Valerie Sherman remembers with fear her experiences during physical education classes.
“I hated dodgeball because the boys tried to knock my head off,” said Sherman, now 32, of her K-12 school days. “If you’re an adult, fine, but I don’t think your children should be playing.”
And now, for the most part, they aren’t. Many schools nationwide have banned dodgeball in recent years.
Should it brought back back to schools? And will it be part of school memories again?
“I went to a phys-ed conference (recently) and I told the teachers there in five years I’ll be doing a session on integrating dodgeball into the curriculum,” said Rob Immel, a physical education teacher in New York, who is also a member of the New York Epic, a professional dodgeball team. “I think it’s grown that well. A lot of students want to play it.”
The fire under dodgeball burned hottest in the mid-to-late 1990s, spilling over into this decade when schools decided to do more than just condemn it. The physical education community targeted it.
“I think back to the PE that I had, and there wasn’t a lot of good feelings,” said Zach Foubert, physical education teacher at Arapahoe Ridge Elementary in Westminster. “If you weren’t at the top of the mountain, it wasn’t for you. And then as soon as you could avoid taking it, you did.
“That’s what we’re trying to get away from. We’re trying to build positive feelings and social interactions with physical activity. So, when students leave and move on with the rest of their education and on into adulthood, they have positive feelings about physical activity and will choose to do those.”
Foubert does not include dodgeball in his classes. He said he got rid of it six years ago and since then has seen a discernible difference in the attitude and participation of his students.
“There’s much more positive feelings, the students are much more interested in physical activity and doing things on their own time, and that’s my goal,” he said.
A groundswell in favor of getting dodgeball back into school phys-ed curriculums came after the release and subsequent popularity of the movie “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” in 2004.
The National Association for Sport & Physical Education was deluged with media calls wondering why the game was getting banned.
In 2006, NASPE released a position paper on the subject, which, in part, read: “The students who are eliminated first in dodgeball are typically the ones who most need to be active and practice their skills. Many times these students are also the ones with the least amount of confidence in their physical abilities. Being targeted because they are the ‘weaker’ players, and being hit by a hard-thrown ball, does not help kids to develop confidence.”
Francesca Zavacky, senior program manager at NASPE and a former physical education teacher, said the organization’s position has not changed. When Zavacky was teaching, she recalls getting pressure from parents to put dodgeball back in the physical education class.
“I was at a school that it was all they played when I got there,” Zavacky said. “And usually the parents that really enjoyed it, when you asked them what they liked about it, it was the aggressive nature, the bullying aspect, the ability to be better than somebody else was more of what they were after, not the skill development part. So it reminds you of how misdirected the activity is.”
Still, dodgeball is creeping back in, though not in its original form. Immel’s school, Wood Road Intermediate in Ballston Spa, N.Y., banned the sport and plays an altered version called “Survivor.” The student teams have a 15-foot buffer zone between them, they use small, gator-skin balls, and those who are hit do jumping jacks and are allowed back in the game.
“The game lasts forever and everybody wins,” Immel said. “I tell you, I can go out in the hallway right now and ask any student what’s their favorite unit, and they’re going to say ‘Survivor.’ As a teacher, and as an athlete, I never want to make a student a target. That’s never the objective. I don’t want to hurt a student’s confidence.”
Chris Dempsey: 303-954-1279 or cdempsey@denverpost.com
