The Bombardment of Blitzball

There are eight rules to Blitzball.

The first rule:

“If it is your first night out, you have to play,” sophomore Tristan Connelly said.

The remaining seven rules are not quite as clear.

“Pretty much, it’s anything goes,” Connelly said. “As long as you don’t hit from behind.”

Bliztball is a full contact sport that combines football with rugby played by two seven member teams, although the game is played with whoever shows up.

“Sometimes we have 10 players on each team,” Connelly said. “Sometimes we have four.”

The game begins with one team kicking a deflated soccer ball to the other team, similar to a punt in football. The receiving team returns the kickoff, players collide and any semblance of order disappears.

The only rule that appears to survive the melee is how a team scores.

“You have to catch the ball in the end zone,” Connelly said. “You can’t run it in like in football.”

To win, a team must score 10 goals and has to win by two goals.

Blitzball is played four nights a week with normally two games a night.

“We play until either the resident director shuts us down or we’re too tired to keep playing,” freshman Mike Taylor said.

But if the action is not enough, Blitzball comes complete with its own cheering section.

“Me and the other girls are Blitzball cheerleaders,” said freshman Valerie Blum, the self-proclaimed spokesperson for Blitzball.

Blum and the other fans watch the action from blankets spread across the sidewalk. They cheer, and sometimes heckle, the players and share a few laughs.

“Most of us are friends,” Blum said. “I think it’s funny because they just like to hit each other.”

Blitzball started when a group of students got bored of soccer one night and wanted to play something different.

“A couple of the guys said, ‘Hey let’s play rugby,’ but we didn’t have the field space or enough guys, so I told them about this game,” Taylor said.

Taylor may have introduced GC&SU to Blitzball, but he admits it was not his brainchild.

“I got it from a high school football coach,” Taylor said. “It was a conditioning game, but we changed the rules a little bit to make it more fun.”

For Connelly, it is not just about having fun, but having fun here on campus.

“The nearest sport that I’ve played here is rugby and that’s in Macon,” Connelly said. “I’d have to drive 40 minutes to practice maybe once a week and we might have games on the weekend. Here we play four nights a week.”

So what is it about Blitzball that has students spending their nights running up and down a field for nothing more than the chance to hit and get hit?

“It’s a good way to just have fun and blow off steam after classes,” Taylor said.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 22 2005. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry