwing against the wall all the time - you tended to get the misses back faster if you threw against the wall as opposed to the fence.
Well, heck, we used to play murderball, but there were no teams as such. Just a big open area and a tennis ball. The person holding the ball was not allowed to move with it; he’d have to toss it and run after it, hoping that no-one else would dive in and snatch it away because that invited a close-range demonstration of the game’s point; to hurl a tennis ball at the other players as hard as possible.
Good times.
That’s like what we called handball.
You’d get from three to a billion people all in a group near a wall (preferably brick) and one person would throw a tennis ball as hard as they could at the wall. After it bounced off, the goal was to try and catch it. If you made an obvious attempt to catch it and missed, or if it touched you or you touched it after it struck the wall, then you had to run and touch the wall before someone else grabbed the tennis ball and threw it all the wall. If the ball hit the wall before you did, you got a strike. Three strikes, and you’re “out.” At that point, you had to stand in front of the wall, facing it, and let someone throw the ball as hard as they could against you from a respecatble distance away. Usually, to minimize pain, you would bend over, since getting hit in the ass was a bit less painful than the back. But, if the person throwing the ball missed you, you got away scott free.