Gaga Ball

For the past month we have been in Florida at the Ragan’s Family Campground attending a Full Time Families rally. The campground is quite large in comparison to other campgrounds we have been. It has a pool, with a separate lazy river and a really tall water slide. It also has a fairly large mini golf area, many playgrounds, a pavilion and two Gaga Ball pits. For the first two weeks I went down to the pits almost every day to play, so now that it’s time to write another post I decided to write about the game.

Not everyone reading may have heard of Gaga Ball, so first I will talk a little about the basic rules, and a little bit about it’s origin. The game is a variation of dodge ball the originated in Israel. It is played in an enclosed pit with a single ball. To get people out you hit the ball towards them and try to hit below the knees. If you hit above them the person is still in, although occasionally it is played where you only have to hit below the waist. If you touch the ball you are not allowed to touch it again until another player touches it or it touches the walls. If you hit the ball hard enough for it to go out of the pit then you are out. There are many variations, but these are the most basic and standard rules.

Gaga Ball is so popular here that a kid actually set up two tournaments with an entrance fee and cash prizes! I was part of a team which consisted of three people, myself and two other boys named Mattias and Eli. We had to have a team name so I suggested team JEM because it had the first letter of all of our first names. We did extremely well and we would have won, but for some reason the judge was allowed to be on a team, and unfortunately the hit wasn’t clear enough for it to be indisputable, so we lost. I was and still am pretty upset about the loss.

The second tournament was smaller, but more fair because the judge was not allowed to join a team. My team also had one additional member, a kid named Manny, so now we were team JEMM. This time was super close, but again we got second place, although I think we would have done better if we hadn’t done it at night. The most unfortunate part of this though was that both my team and the winners of the second tournament would have gotten to participate in the adults tournament, but I got sick the day after so I couldn’t. I still had a ton of fun, but I wish we could have won at least one of them.

In the time since the second tournament there have been way less kids playing Gaga ball. I think that people have just gotten a little tired of it, which is unfortunate, but I had tons of fun playing while it lasted. It is a very fun game that I really enjoy, I would play it way more if you didn’t need a very specific stadium to play it, but I guess that is just how it is, and it definitely makes when I do get to play way more fun.