Recession Recess

When stocks fall, dodgeball!

Two young women brandishing tall Bud Light cans walk briskly across the baseball diamond at Tempe’s Papago Park and stop to ask Shana Schwarz a question.

“Do you have our t-shirts?” asks the blonde.

Adds the brunette, “We’re the Horny Devils!”

Schwarz rifles through a row of well-organized boxes on the bench in the dugout and returns with an armful of maroon jerseys with the words “AZ Fire” emblazoned across the front pocket and the saucy team name printed across the back.

“Cool!” say the women, as Schwarz dutifully notes their receipt of the uniforms on her clipboard. “Awesome!”

Schwarz, a twenty-something West Phoenix native who manages the southwest region of WAKA, the World Adult Kickball Association, never imagined she’d be making a living managing kickball, the P.E. activity that brightened her days in elementary school.
“I always get the weirdest looks when I tell people what I do,” she admits. “My parents still tease me about it – ‘When will you get a grown-up job?’ You know?

“But this is my paid position,” she says, proudly. “I run the WAKA leagues for Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota and Louisiana. And I love it. I absolutely love it!”

Across the country, adults in their 20s, 30s and beyond are embracing the playground sports of their youth like never before. Kickball leads the pack of kiddie games gone legit – the ten-year-old WAKA league now boasts over 49,000 registered players in 28 states (including some 1,200 in the Valley, according to Schwarz) – but dodgeball, ping pong, capture the flag and even paper-rock-scissors now have their grown-up zealots, and savvy entrepreneurs are spinning adult twists on old kids’ favorites that cater to this arrested development.

An adult-sized, high-performance pogo stick called the Flybar can now be had (for upwards of $250) at retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods, and a Phoenix businessman is now promoting a six-sided ping pong table for a new sport he calls “Hexapong.”

Call it a recess from the recession, an escape from the mounting worries of adulthood – layoffs, foreclosures, a plummeting stock market – by returning to the schoolyard sports of more carefree days.

In his 2006 book, Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up, Christopher Noxon, a journalist who began playing kickball with friends in Los Angeles, tagged the sport as part of a new phenomenon: Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers aggressively co-opting kiddie culture as “a way of maintaining wonder, trust, and silliness in a world where these qualities are often in short supply.”

Jenna Farmer, a college student who represents the Glendale and Scottsdale divisions of WAKA, admits to being something of a “rejuvenile” herself (other labels that have been attached to the group include “kidults,” “adultolescents” and “boomerangers”).

Whether or not this “‘self-conscious cultivation of immaturity,” as one social scientist put it, is just an excuse to delay traditional adulthood (as many others have), the fact is, many of these post-grad Peter Pans are actually beginning to forge careers in what could be called professionalized playground games. In 2005, WAKA began grossing over a million dollars a year from its $65-per-player annual membership fees. And ever since the 2004 Ben Stiller comedy, Dodgeball, hundreds of adult dodgeball leagues have sprung up around the U.S..

For Shana Schwarz, whose husband, Mark, also manages Tempe’s AZ Fire division of WAKA, the newly created job opportunity is a dream come true.

“We’re expecting our first baby in April, which is why I took a job working from home,” she says. “I’d worked in other fields, like advertising, but I always loved kickball. So this is truly the best job in the world for me.”

All Shapes and Sizes

Sam Pewitt insists he was never a bully in grade school, even though the Scottsdale bartender, who stands 6’6” tall and weighs 210 pounds, was always a formidable force on the playground.

“I could always throw pretty hard, but I was also a bigger target,” he says. “So the smaller guys, they could run around quicker and catch the ball, getting me ‘out.’”

Nevertheless, the 26-year-old who runs AZ Dodgeball, the Valley’s only dodgeball league, admits some potential members are scared off from joining adult dodgeball by the thought that the bully who always nailed them in third grade will return as a corporate tyrant, bigger and badder than ever.

“Now that we’re adults, it’s really not like that,” Pewitt insists. “It’s a co-ed league, so we’ve got little 100-pound girls that come and play, along with guys my size. But everybody has an absolute blast. It’s not like the bullies picking on the little kids.”

Indeed, boosters of adult playground games say the only people to avoid in returning to kiddie sports are the whiners who insist on doing everything by the guidelines their P.E. teachers laid down when they were eight.

“Those who would have been the bullies in elementary school are now the ‘rules lawyers,’” says Mat Montgomery, representative for WAKA’s AZ Scorch division in Tempe. “They’re the folks who go out and make sure that every call is right. The people who are in tune with every aspect of the game, and have to let everybody know whenever some minute detail is overlooked.”

Pewitt says the real divisions in adult playground sports fall between barflies just looking for a more active social scene and frustrated former jocks who take the games perhaps a bit too seriously.

“Most people use it as a social outlet, but there are people who take it really, really seriously, and consider it something that could become an Olympic sport,” says Pewitt, who places himself in the latter category. “It’s a great way to get out of the house and typical bar scene to meet people and have a great time. But dodgeball is also very competitive, and there are people who definitely play to win. You get what you want to out of it.”

Those hoping to rekindle warm memories of their childhood may be in for a shock when signing up for adult dodgeball or kickball, however.

“There’s a weird duality, because you’ve got what amounts to a child’s game – very simple, easy rules, you don’t have to be terribly athletic to participate,” says Montgomery, a Web developer who started his league with a few of his college pals who were into improvisational comedy. “But it’s always mixed with some very adult activities. Playing ‘flip-cup’ before and after the game at the designated division bar is just one of those,” he says, referring to the team-based drinking relay race that has become as important in both kickball and dodgeball as the action on the field. “But trust me, it gets much raunchier than that!”

Ping Pong With a Twist

At a computer repair shop in a northwest Phoenix strip mall, six college guys on winter break from the University of Arizona are trying out a brand new game called “Hexapong,” a variation of ping pong using a hexagonal table that allows up to six players to battle each other at once, or as two teams of three.

While each of the young men are self-professed video game junkies who seldom engage in old-school physical sports, the novelty of playing a game they remember from elementary school with a new, “extreme” twist keeps them interested for nearly three hours.

Guy Allen, a Phoenix surveying consultant who invented the game about three years ago as a way to get more of his friends simultaneously playing ping pong, a favorite pastime, says he’s seen that reaction nearly every time he sets up the table. But finding rejuveniles with $625 to spend on an amped-up ping pong table that measures a little over nine feet in diameter has proven particularly challenging for Allen.

“I get a lot of people saying it’s cool, they want one. But then I never hear from them again,” laments Allen, who says he’s loaned his three prototype tables to YMCAs, Valley parks, fire stations, biker bars and ritzy resorts in an effort to find the right market for his unusual product. “It’s just been hard getting it to the right people.”

Allen’s wife, Vicki, says the couple wasted about a year trying to market the stop-sign-shaped table to traditional table-tennis fans, most of which viewed the variation as an abomination of their strictly defined sport.

“We finally realized that they’re just not into this,” says Vicki, who notes they’ve trucked the table to the U.S. Table Tennis Open in Las Vegas and have blogged in online forums dedicated to the game with fans from China, Hungary, Germany, Italy and the UK. “It was a costly year, and very discouraging.”

The couple finally decided to focus on the college and recent college grads crowd, who’ve proven the most receptive. Problem is, says Guy, most fund-strapped colleges want the tables donated, and twentysomethings are notoriously tight with their limited disposable income.

While schoolyard sports may be proving a welcome distraction from the harsh realities of adulthood, clearly the troubled economy is affecting the innovators in this new market as well.

“We’re thinking of marketing it to the beer pong crowd,” says Allen, with noticeable resignation. “Who knows? That might be the best avenue for this.”