I was pleased to see kids engaged in Street Ball; it’d been a while. Street Ball is a catchall term for any ball-based game played in the street. Maybe some catch with a football or baseball. Perhaps a bit of 3-on-3 basketball with a portable hoop rolled to the curb. Soccer. Street Hockey. Possibly a kid-invented game like I observed 10 or 12 times over the course of a couple of weeks.

It was a customized game of kickball. There were 3 bases: Home, First, and Second. There were also some goals: a plastic milk crate, a cardboard box, and a recycling bin. Usually, there were 4 kids per team, but the number went up and down.

Some rules I was able to suss out in my observations and a few passing questions:

• Three outs for each team per inning
• If an outfielder caught a kicked ball one-handed before it bounced, it was an automatic 3 outs
• If a kicker made it around the bases, they earned 1 point
• If a kicker kicked the ball into one of the goals, they earned multiple points: 100 points for the milk crate, 10 points for the other goals
• Automatic time-out for passing cars
• Kids under 5 got to kick a still ball from home base, older kids had the ball pitched to them

Players ranged in age from 3 to 12. Older kids handled the pitching and refereeing. There was lots of cheering and yelling, plenty of laughing, and a bit of bickering. I saw this street ball game after school and on weekends for maybe 20 days. Then it was gone.

Street Ball Wrap Up

Back in the day, we played a lot of street ball since it was so convenient on our lightly trafficked street. Most of our base-based games happened in someone’s backyard or on a nearby empty lot. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

I didn’t know it then, but there was so much learning happening. Practicing self-regulation, negotiating rules and their enforcement, honing conversational skills, and reading body language, to name but a few. There’s a huge difference between playing kid-made games like this version of street ball and being involved in an adult-organized, adult-managed, adult-scheduled sport. The former is almost always real play and the latter is nearly always a play-like activity.

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