By Andrew ’22
Students at the Middle School can participate in over twenty interscholastic sports. Many communities and valuable relationships grow from these diverse athletic opportunities. One sport, however, unites the entire campus. Serious athletes and casual players, seventh graders and ninth graders, students and teachers all come together to compete and cheer each other on during this intramural sport’s two-month spring season.
What could this awesome sport be? Here’s a clue. Its most essential skills can be summarized with this helpful mnemonic: The Five D’s – “dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge.”
This magnificent sporting event is the incomparable Harvard-Westlake Dodgeball Tournament at the Middle School. Each spring, 32 teams compete in the hopes of advancing through the bracket and winning the championship. The victorious team is immortalized by a plaque that hangs in the hallowed halls of the Hazy Center, where hundreds of students walk by each day.
The Dodgeball Tournament is a community-building experience through and through. Students create their own teams of six players, and joining a team is a great opportunity to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones. During my time as a dodgeball player, I found that most of my teammates weren’t my closest friends but classmates I didn’t always get to connect with on a daily basis. Through mutual friends and a shared passion for dodgeball, we became not only teammates but also closer friends. A large part of the tournament’s magic comes from the fact that the dodgeball court is an entirely different environment than the classroom. This is especially true in regard to faculty members. Each team can have one adult player on its roster, and many faculty members take this opportunity to showcase their dodgeball skills. During the school day, the student body typically only interacts teachers and staff in classrooms or offices, so it’s exciting to see them on the dodgeball court, just as excited about the game as students.
Going to a dodgeball game is thrilling. Matches are held during all-community break periods on the campus’s outdoor basketball courts. Before each game, a large crowd of students and faculty files onto the court, surrounding the playing area. During the game, excited spectators cheer on their favorite teams, discuss a team’s chances of winning, and debate referees’ calls. The entire arena buzzes with enthusiasm throughout each match’s three rounds. Countless highlight reel moments, from skillful sidesteps to pivotal catches, get the crowd cheering with an energy matched only by the roars at a Homecoming game.
What makes the spectating experience so unique, however, are the traditions passed down from nearly two decades of the dodgeball tournament. Ninth graders, the role models on campus, lead by example and pass on these traditions to the younger grades. For example, one lasting tradition is the “Pterodactyl”. When only one player is left on a team, the crowd starts chanting, “Pterodactyl!”, encouraging the player to execute this fan-favorite move of throwing two balls at once, a motion similar to a pterodactyl’s flight. Another popular tradition is the “Sudden Death” round. When a game seems like it’s going to go over the allotted time of the break period, the referees announce the start of “Sudden Death”. The students on the far sides of the court walk inwards, shortening the arena and raising the stakes. In this intense setting, some of the most spectacular plays and upsets occur. The following year, the new ninth grade class will transmit these traditions and establish new ones of their own. These parts of the tournament are wholly unique to the HW Dodgeball tournament, and they make you feel part of a larger community at HW, past and present.
