By Samantha Schmidt
This isn’t the dodgeball you played when you were seven.
Even players on the bench, perched on the stage of the Devonshire Public School gym have to duck for their lives while watching the game.
Welcome to the Ottawa Sport and Social Club’s expert-level dodgeball league.
With four balls in play and six players on the court per team, the object of the game is to hit players of the opposing team and get them “out.”
It sounds simple enough, but this sport can still offer competition while being fun.
The club offers 15 recreational sports for adults in total, and the dodgeball league keeps getting bigger and better.
The club started with only six dodgeball teams two years ago, but now boasts over 70, indicating how popular the game, once associated with recess, has become since the 2004 Ben Stiller flick, “Dodgeball.”
With increased enrolment, the club now offers different levels of play, from recreational to experienced.
Jamie Chin, who plays several sports with the club, says she only signed up her team for the expert league by accident.
“We discussed it as a team and I thought I had chosen the intermediate or rec(reational) ball,” she says.
“But when we got the schedules, we saw we were in the experienced league.”
“The teams are quite better than us. We don’t win,” she says, laughing.
That doesn’t seem to hamper the spirit of Chin’s team, “Las Brisas,” though.
Even when put up against the top-ranked team “drinking team with a dodge ball problem,” clad in matching black shirts they had made for the league, Chin’s team plodded on enthusiastically.
Even though the expert league seems more competitive, Chin says the games are still fun.
“You get a couple people per team who are pretty die-hard,” she says. “But for the most part…people are more fun and relaxed.”
However, dodgeball isn’t without its battle scars. Chin’s husband injured his finger and missed a number of games. His first game back, he tore his Achilles tendon and will be in a cast for some time.
Chris Page is one of those aformentioned die-hards.
Page and his team have been playing for three seasons.
He says he and his fellow “master blasters” decided last year to move up to the expert level when they lost in the final round of one of the club’s day-long tournaments.
Page, who has been practicing dodgeball since childhood at his cottage, says there are skills you need to be an expert dodgeballer.
“You have to have a good throwing arm,” he says. “You have to be able to dodge.”
He says, however, he still plays mostly for fun.
The club got its base set of rules from its Toronto counterpart when they first started offering dodgeball in fall 2005, but has since been adapting the rules to keep the game fun, says Nicki Bridgland, president of the Ottawa Sport and Social Club.
The extensive list of rules on the club’s website outlines the basic rules you played by in elementary school and even gets technical with a list of ways a ball can be rendered “dead,” or out of play.
Since the dodgeball games don’t have official referees, Chin says some grey-area remains.
“At the start of any game, the captains discuss what they’re going to do about hitting people in the head,” Chin says.
Like all of the sports run by the club, 25 per cent of dodgeball scores are based on “spirit points,” says Bridgland.
This means that at the end of every game, each team can earn up to five points for being good sports that count towards their league standings.
She says this way the club can tell how “enjoyable and fun the other team was to play,” since all the games are self-officiated.
Bridgland, who also plays in dodgeball league on Tuesday nights, says even though the club offers different levels of dodge ball, the goal is still to have fun and that there really are no experts.
“It’s not a sport people have been practicing over the last 30 years,” she says. “It just brings everybody to the same playing level.”
Bridgland says dodgeball is a great workout for those looking to be active, but most play for fun.
“People’s arms are sore from throwing afterward,” she says. “But their stomachs also hurt after, because they’ve been laughing so hard.”