I broke down and bought a "fake" one, LOL! I still have it in my basement. We never had cell phones but we knew where to find our friends. For a time we used a hickory rake handle (head broken off) for stickball and that thing was a boomah! We also used rolled up paper tied by a string for touch football. Stoop ball. Many hours of pleasure. "Who's got a ball?" - any kid in Bay Ridge, mid to late 20th century! Ya know, my wife never heard of a "stooo" until she met me... I thought it was "catch a fly, you're up." Those of us on Bay Ridge Avenue called it Stoop Ball! Loved that popping sound that told you the ball hit the edge of. the step and would fly up over our heads! Over the head was a usually a homer. 3 bounces - a triple - 2 bounces -
a double - 1 bounce =- a single. Catch on a fly - an out. Never bored in those days. Spent hours upon end playing stoop ball... We entertained ourselves so well!! No cell phones, no computers.....I was out in the snow and the rain because we had so much fun!! Never bored. A ball and a stoop! We were lucky We were Baby boomers. We had tons of friends. Always something going on. Nowadays I have to drive my son to a friend's house. Stoop Baseball.
One of my favorite movies growing up was “The Sandlot.” It’s a coming of age story of a group of neighborhood boys, who love to play baseball. The movie is set in the early 1960s, and spans the length of one summer. The Sandlot boys spent the summer playing baseball, getting into trouble and learning the true meaning of friendship. Of course, in the movies, whenever there is a rag-tag group, there is always the elite group. One afternoon, the elite baseball players in their nice white, Los Angeles Angels’ jerseys, challenge the rag-tag team to a baseball game. One of the most memorable scenes was when Hamilton “Ham” Porter tells the other boys on the team that, “You play ball like a girl.” This was considered
Every baseball fan knows of the term spitball. A spitball is when the pitcher spits his tobacco juices onto the b...
When a boy or girl is of age we get “The Talk.” We all know what this “talk” is about and some of us know before we’re even told. Our parents gather us up trying to explain sex through metaphors like, “the birds and the bees”, or the biggest one “Baseball.” As we think about sex at a young age we say “Well this makes sense, Baseball is easy!” with few rules we follow along that baseball is a good metaphor to use, but is it? As we get older, understanding sex seems to be a little more difficult. In order for us to understand sex we have to be willing, so that we can understand the opposite sex. In Al Vernacchio’s speaks about metaphors in his TED Talk. Al says that “Sex Needs a New Metaphor. In today’s society, sex is talked about through baseball,
When the first people of America started playing lacrosse centuries ago, the game served many purposes. It was played to amuse the Creator, to train young men for war, and to settle disputes between tribes (Source B). The game was played by tribes in all parts of the United States and Canada; it was played by the Mexican Kickapoo in Texas, the Seminole in Florida, the Bungi in Manitoba, the Cherokee in Tennessee, and the Passamaquoddy in Maine (Source B). The game was called Baggattaway, meaning they bump hips by the Algonquin tribe, and Tewaarathon, meaning little brother of war, by the Iroquois tribe (Source B).
Many people don't understand the point in playing baseball. Why would someone swing a stick, hit a ball, and try to get back to where they started before the ball returns? What pleasure is there in that? Why not participate in a sport like wrestling or track where there is an obvious level of individual improvement and therefore pleasure. Well, I play baseball because of the love I have for the sport, and because of the feeling that overwhelms me every time I walk onto a baseball field. When I walk onto a field I am given the desire to better myself not only as an athlete, but also as a person. The thoughts and feelings I get drive me to work hard towards my goals and to be a better person. The most relevant example of these feelings is when I stepped on the field at Runyon Complex in Pueblo, Colorado during our high school state playoffs in 2003. This baseball field will always be an important place to me.
On an excruciatingly hot summer day of 2016, my softball team was headed to the “Willoughby Starzz Tournament” Championship game. The day had consisted of three prior games, which included a semi-final game which Kendall did not play in. While walking out of the dugout our team felt the tension and could see Kendall’s mom, Kathy, jump up to confront our coach. Quickly, she got up in his face and started yelling. Trying to calm her down, Coach Mike Starkey said, “can we please discuss this calmly after our game?” However, Kathy had her own plan in mind. She followed him to the next field yelling and screaming about how her daughter deserved to play. At this point, our coach became angry and told her that she was wrong for yelling at him like
A travel of over 3000 miles for some, a 210 mile drive for me, just to arrive at the biggest gathering of over 1,500 twelve year olds; all just to play baseball. The only place that would be suitable for such an event is Cooperstown Dream Parks, every baseball players heaven. Cars have come to Cooperstown from everywhere for this week long tournament. I met children my age from all over the United states. I became friends with kids from Ohio, Illinois, California, I even met a player from Puerto Rico who barely spoke any english. The windows of everyone 's car decorated with the names and numbers of teams and players. Excited baseball teams spill from their Barracks and hustle toward the already crowded seating area. Festive music played over
The game of basketball is a highly recognized and widely known sport. Basketball was first heard of in the winter of 1891 when a man by the name of James Naismith was told to instruct a physical education class at the Young Men’s Christian Association in Springfield, Massachusetts. Naismith was instructed to put together a game for young men to enjoy while they were at the YMCA. While trying to come up with a brilliant and fun game for these young men, Naismith reminisced back on his childhood in Canada. He remembered a game his friends and him had played all the time: “Duck on a Rock”, which involved trying to knock a large rock off a boulder by throwing smaller rocks at it. Naismith also remembered watching a game of rugby going on in the gymnasium. The game of Rugby involved tossing a ball into a box. After a very short time of trying to make up a game for these young men, Naismith came up with a brilliant idea. Little did he know the game that he came up with just so happened to be one of he most renowned sports in American history. Naismith’s idea pertained to nailing up raised boxes so that players could attempt to throw a ball in the basket. When there were no boxes too be found, he used peach baskets. Supposedly, Naismith came up with all the rules for this game in no more than “about an hour”, according to Alexander Wolff. Shortly after Naismith had invented the game of basketball, graduates of the YMCA traveled internationally which is the main reason as to why this sport is so widely known. The impact basketball has made on the lives of many Americans is incredible in the sense that it has given people the ability to ...
I woke up when my core came out of a machine in the factory. I felt so naked, I was missing two layers on me, and my white cover. I was on a moving line, with millions of other core balls. Ahead I saw that they were splitting us up into groups. There were probably ten groups, I got picked into the furthest one to the right. Over the line I got picked into stood “Great Quality Balls.” I felt so special, I was going to be apart of the best balls. Next up we were but into a ten times ten order, and put through a molding machine, which gave us our second two layers. The feeling of getting the extra layers was good, but still something was missing. There were probably dozen men standing next the moving line, they were taking up some balls and
pong game, with two floating paddles and ball that bounced off the walls. A sonar-blip
The most principal piece of the sport of tennis is the rally, where adversaries progressively hit the ball forward and backward over the net, utilizing their tennis racquets, until one player makes a slip. Amid a rally, there is an astounding cluster of essential mechanical standards in progress that represent the direction or the ball. The motion of movement of a tennis ball are represented by the same fundamental mechanical rule. In any case, the sheer number of power communications that happen on a tennis ball make it difficult to effectively determine a basic scientific comparison for the flight way of a tennis ball once it has been hit by a racquet. So all things being equal we will quickly touch on a percentage of the physical rule that administer the development of a tennis ball. At that point we will look at the impacts of twist on
The first basketball type game may have been played by the early Olmec people of ancient Mexico as early as 500 years ago. The Aztec, and Mayan cultures also had a game similar to basketball, only instead of a rubber ball, they used the decapitated skulls of their conquered foes. The game of basketball as we currently know it, was designed and founded by Dr. James Naismith. Naismith was born on November 6, 1861, in Almonte, Ontario. Born and educated in Canada, Naismith came south to pursue his interests of physical education and Christian ministry. Shortly thereafter, he became a teacher at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Dr. Naismith was given two weeks to discover a game that would
On Thanksgiving Day in 1887, a group of 20 or more men gathered in the Farragut Boat Club to watch the Harvard-Yale football game. The website titled, History of Softball, stated “After Yale’s victory, a man picked up a stray boxing glove and threw it at someone who then hit it with a pole” (Rules & History of Softball). The boxing glove was bound together with its own strings into a sphere by George Hancock, the inventor of softball, to resemble a ball. A broom handle was mangled off epitomizing a bat and chalked marked lines on the gym floor, obtaining smaller dimensions than a baseball field to fit inside (Rules & History of Softball). The ball was fielded barehanded due to the malleability of the boxing glove. The Softball game, also known as hardball, lasted an hour and ended in a score of 41-40, pertaining to a protracted game. George Hancock was inspired by the scrimmage and in the following weeks, Hancock developed an advanced ball that was significantly larger in size and a bat that was a minute for the formalization of softball. Marking history, the game of softball was officially established. Rules and a league were later entrenched by the Boat club in 1889, evolving the game
Branching off from our last article, the game of volleyball itself was invented in 1895, and almost at once it swept around the world; not only as an official sport, but also as a pastime that could be described as one of the “crazed” varieties. Well, it didn’t just stop there; volleyball eventually made its way outdoors, to the beach!
“The "cue stick" was developed in the late 1600's. When the ball lay near a rail, the mace was very inconvenient to use because of its large head. In such a case, the players would turn the mace around and use its handle to strike the ball. The handle was called a "queue" meaning "tail" from which we get the word "cue." For a long time only men were allowed to use the cue; women were forced to use the mace because it was felt they were more likely to rip the cloth with the shaper cue.” (PoolTables)