Join the craze: Spike Ball’s Club’s devoted following
“Spikeball has always been in my blood,” said Sam Cavanagh, vice president of the new and rapidly growing ARHS Spikeball Club. In fact, when he first played in elementary school, he said it was “love at first sight.”
For Presidents Spencer McDonald and Alden Pope, a goal this year is to increase the popularity of this underrated, competitive sport while also having a great time and relieving stress at the end of a hard school day.
The Spikeball Club just started out as a small group of friends that wanted to play a fun game during flex block with inspiration from technology teacher Lee Larcaveque’s Pitchnut Club, but it ended up growing into something much larger than expected. “We wanted to just chill and play spikeball at the end of the day with some buddies, but it ended up turning into a whole community, ” McDonald said.
The Spikeball Club meets in the gym or outside (depending on the weather) during Monday and Wednesday flex blocks and is supervised by PE teacher Matt Travis, though they are hoping to add additional blocks. “It was really a no-brainer when it came to choosing the advisor for our club, Mr. Travis has always been there for us,” McDonald said.
The club currently draws a max of 20-25 people per meeting, but 30-35 different people have shown up. The presidents are planning to buy more spikeball nets so the maximum number of people per meeting can increase.
They have had problems in the past with breaking nets or nets that lack the consistent bounce needed for this highly competitive sport. Some short term goals they have include mini-tournaments in the Spikeball Club to make it more competitive.
These tournaments are planned to have buy-ins so they can afford more nets and expand their club. “We also plan to use the recordings we take to make highlight reels in the future to sell,” McDonald said.
Not only does the Spikeball Club have a leaderboard they also have a complicated weighted ranking system based on win percentage and strength of schedule. They post these results on the presidents’ independently-run Instagram account.
“We created this scoring system so we could have multiple different factors to evaluate how good each player is, in our club and make it more competitive,” McDonald said.
After winning back-to-back tournaments, senior Spencer Waite has earned the number one rank on the leaderboard. “It’s great to be ranked number one I have earned it through a lot of hard work and practice,” Waite said. “Being number one means everyone wants to beat so personally it brings more competition to the club for me.”
Vice president Cavanagh describes spikeball as not only a sport but its own “vibe.”
“During the summer we would go to the meadow. There would be a beautiful sunset on the horizon, we would all be barefoot, with the spikeball net in the middle and music playing on a speaker,” he said. “I have no bad memories of playing spikeball, even when I am losing it is still fun.”
