The Wake

“Last year’s success led to the National Dodgeball League’s second annual Amateur Championship Tour,” NDL Operations Director Niki LaGrano answers when I ask her about the NDL’s decision to start a second tour. LaGrano makes the popularity of dodge ball evident. Although the Amateur Championship Tour originally began with four stops, 16 now make up the tour to satisfy the public’s growing interest.

LaGrano says, “The NDL brings dodge ball across the country at both the local and national levels and hosts games for corporations, parties and charities in Dodge-It centers.” Adding to the excitement of dodge ball, the NDL’s second annual tour offers local winners the chance to earn cash prizes and move onto the next level of competition in Las Vegas on Aug. 17 and 18.

By attending the Saturday, Mar. 31 stop at the Xcel Energy Center, I can confirm LaGrano’s description of dodge ball. She says, “Dodge ball is about fun and competition.” Teams arrived before 11 a.m. to participate in the competition and started playing by 12:45 p.m. Participants in green, yellow, gray, blue, and red sat among their own teammates, seemingly relaxed and focused on enjoying their time. They hardly paid attention to the pressure of competing against other teams that came from other states.

One of these teams, who arrived first at 10:35 a.m., clustered near the stairs where a clock stood to the right of the entryway to the stadium. Team Conviction, whose team members wore neon orange shirts with blue numerals, showed confidence in their ability to win and tell some good dodge ball jokes. One team member says, “We are ready to stomp everybody,” and another teammate tells me, “Dodge ball is all about the catches and the footwork.” The anxious members calmed themselves by pacing back and forth on the sidewalk outside the Xcel Energy Center. They told me that they drove three and a half to four hours from Iowa. Not long afterwards, LaGrano revealed that teams also came from Pennsylvania, Northfield and St. Louis Park.

Although the rules regulate the game for easy judgment calls, participants employed an array of strategies on the 30 feet by 60 feet playing field and showed the throwing and catching skills that they had practiced with either footballs or dodge balls before the competition began. One popular game-time strategy was to identify weaker and stronger opponents by throwing all the balls at one person, eliminating them from the game. A seventh person, the retriever, helped the teams gather the balls lying outside the boundaries on their side of the playing field.

Before the whistle is blown to signal the start of the competition, many players assume a running stance. They line up next to each other, and at the start of the game, they run to the four-foot-wide neutral zone in middle of the playing field to grab a ball. Once they grabbed the balls lined across the center of the playing field, they immediately backed to the boundaries of their zone, the farthest position possible from their opponents. This strategy was effective at making opponents throw longer distances, amplifying the difficulty of targeting players and effecting fatigue sooner.

Still some teams managed to deflect the ball from hitting themselves. They used the large balls called blockers to remain in the game. Other teams tended to lean, jump or lay down on the field to avoid the live balls that could eliminate them from the game. Teams rarely applied the sacrifice fly strategy that LaGrano mentioned that they could use. They rarely intruded on the opponent’s side of the playing field to make themselves vulnerable to a hit.

In offense, the teams preferred to throw stingers, small balls that proved more difficult to dodge. Teams aimed the majority of the balls thrown downward at their opponents, perhaps to avoid headshots. They took LaGrano’s warning seriously: “Head shots are at the standing level, and teams may be penalized.” On the other hand, a few team members seemed to serve the purpose of solely catching balls to bring eliminated teammates back into the game and remove their opponents at the same time.

Despite the aggression that some teams exhibited, players on opposite teams would give each other high fives whether their team lost or won the game. Spectators had fun clapping and cheering, but the winning bracket could only have three teams. The team wearing the gray and yellow, plain white and red shirts remained.