Southport Magazine

We all, at least those of us of a certain age I suppose, remember playground recess kickball games. That red ball. You known the one. The same ball used for the dreaded dodgeball death matches, but this time just rolling towards you in an entirely unthreatening manner. All you had to do was kick the thing and run. My kind of sport, really. As a hand-eye coordination challenged child (and adult) baseball wasn’t my thing at all, but kickball, that I could play. And I wasn’t even picked last most of the time because I could run! I have fond memories of kickball. 

Fit forward a few decades and I’m a relatively well-adjusted adult with a real job and all, working and paying bills and mowing the grass (sometimes) and doing all the Very Serious Adult Things. Kickball was not one of these. Until the lovely and talented Lisa came home from work (as a reporter for the State Port Pilot where one of her beats was the Oak Island police log) and announced that we’d been invited to join the Oak Island Police Department Adult Kickball League team. I snapped back to those playground days when kickball was pretty much the one “sport” I could play and jumped at the chance to re-live those days. 

It never occurred to me that kickball might not agree with a body that hadn’t been running around at recess everyday in quite some time. Matter of fact, once gym class stopped forcing me to, I had decided running should be reserved for those times when a man with a knife was chasing you. Or maybe zombies (but just the fast kind, I could out walk a Night of the Living Dead zombie). Nor did it occur to me that my catching and throwing skills had not improved from their dismal state of my youth. Nope, I though kickball was a perfect way to get out there’d do the sports thing. 

As it turned out, we ended up on exactly the right team for us. We were all in it for the fun and nostalgia. We’d all roll up on game nights, some of us, including me, often straight from work, quickly sort out some idea of who would cover what position, and off we went into competition. Some of that competition took things more seriously. I’m looking at you Oak Island Fire Department. They actually practiced. And, I think, strategized. Strategy in kickball? To each his own, I guess. 

But us, nope, we went out and played and laughed and generally made fools of ourselves. I became known for my heroic crawl over home plate after tripping over thin air on my way from third base. At the time it made sense. Staying low would make me a more difficult target for any attempts to throw me out. And, of course, crawling is much easier than standing up. A teammate announced loudly in the middle of a play that he’d “broken his spleen.” Lisa made a Sports Illustrated-worthy catch simply because NOT catching the ball would have hurt and she wasn’t having that.  

I don’t recall if we ever actually won a game. 

But that wasn’t the point, at least not to me, and I think, to my teammates. We had a blast. We got outside and enjoyed beautiful spring evenings with a view of the ocean and the company of friends. We got some sort of exercise. We remembered that kickball may not have been as easy as our memories told us. But we remembered, also, why we loved it as children. It was still fun. 

That was one of the first seasons the Oak Island ran an adult kickball league, but it has proven popular and they are still going strong today. If you’d like to relive the kickball glory days of your youth, or just get out and have a ton of fun, sign-ups are going on now via the Oak Island Recreation Department. You may sign up as team or as a free agent up until April 1 using the link on the little graphic accompanying this article. Go ahead, do it. You know you want to.