In high school they spent their lunchtime with the hobby of playing dodgeball. Now at Ohio State, these six men have taken their high school pastime to the next level – the intramural level.
This quarter marked the first quarter that the OSU Office of Recreational Sports recognized dodgeball as an intramural sport. When Curt Thompson, a sophomore in integrated social studies, found out about the opportunity to join the league, he told his former high school teammates from Parkway High School about it.
That was the beginning of team O’Doyle, an OSU intramural dodgeball team formed by Thompson and the other five men from Parkway High School.
“It just goes back a few years so we decided to put a team together and keep it going,” said team member Ryan Thompson, a junior in integrated social studies. “We all played dodgeball together in grade school through high school, and now here we are in college.”
Thompson, along with other teammates, competed for the championship title of intramural dodgeball at 7 p.m. on Sunday at Larkins Hall in the Blue Gym where they played regularly.
Curt and Ryan Thompson have spent the last month taking the court along with sophomores Bill Rumple and Jared Hayes and juniors Bryan Smalley and Mike Moloney. In league along with four other teams, they represented only a portion of OSU students that played dodgeball this spring.
The rules were simple – try to hit as many of the opposing team’s players without hitting anyone in the head and avoiding having the ball caught since they caused the thrower to be taken out of the game. Keeping this in mind, Team O’Doyle adopted fresh strategies to accomplish the goal of eliminating the players on the other side of the court.
“A lot of times we tried to distract the other team by throwing balls at different angles or kicking the balls so that we could throw a low, fast, straight ball,” said Hayes, team captain. “We tried to aim low at the ankles.”
These strategies, along with the team’s athletic ability, allowed team O’Doyle to move into the semi-finals after beating out two teams including league member – the Gapes, 5-3 – Sunday night. During the regular season, scoring was based on the number of team wins, however in the tournament, a team had to win the best of nine games to move on.
“The second team we played – the Gapes – were kind of our arch enemy because we had pretty heated games against them,” Hayes said. “We had played them before the tournament, but the other two teams we had not played before.”
The championship game was a combination of teams from each league. The teams that Team O’Doyle competed against in the first round and semifinals had played on a different league throughout the regular season.
A chant of “O’Doyle rules!” started off the day’s competition for team O’Doyle. It would take its place on one side of the court and at the call of the referee, its members would run to the half court line and collect as many of the four rubber balls before the opponents did. Many times this turned into a vicious struggle between the players as they wrestled each other to the ground, trying to gain the edge and steal the weapon away.
During the sixth game in the first round, one of these struggles ended in a punch being thrown at Rumple. The referee had to ask the instigator from the opposing team to leave the premises, and Team O’Doyle responded by beating out the foes on the court.
In each game, play started out slow. Each team held the ball and waited for the right time to attack. Most opportunities came when one side controlled the ammunition during which time team O’Doyle showed the most strength.
“I did a lot of trying to deceive the other team,” Ryan Thompson said. “I would throw the ball up in the air, trying to get them to look at it, and then have one of our harder throwers try to pick the guys off while they were following the ball.”
Hayes and Rumple were the harder throwers, while Smalley’s role for the team was catching balls thrown by their opponents. The team members were able to respond to each other having played together in the past.
“We understood what each person’s limits were,” Curt Thompson said. “Knowing everybody’s limits helped so we didn’t ask for too much out of each other.”
However, this did not help them much in the semifinals when fatigue kicked in. Team O’Doyle fell 0-5 in its last match of the season.
Hayes said other teams had advantages over them.
“The last team we played was awesome. They could wing balls like I have never seen before,” Hayes said. “They play on another dodgeball league every Monday and Thursday throughout the year though.
“With dodgeball there is not too much strategy. It is just winging the balls at each other, so we really didn’t practice,” he said. “We would get here a little early before our games to warm up and throw balls at each other.”
