The very idea of adults playing dodgeball was funny enough for Hollywood to make a Ben Stiller comedy film based entirely around that premise (also mustaches). Why would a grown person engage in an activity normally associated with gym class, recess, and humiliation?
"There's definitely that feeling of nostalgia, where you have the feeling of being on the blacktop again, and you're picking teams, and it kind of brings you back to those simpler times when you didn't have any bills to pay," says Chris Davis, who works for Zog Sports, a company that runs adult sports leagues in San Francisco — basketball, volleyball, touch football, and, that most contactful of sports, dodgeball.
Davis thinks that adults are drawn to this childhood sport because the stakes are lower. Picking teams is no longer a high-pressure situation, and often the teams in Davis' league are just groups of TRX or Docusign employees looking to let off some steam.
"It's a very social environment that takes a lot of the playground bullyism away," he says. Matter of fact, dodgeball is no longer even part of the public school PE curriculum, Davis says, because of how quickly it tends to reward bullying behavior. So adult dodgeball is doing important anthropological field work by actually preserving a dying sport while removing some of what made it intimidating or traumatic in the first place.
"I think in San Francisco, you've got a lot of people, maybe they have some money, they're fairly young, and they're nostalgic for just the sense of play," says Shannon Bruzelius, who runs Foxhound Adventures. The company organizes live-action urban spy adventure games for adults in the city.
The spy game is one that Bruzelius and his friends created while growing up restless in a small Colorado town. The game is called Jericho, and it incorporates both espionage and laser tag. He's been running this small company, which started out as a Meetup group, for four years now — and business is good in San Francisco.
"There's a real community here in the Bay Area of people who love 'play,'" he says. He notes that many of his customers are people in their 20s and 30s with a "little bit of money to spend."
Safe to assume that these adults with a little bit of money either don't have kids or can afford child care during the four to six hours of Jericho game play. Either way, the adults in San Francisco who fill their hours with dodgeball or laser tag or Big Wheel racing or Skee-ball are prioritizing play in their lives and budgets.
Davis emphasizes the social aspect of team game play, and he believes that is what drives people to sign up for his dodgeball leagues.
"People don't always know how to meet people very well, and in this day and age, social life is on social networks, it's very technological. And this is a different way to branch out from that," he says.
Davis probably has a point — single adults love to socialize. It's likely that Bruzelius has a point about nostalgia, too, but he also has a point about money. Nostalgia is a feeling; indulging in that feeling is a luxury. Collecting toys or comic books, devoting weekends to highly organized live action spy games, playing dodgeball on a regular basis: These activities are for the young-at-heart and rich-at-wallet, a clientele which San Francisco appears to be catering to particularly well.
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