Blogging Basketball/Volleyball Co-ed: Part 7

Basketball.
Volleyball.
Soccer.
Flag Football.

Those were the four sports listed in the disclosure.

Nowhere. I repeat, NOWHERE was listed the fateful sport of...dodgeball.

Truthfully, dodgeball could go a lot of different ways. It could be really fun. Or it could be really painful. In rare circumstances it is both, however that was not the case of today.

Honestly, today was mostly just fear.

First of all, our regular student teachers weren't there. So we had Coach Bailey, who in a lot of ways is like dodgeball. She can either be really fun, or just inspire fear and pain. (And by pain I just mean she makes you do pushups if you do ANYTHING wrong. Yikes.)

Second, it was a half day. Since we weren't playing basketball, and we didn't really have time to do anything else, she decided we would play some dodgeball. Except her ideas of dodgeball were not unlike that of a Nazi war camp.

We played 2 dodgeball games. The first was probably the worst. (Hey that rhymes!)

We were divided into two teams. One team had to run 20 frizbees from one end of the gym to the other. Without getting hit. Remember that little part. Without getting hit.

The other team stood on the side lines and threw dodgeballs at the people running back and forth.

If you got hit, you had to take your frizbee back to the other side of the gym, and then go sit down where you got hit. In other words, right in the middle of the battlefield.

Now, when it comes to dodgeball, I've always had a strategy, since I was in elementary school:

Stay unnoticed. 

See, that way, I always last down to the last few people, so the others think "wow, Kaela is really good at this game." and then I try to get someone out, I get noticed, and I've been hit within 4 seconds.

It works, I promise.

However, Coach Bailey seems to have heard of this strategy before, because she saw right through me. Or maybe it wasn't just me. But when she blew her whistle and everyone just stood around looking like lost sheep, too afraid to run out into the war zone, she told us we had ten seconds to run before we all did pushups.

As it would happen, I was still able to last until the last few people. What can I say? I'm pretty agile.
But the only problem with lasting until the end, and then having to run, was that everyone on the other team wanted to take me down. Let me just paint you a picture of what that's like.

Okay, imagine that you are waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure....

Just kidding.

Imagine that you are holding a frizbee. A frizbee that you have to take to the other end of the gym. Your team is depending on you. Even the really, really, REALLY smokin hot guy on your team is watching you. You've got to do this!! Half of the class has their eyes on you, dodgeballs at the ready, waiting for you to make your move. You step onto the court, and break into full sprint. Everywhere around you the balls go flying, whizzing past your head and arms and legs all while you are jumping over your team mates who sit, dejected in the middle of the battlefield. And then it happens. You are hit, not just once, not even just twice! But three, maybe four balls all hit you - arm, leg, back, and you know that it's over, you've failed, and now you too have to sit down in the middle of the war zone. And then, supposing you don't get hit, that you actually made it, you know that you have to do it all over again....

Anyways, that did happen a few times. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I didn't. It was an experience, to say the least.
The weirdest part of that game was around the end, the people on my team that were sitting on the floor decided it would be a good idea to make a barrier. So they all sat close together and held their arms up and told us to run through them, as if that would stop the balls from miraculously hitting us. And, as you can imagine, it totally worked.
.........

The second game we played was pretty much the original dodgeball, with the one exception that you cannot use the balls as shields. In other words, my strategy for this game just got screwed too.

However, I used my strategy of staying unnoticed until the end, and then my team actually won!

And then, surprise surprise, we played one last type of dodgeball. The worst. The mother of all dodgeball games. The ones you see in horror movies. (And by horror I mostly mean stereotyped movies and shows about high school.)

A free for all.

Suffice to say I was out within 4 seconds. I tried to make alliances, but I was betrayed.

In the end, it was one of the most exciting days of Basketball/Volleyball Co-ed I've had yet. It gave me really good material. I'm still trying to decide if it was worth it.

Peace!