There’s nothing cooler than looking decidedly uncool together.
At least, that was the shared sentiment between me and a few others in the journalism department after we played spikeball, the latest sport to take college campuses by storm, for a little over an hour last week.
The only time we could all meet up—4:30 p.m. on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon—didn’t have what I would typically label as peak spikeball conditions. The grass was still squishy from heavy rains in the morning, and the cool 64 degree breeze had that weird, muggy, should-I-be-wearing-a-t-shirt-or-sweatshirt quality to it (and you somehow regret either decision you make).
I decided to wear a t-shirt that day, mainly because I just got back from a strenuous workout: teaching 14 kindergarteners how to hit a tennis ball over the net without a) baseball-swinging it into my trachea, b) concussing the kid behind them and c) falling over. After such an ordeal I normally need to lay in bed for an hour or so to recover from the sanity that leaked out every time I had to say, “Clap twice if you can hear me” or “We don’t get to play line tag if you keep throwing the balls over the fence.”
All that to say, I had a headache, my skin was kind of clammy from the humid breeze, and I was starting to rethink my decision to teach three beginners how to play spikeball on a Wednesday afternoon just so I could write an article about it. But like any hard investigative journalist, I simply had to get to the bottom of spikeball’s collegiate appeal. So, the five of us—my roommate, Naomi Mengel; Cardinal and Cream features editor, Jackson Hall; our very own editor-in-chief, Suzanne Rhodes; and everyone’s favorite journalism professor, Ted Kluck—set out into the squishy grass of the Watters quad and began our spikeball journey together as anyone might expect: kind of bad.
“I felt like I looked very stupid,” Kluck told me in a post-game interview. “From an aesthetics standpoint, it’s not a sport that you play because you’re gonna look cool… That made it hard for me to be the loose, fun-loving party guy that I usually am.”
Spikeball’s gameplay is pretty similar to volleyball, but you have to subtract any semblance of grace you’d find in a good dig or spike from the latter. In 2 v. 2, each team gets three touches before they have to spike the ball back onto the net, and spikeball’s twitchy, awkward movements can make even the best players look like one of those inflatable flailing guys in front of a car dealership. Especially when you’re making those movements with no results to show for it, it can get a little frustrating (e.g. see-through smiles directed toward your partner and saying “We got this!” to mask the pain). In our learning stage, probably 90 percent of our points went a little like this:
- Serve.
- Other team doesn’t get ball back.
- Forced laugh.
- Repeat.
At this point, I was regretting my decision to hold our match in the middle of the quad. I felt like everyone was peeking through their window blinds, shaking their head when I ran to retrieve a stray pass with the same grace as someone chasing after a ping-pong ball. To put the icing on top, I was also still dealing with the kindergartener-induced headache.
But we kept grinding, increasing our rally totals with each point. Kluck discovered a nifty topspin serve that he subsequently used to put my returning skills to the test. Rhodes got a few how-did-you-get-that spikes down. Kluck got a little too comfortable with his newfound serving skills, and I got a little too aggressive with my next spike. (Now, I’m by no means a spikeball expert; however, my sole claim to fame on this campus/earth is winning the last few intramural championships, so I feel obligated to flex it every now and then—it’s the only thing I’ve got, people.)
Eventually, I stopped worrying about what anyone else thought. We were having fun, discovering the different sporty sides of our classmates and probably getting better simply because we weren’t worried about “looking cool” anymore. Let’s be honest, if “looking cool” was my first criteria for having fun in any sport, I probably wouldn’t be able to play any of them.
“There’s something bonding about looking uncool together,” said Kluck. “There’s a little vulnerability to it when a group of people just decide, ‘You know what, we’re not gonna look cool doing this, and we’re gonna have fun.’”
Near the end of our experimental session, I realized my headache was gone, and the breeze was a little crisper against my forehead as the sun went down. We exchanged a few final laughs, and I trudged up the stairs to my dorm, feeling slightly upset at how quick the time had gone.
I think I realized that day that spikeball is a great sport not just because it has an easy learning curve or minimal equipment, but because it thrives in spite of its considerable “uncoolness” factor. It has the same energy as something like karaoke or ResLife events, and it’s almost paradoxical—if everyone buys into something that seems totally “uncool,” it inevitably becomes “cool.”
So, even if you’ve never touched a spikeball in your life, even if you have the worst hand-eye coordination in the world, or maybe you’re just not buying my “coolness” argument, go try it out for yourself. As long as you have a few friends that are willing to look like little flailing inflatable guys together, you’re on the right track.
