Let us start this discussion of informal sports with three of the more popular, and more known, of the informal sports. The first of these is dodgeball. Dodgeball is a game where you throw a ball at someone on the other team and if you hit them, and they don’t catch the ball or dodge out of the way of it, then they are out. Back in 2004 the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story brought about a new level of popularity to the game that it had not previously enjoyed. Along with various amateur and professional dodgeball associations, dodgeball is also played at the college level as an informal collegiate competition. While dodgeball is under attack for being a tool of the school bully to beat up on the weaker children in school with the school’s consent, it is none the less a growing informal sport.

Stacking cups is also an informal sport. Referred to by people inside the sport as stacking, cup stacking has started to take on a life of its own by spawning not only the World Sport Stacking Association but also an official world championship cup stacking game for kids available in toy stores around the country. There is also a world stacking championships where the competitors try and beat each others’ times for stacking in certain formations. On top of helping to improve hand-eye coordination, stacking cups is also a great way to stack cups all over the world and meet a whole bunch of other people that also like to stack cups all over the world.

Another surprising informal sport is the informal sport of pogo stick jumping. After doing some research on cup stacking being a sport of any kind I was ready for anything when I started to look up pogo sticks. Wow have pogo sticks come a long way since I was a kid. I remember a cheap little metal pogo stick with a spring that would break if you weighed over 90 pounds. The weight limit has increased and so has the number of springs on the stick. They call it extreme pogo now and these new pogo sticks are incredible. Now people do flips and stunts on pogo sticks and things I would have never dreamed of. Do yourself a favor and watch some pogo stick videos on Youtube and prepare to be amazed.

Remember playing kickball in the school yard at recess when you were a kid? Did you ever think that, as an adult, you would have the option to join the World Adult Kickball Association? Well the World Adult Kickball Association, or WAKA as it is known, is the world’s foremost sanctioning body of kickball tournaments around the world and has been so since 1998. That’s right, adults play professional kickball all over the world and they can also compete for the Founder’s Cup in the WAKA world kickball championship. In 2007 they are holding the Founder’s Cup championship in the beautiful city of Boston, MA. Upon further review I see that the WAKA has no team in my town and I may have to look up my old grade school friends and see if they want to start a world championship kickball team. The more I think about it the more I really start to like the idea of the category of informal sports.