Wants it so schools can’t play dodge ball in P.E. classes.
A couple arguements used:
-Once a kid is eleminated they have to wait until a new game starts again. Therefor not giving them an adequate workout
-The idea of “Human targets” isn’t healthy for kids.
Personally, if the balls are foam, then the human targets problem is solved, unless you want to talk psychologically. And many teachers fiddle with the rules so kids can get in and out quickly, or in cases, “out” but still active.
That was never my game, for sure.
It seemed only the mean kids really loved it.
I much prefer all the non-contact sports, like track and field or hammer throw, things where you can go for a Personal Best and be happy without having losers.
I think it’s bullshit, powerpuff. I have fonder memories of dodgeball than any other sport/athletic activity I undertook as a kid with the exception of basketball and touch football. (Adriatic, I wasn’t that mean either.)
1.) When I played dodgeball in the early 1970s, our PE coach had us do a fair amount of calisthenics before our fun activity and run a few laps after it so I would say everybody got a fair workout, especially when Mr. Doan made the losers run. Everybody played harder then. I would also point out that other activities don’t involve much activity either.
Play right field in softball or baseball and you may never have to field the ball as only the good players knew how to pull to the opposite field. I remember playing goalie in soccer and remaining farily inactive if I had good defenders in front of me. There were simply not that many chances to handle the ball and mainly I stood around trying to be alert.
In sports like baseball and kickball, a fair number of players are standing around at any given moment watching the action. In dodgeball, we were always bouncing around and looking about and we got a workout even if we weren’t targets.
2.) The “human targets” angle is also BS, IMHO. All sports are subliminated aggression; dodgeball is just more obvious about it than others. I remember that most of the boys loved dodgeball – it’s easy to learn and it doesn’t require massive bulk or great height. I swear I think we had more fun when I was a kid because we didn’t have all these child psychologists, self-righteous advocates and profession nannies messing with our minds.
I always liked dodgeball.
Reasons:
[ul]
[li]I’ve always liked to run. Dodgeball lets you run on an adrenaline rush. :)[/li][li]I can throw reasonably well. Throwing a foam or very soft rubber ball at someone is challenging and very fun. Anyone who takes issue with the concept of ‘human targets’ is scapegoating a game when the problem is poor child-parent and child-peer relations.[/li][li]The sense of teamwork even in rushed and harried conditions. If you can feel like a unit even when another group is trying to hit you with a ball, you can work as a team in other conditions.[/li][li]Oh, yeah, all that running is great cardiovascular exercise and throwing accurately improves hand-eye coordination, both important in early development. The exercise is especially important now, when America has an obesity epidemic.[/li][/ul]
I will debate reasonable challenges and laugh at unreasonable ones.
Bettie, sometimes their aim was just off. I wear glasses, but I took them off for dodgeball.
Derleth: Good point about obesity. I know people on the SDMB get sick of hearing about “the good ol’ days” but I swear fewer of us were blimps when I was a kid.
And that’s only been about 25 yeara ago.
We played dodgeball in PE class, and for us less-popular kids, it was literally torture.
The one objection I have to it is that it provides a means for bullies to engage in permissible physical torture against weaker kids. Unless the ball is Nerf or some other kind of foam, those things HURT like hell. At the least, they can take the wind out of your sails, and at worst, head trauma. I saw more than one kid go to the nurse’s office with a mild concussion that came from a well-aimed volleyball. And you can’t tell me that wasn’t deliberate.
I’m all in favor of exercise and organized sports for kids, but there needs to be some thought put into the class dynamic to ensure that everyone plays fairly and that “team sports” aren’t used to torment kids who can’t fight back.
Hey, I WAS one of the less-popular kids, and I liked dodge ball. It was the only game where my tendency to duck when a ball comes anywhere NEAR my head was actually an asset.
When I was in school I loved playing dodge ball. I was the smallest guy in my class and took a lot of crap. Dodge ball was the great equalizer for me as I could run and throw with the best of them.
It was always nice to watch the bullies run laps after I beaned them…
What the hell kind of balls were you using in your P.E class? We never had a kid taken away on a stretcher during our dodge ball games.
I liked dodge ball. I wasn’t a bully or popular kid, though not unpopular. I did not witness acts of cruelty on the dodgeball court. Yes, you were targeting your fellow students, with the knowledge that they will be targeting you also.
Maybe dodgeball differs from region to region, but where I played, the balls were rubber. Even a direct hit only stung for a few moments. And I learned that when you dodged, by moving and weaving, your chances of getting hit were drastically reduced. And when you played with some enthusiasm, you became slightly less bulky and slightly more agile.
The dodgeing skills I learned there have served me well.
I know that YMMV and all that, but at the school I attended, when I attended it, dodgeball could get brutal. I want to emphasize that this happened in high school. (What high schoolers were doing playing dodgeball with volleyballs is anyone’s guess.)
Yes, I also know that the point of the game was to target classmates. I also know that I saw a LOT of kids deliberately throwing with the intent of causing pain. In a few cases, the ball was aimed at the head deliberately, causing a mild concussion.
My point was not to catalog cuts and bruises and concussions from dodgeball. My point was that kids can be vicious toward each other, and dodgeball is the perfect opportunity to inflict physical and mental pain on kids who can’t fight back.
Personally, I remember loving dodgeball (we called it bombardment). Did your teachers start off with the balls lined up along the middle, and the kids against opposite walls-when he blew the whistle, you raced towards each other and the balls? Some kids took some vicious shots then. We used volleyballs, but they had a bunch of old, partially deflated ones they generally used. It was always a hit when we would have a sub who would screw up and let us use the regular, fully inflated balls. Of course, as a kid I also liked Pompom and Fumble Rumble, and I currently enjoy martial arts. And yes, aiming at the head was expressly prohibited, but of course, we consistently aimed at nothing other than the head.
I have an 11 year old son who has a mild neuroloigical disorder that makes him not a natural athlete. He can compete with anyone in things like track or target shooting, but not complex activities like most team sports or, you guessed it, dodgeball. He has a hard time perceiving and catching balls coming towards him, especially if he is moving at the same time. And gym class is not fun for him. Which I think is sad. Once I started to think about activities as “having kids as targets,” I was stricken by how many of my kids’ gym activities are styled that way. Which I don’t think is necessary. So I would say keep dodgeball, but be aware of the entirety of the curriculum. Make sure TOO MANY activities are not designed in a way that allows the same type of kids to excel while another identifiable group always fails.
I remember the kind of dodgeball we played at our school, also called bombardment, as nothing like what you guys describe. In our version of bombardment, we were split into two teams on either side of the gym. No one was allowed to cross the halfway line. The PE teacher would throw one ball to each side–and we’re not talking Nerf balls or foam balls here, we’re talking old, half-inflated volleyballs that weighed over a pound each. Inevitably the balls would be chucked across by the hardest throwers on either side. There were only two rules–“no head shots,” and if you caught the ball, the thrower was out.
This was one of the most dangerous, and least athletic, sports I’ve ever heard of. There was no running involved whatsoever–all you could do was just stand there hoping to be able to see the ball coming at you in time to duck or dodge. Since few of us actually threw the ball regularly, there was little participation other than as sitting ducks. And I probably don’t need to tell you about how much it hurts to get hit by a half-inflated volleyball. (One of the guys in my PE class later pitched for a minor-league team–getting hit by him was akin to being hit by a cannonball.)
By my standards, dodgeball sounds like a nice walk in the park–why would you want to ban that?
I think YMMV was the last of the acronyms around here for me to catch on to, and I had to ask as well. It stands for, “your mileage may vary,” and is shorthand for the notion, ‘this is what happened to me; your experience may or may not be the same.’
I agree about dodgeball in HS with volleyballs. At that age, people can throw balls hard. Dodgeball was one of our most frequent games in elementary school, but I haven’t played it since the end of sixth grade. And, like you, we played it with rubber balls with a fair amount of ‘give’ to them. In five years of elementary school (I skipped first grade), someone may have gotten hurt with one of those balls sometime, but I don’t remember. And because of having skipped a grade, I was the class runt, and most likely to be the one hurt.
Our preferred form of dodgeball was something called Greek Dodge, which worked like this: if you had teams A and B, then the court looked like A’| B | A |B’ , where the vertical lines represent the two end lines and the center line. Team A would start off with one person behind the end line at A’ and everyone else at A; team B similarly. If team A had the ball, they’d be throwing back and forth through area B, trying to hit the team B kids on the fly; if they succeeded, the B kid who was hit, moved to B’. (Once at B’, you stayed there.) But if they caught the ball on the fly or recovered it on the bounce, team B would be throwing it between B and B’ at the kids in A. Game over when all of Team A’s players ended up at A’, or likewise for team B. So while your being hit brought your team one step closer to losing, it didn’t put you out of the game; you still got to chase down the ball, and throw it at the kids on the other team.
Lots of running, occasional throwing, and you’re never really ‘out of the game’, which seems to deal with one of the two arguments against the game in the OP.
Kickball, Greek Dodge, and variations on tag were our usual elementary-school games, both in and out of school.
In grade school, we played Dodgeball on an asphalt field,
and I don’t remember anyone being victimized, nor do I remember being physically hurt from the ball hitting me.
I don’t remember what kind of balls we used, but I think they might have been those big soft reddish ones that little kids use.
When I got to junior high we had “MurderBall”! This was played inside the gym when it was raining, and there we used
partially deflated volleyballs. Those HURT when they hit.
On the other hand, I was a year ahead of most everyone else,
and significantly smaller, but I don’t remember being singled out or victimized by anyone.
ok the only problem i see is dodgeball in highschool … that may hurt… but we played it in elementary and middle school and we used fully inflated vollyballs/soccerballs/basketballs… basketballs were common… anyway i was fat and slow and i loved dodge ball… i never saw anyone hurt beyound a little stinging or a brief knock down or something… also dodgeball doesnt really punish fat and slow kids if they know how to play… its more about seeing the ball and changing directions also i found my gut made it easier to catch a hard shot to my body as i could trap it… now if you want to talk about a violent sport with human targets… try “pick up and run”… it has varing names from region to region… i suspect its is the same as/similar to fumble rumble listed above… basically someone throws a football up into the crowd… the guy who gets it trys to run it to an endzone… everybody else tries to tackle him… once tackled… unless he fumbles (common) he gets to throw the ball up… fumbles are live and once recovered must be advanced… his reward for making it to the endzone its to wait as eveybody else lines up so he can run it to the other endzone… now thats violent… note: this was not a school sactioned activity… this was a neighborhood game…
I loved dodgeball. The rules we played were that if you caught a thrown ball then the thrower was out. People started trying to throw away from me because I could catch anything if the thrower was more than 5 feet away from me. So, I stood in the middle and tried to keep my eye on all the balls. Unpopular kids would just stand near me. I would let them do the throwing - I just liked to catch. The hardest thing was if more than two balls were thrown at me at once. Once I did manage to get all three balls but it meant knocking two of them up into the air catching the third then the second as it fell and one of the unpopular kids got the third.
In elementary school, I was extremely unpopular among the bullies and only moderately popular among the rest. Bullies hated me but I was too athletic for them to do anything about it. Several of them attempted to fight me but found out that I had a hard head and a harder right cross. In many team sports they could team up and beat any team I was on, any of their friends on my team would intentionally play poorly. But, in dodgeball, I could take on any number of them and win. Every time. I loved it and so did all the unpopular kids. We used those red rubber playground balls, I was hit in the head lots of times. Sometimes I used my head to knock a ball in the air intentionally. They stung. The smaller harder ones could bruise you a bit, but I don’t remember any injuries except from stepping on a ball and twisting an ankle.
Oh, we played with four balls on the court, but you never had to worry about four at once because if the balls were held too long the team with the most had to throw first and I always made sure my team never let the other team get four at once.
The unpopular kids learned from me too. They would knock balls up into the air a lot and I or others could catch them before they fell. It really became a team sport.
We didn’t play it once I reached Junior High. By then I discovered volleyball, where I once got hit in the face so hard it hit both ears (Tom Selleck did that to me at the 1983 USVBA tournament in Seattle). Still no injuries that I know of from ball impact. Volleyball was cooler than dodgeball because on the east coast in the early eighties it was played mostly by tall thin girls. I got my referee certificate when I was 15 so I could go to all the girls tourneys.
I can see that a basketball could cause injury, but the red rubber balls that I thought of as dodgeballs shouldn’t be a problem. Volleyballs are even lighter.
Hmmm… My nephew is a real light touch and screams in pain at the slightest sting. Other kids that he plays with are the same way. Are kids not as tough as they used to be?
