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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (14915)	5/30/2001 12:12:32 PM
From: E	Respond to of 82486

That's a horrible story. But dodge ball isn't football, and that description certainly has nothing to do with the dodge ball games I've played in or observed. One of things that was good about dodge ball was that it was the game most liked by the kids who couldn't throw a football or hit a softball with a bat or get a volley ball over the net! It featured a lot of yelling and screaming, but it was the fun, noisy kind, not the angry kind that is associated with team sports. Dodge ball was largely an equalizing game, though obviously the more agile, quick kids stayed in the ring longer. But although it was very active and lively, you didn't need a lot of skill or strength to play it and enjoy it; and if you wanted to stop playing and talk to your friend you let the the ball hit you , and because it didn't affect any team, nobody cared -- and it is also one of the few very active physical games boys and girls play easily together. Also, there was no "picking sides," a ritual that always causes visible pain to those picked last. There is no measure to lessen bullying I don't favor. Since dodge ball has been, in my experience, the precise opposite of a bullying sport, it startles me to find it prohibited on the explicit grounds that it encouraged "aggression" and "competition." Maybe variants of it are played now that include teams and hostility? If so, why not just go back to the non-team version? There was a very simple way that over-aggressive play in dodge ball, like throwing the ball too hard, was controlled: you couldn't play for a week. It was completely effective because pretty much everyone, in my experience, wanted to play dodgeball. If you didn't feel like playing, you didn't play-- it wasn't an official sort of mandatory school sport like softball (which I loved) or soccer (which I hated.) On rainy days in gym, we begged to play dodge ball. Let's talk competition-misery. Summer camp, and gym, when I was in my early teens, featured the worst horror of sports for me -- having to get naked or near-naked in front of the other girls, some of whom developed earlier than others. I was a late bloomer (most of the girls in the school I attended from the sixth through the ninth grades were Semitic, and got breasts and their periods when they were eleven or twelve: I was almost 15 before I menstruated (I made my mother take me to a doctor, fearing I was a freak), and the whole experience made me sick with anticipatory humiliation all day every day on which gym was scheduled. It was even worse because of being looked at askance because I refused to take a shower with the other girls after gym. Absolutely nothing in my school career was worse than that particular form of competitiveness. Nothing. Dodge ball didn't usually require that one's skinny little-girl self get undressed and put on its gym suit in front of the other, developed, girls and then take a shower with them afterward. That may have been one of the reasons I so loved the game, but I think it was mainly that it was so much just plain boisterous fun.