Apr

16

Touchy feely playground

April 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment

A school in the US bans tag, dodgeball and touch footy.

I first encountered the weird concept of ‘touch’ sports on my first trip to Australia — the last place on earth I would expect any sport not involving pummelling to gain any sort of traction. Still, times change and if touch football skills up the nippers before ushering them into proper football then I suppose it’s all for the best (extrapolating this line upwards could of course lead to more dangerous sports like rugby, boxing, judo, cage fighting, bare-knuckle-Mafia-boss-battering and for the insane, Australian rules Football).

The school’s head says the tag has got out of hand: 

“Then the kids do ‘pyramiding’ or ‘towering.’ They pile on each other. [Sometimes] they call it ‘jailhouse’ or ‘jailbreak,’ “

We used to call this a ‘pile on’ back in Scotland and usually those doing the piling ended up getting as bruised as the pilee. As for tag, we called it tig and I distinctly remember some nutter from the Raploch wanting to get a bunch of folk together to play tig in a local electricity power substation. Happy times. 


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