Game(s) of the Week: Bombardment and Prisonball

To discuss my old elementary school recess games of bombardment and prison ball, both played on a full-court outdoor asphalt basketball court with those red inflatable bouncy balls and two bowling pins and involving the entire class at once, I read back on this blog and discovered I had already written an article covering it all...so with the author's (my) permission, I have copied that August, 2007 piece and pasted it below:

When I was going to elementary school from the fourth through sixth grades, we had our customary recess/physical education period. And one of the games we used to play was Bombardment. This game used the typical outside, asphalt-surfaced, full basketball court, but instead of using the baskets, a bowling pin was placed underneath each basket on opposite ends of the court. The class was divided into two sides, each side relegated to one half of the court. The object of the game was to knock down the opposing team’s pin using those red, lightweight basketball-sized balls (usually with about four or five used per game) that were commonly used in elementary schools. In the process of the game, if someone got hit by a ball thrown by the other side before it bounced, they’d be out of the game (until the next game started). Unless they caught the ball, in which the opponent who threw it would be out of the game. So, as a game of Bombardment went on, fewer and fewer players would be actively involved, while more and more would be off the court. While “out” of the game, students would often make up their own games, talk with each other, or play on the monkey bars nearby. Apparently, to the faculty involved in overseeing this, that meant too much student freedom and not enough control, so a new game was later devised and called Prisonball. It was exactly the same as Bombardment, except that when you were “out”, instead of leaving the game, you had to stand in a small square inset on the opponent’s end of the court and wait for a ball to come to you (which rarely happened). If you were lucky and got hold of a ball, you then had to hit one of the opposing players with it to be “redeemed” and go back to your end to play. Can you guess what happened? As the game wore on, more and more players became “prisoners” and were cramped together, sometimes resembling “Black Hole of Calcutta” conditions, in the respective “prison” squares (with the more aggressive students jostling with others for positions on the outside). But this misery for the students was joy for the faculty, who once again had the students all under their thumbs. And it got to be that, at the beginning of a game, a teacher would loudly proclaim that it was to be Prisonball, not Bombardment. So one of my favorite games at school quickly turned into my most hated game there. Those responsible for this could control my participation, but they couldn’t control the contempt I felt for them then. It just made me, in the long run, less trusting of any school authority and more likely to go down my own paths, for better or for worse.