When you hear the term ‘college sports,’ it will probably conjure images of basketball and football, among others. But at Northern Kentucky University and other schools in the region, there’s a whole competition ecosystem for a sport you may not have thought of since grade school: dodgeball.
NKU Dodgeball Club’s President Hunter Theissen said that even if their club is just that, a club rather than an official program, that doesn’t mean that players don’t take it seriously.
“We do treat it more like an actual sport,” Theissen told LINK nky.
The club began when Wes Peters, who coaches the dodgeball club at the University of Cincinnati, reached out to Will Strong, an NKU student who’s now a senior and captain of the team.
Strong and Peters worked to get all of the club’s administrative ducks in a row, and the club is now in its second season.
Peters gained a passion for the sport during his days as an undergraduate in Michigan (he’s originally from Detroit). He played even into his graduate school years and started the club at UC in 2018.
“I love the kids that I’ve got to watch grow up from freshmen to graduation and beyond and watch them really develop as not only dodgeball players but also as human beings and adults, and it’s been super rewarding,” Peters said.
The club competes primarily as part of the National Collegiate Dodgeball Association, which focuses on university-based clubs throughout the country. There are currently about 40 teams in the association, all of which are student-run.
The season runs the length of the academic year, and the teams compete in regional sub-divisions; NKU plays in the south region. Each year culminates in regional and then national championships.
Matches are played on basketball courts with up to 12 players per team at a time. Matches are split into two 25-minute halves, and there’s a 15-second shot clock. A player has to throw (but not necessarily hit an opposing team member) before the clock hits zero.
Failure to make a shot results in that team forfeiting its balls. Everything else is what you remember from high school: hit an opponent to get them out; catch an opponent’s throw to get one of your own team members back. Eliminating everyone on the opposing team gets your team a point. Whoever has the most points at the end of the second half wins. Ties go into overtime.
There’s a good amount of strategy that goes into winning a match; it’s not just everyone running around throwing balls without any team coordination. Strong throwers tend to stand in the front of a formation to both pick off opposing team members and defend the rest of the team. Strong catchers, on the other hand, tend to stand behind to catch any balls that make it past the initial defensive line.
Practices include work on formations and throwing technique, but the best way to learn to play the game is good ol’ fashioned trial and error.
“There’s some scrimmages” during practice, Strong said, “but then there’s catching drills, and then there’s trying to work on your aim and then we work on throwing.”
“Any kid who has a baseball or softball background – and that’s guys or girls – are the people that I would like to target first,” Peters said about recruiting new players as they tend to already have developed solid throwing technique (although students without that background can often be trained to become good throwers, too, Peters said).
Another organization called the National Dodgeball Association also runs tournaments outside of the school year, so even during the summer, the players have something to do. They also allow players of all ages to stay involved with the sport after they graduate.
Overall, it’s about building community and having fun, Theissen and Strong said.
“It’s meant to be taken serious during the matches and stuff, but a lot of times during practice it’s just for fun,” Theissen said. “It’s just trying to build a community at the college, get people who aren’t as good at normal sports, like basketball [and] baseball. It kind of gives them an opportunity to do a sport that they’re used to, that they played in high school.”
“That’s the biggest thing about it, is just have fun and meet people,” Strong said. “It’s sometimes scary when you see how fast the people throw, but, like we said, not everybody has to play. You can just come and have fun and hang out. You get a jersey and feel a part of a team.”
Check out the club’s Instagram page to learn more.