No Pain, No Game

For Teenagers in Rockville, Dodgeball Hits the Spot

Phillip Jasper saw his chance. His older brother, Michael, was on the other side of the tennis court. He grabbed a melon-sized rubber ball and flung it toward him.

What Phillip didn't see was another ball heading in his direction. Until it drilled him in the lower jaw.

He fell, writhing in pain, his hand massaging his face. Then he picked himself up and walked off the court. His 17-year-old brother was untouched.

"That hurt a lot," the 15-year-old said. In a few minutes, though, he was back on the court.

There's nothing genteel about summer dodgeball at Tilden Woods Park in Rockville. When the sun goes down and the lights go on, about 40 teenagers, male and female, line up on opposite ends of the court with a simple goal: hit one another with a rubber ball. Hard.

There are no referees, no time limits, no over-caffeinated parents trolling the sidelines. The rules are minimal. Each night, they play as many as 20 games, but no one really keeps count. They don't wear helmets or kneepads. Sometimes 40 show up; sometimes a dozen. Sometimes they play on weekends; sometimes they don't. People come and go as they please.

"This is the place to be at night," Phillip said.

In a county where many teenagers are fully booked with internships, camps or full-time jobs over the summer, these young men and women relish the moment each night when they can get together for some unstructured fun. At Tilden Woods, the evenings evoke an era when kids had to use their imaginations to fill the time when school was out.

"It's nice to play dodgeball after a stressful day of sick animals," said Phillip, a student at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda who is a veterinary technician this summer at a Montgomery County animal hospital.

Most nights, they start about 8:30, taking breaks only when the lights go out for a few minutes each hour. They quit when the lights turn off for good at 11.

Once a playground favorite, dodgeball's popularity plummeted when schools across the country deemed it too dangerous for gym class. The Rockville teenagers play the game like this: You get hit, you stand behind the players on the opposing team. You're back in if you hit one of them. A team loses when all its players are on the other side.

The sport has made a comeback, particularly among adults, thanks largely to last year's hit film "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story."