Managers Unite, Prepare to Send Kickball a Message

Kickball Continues to Encroach While Softball Players Posture for Confrontation.
July 1, 2009

Washington, DC - Skirmishes have already been breaking out across the city so far this season as the young kickball league attempts to assert itself on the longstanding softball tradition in the nations capitol. Some incidents have even involved lying about permits, ghost field holders, and in one case the police were called. While some people ponder what has to be going through the heads of the brazen kickball players as they continue to push the issue against an army of softball players armed with bats and very hard round balls, lets take a deeper look at this territorial conundrum.

Softball has been a long standing tradition in this country and especially here in this city so full of patriotic symbolism and heritage. Baseball is known the world over as "America's Game" and softball is the common American athlete's past time. Employing creativity and determination, softball teams have carved out chunks of field just big enough to squeeze a field or two in all over Washington. Playing with trees, apartment buildings, swamps and tourists are just a few of the hazards these dedicated slowpitch samurai are willing to take on. Life was tough but good for the softball leagues, until the last few years.

Since the movie Dodgeball was unleashed on the public, there has been a severe rash of adults rushing to create "grown-up" versions of middle shool games. The latest and most popular of these shoolyard scourges is none other than Kickball, or WAKA (Washington Area Kickball Association) as it is known here in DC. Annointing themselves the new official beer league, a point also protested by softball players, the kickballers have gone a step further, they want the land. Like an invading army they have tried again and again to breach and overcome the various softball leagues foothold on the National Mall.

Kickballers have used every trick in the book in their unscrupled attempts to disenfranchise interns from their squatting grounds on the mall. In some instances these underhanded tactics succeed when they find the unsuspecting newby field holder, but in most cases softball teams are prepared and successfully rebuff these advances. Players on both sides are so willing to go to the mats for the land to play on, that in one case involving the Montana softball team, the police were called in to settle the dispute. If that doesn't testify to the brazenness of the kickballers intrusion, Sen. Tester was actaully present at the game when the police arrive on the scene.

So what is there to be done about this clash of competitors? The answer is simple. Softball has the history, the following, the manpower and the aluminum bats, move on kickball, move on. While softball teams can not play a game in the trees on the mall, kickballers could very well make that happen, you simply chose not to. There are several stretches of ground that a kickball game can squeeze into that no softball game ever could. The big 4 softball leagues will not yield their ground, nor should they. With a foothold in house and senate offices throughout the hill, softball may even wield enough power to pass legislation banning anyone over the age of 12 from playing kickball, a move that perhaps should have been made earlier, but one would have thought would never have been necessary.

The poing to kickballers being this, go play in the smaller spaces where you fit and leave the real fields to the over 600 softball teams that have been here way longer than you. You better hurry and claim those smaller spaces too, the new Bocce ball league is about to kick off and you'll soon know what it feels like to be intruded on.