Spikeball Community… aka Blog

The Chicago Trolley rolled up to Beast’s house on Friday night and was covered in Spikeball banners within minutes. We handed out stickers, business cards, and T Shirts to about 30 Spikeballers including Creepy Spikeball Santa (see pix on Facebook) and all jumped on. We hit about 5 bars that night handing out cards and inviting folks to come down to the beach on Saturday. Some loved us, others hated us. The haters got stickers on their backs. The final stop was Cortland’s Garage in Bucktown. Biggggy and I went searching for a late night burrito. Bigggggy, being of not so abled mind and body, ordered the “Tongue Taco”. Seriously, a taco with tongue meat. Strike 1 Biggggy.

Saturday was perfect. 80 degrees, sun, light breeze, 5 Spikeball sets in constant use, it couldn’t get better. There must have been 5 billion people at the beach. Enough red necks and “You know where the weight room is?” pickup lines to stretch all the way to Havasu. Pat got there early to protect our space against the volleyball players and Speedo-clad leathery old men who wanted “their spot”. Beast was supposed to show up at 9am as well but I think one too many Zima the night before nixed that. 10am- really Beast?

By about 11am we started hearing the beautiful, never-ending refrain of, “What is Spikeball? How do you play? Where can I get my own set?” We had tons of people playing, eating (Tim brought sliced celery, seriously), hanging, and just enjoying the day. It was great to see that a lot of people would wander over, pick up a ball and start playing. The age range on the sand was 2 years old to about 50. The first-timers started a little timid but after about 4 minutes of play they were talking serious trash.

We played with some Irishmen who walked up with their hurling equipment (look it up, I had to). We had to explain there was no wooden stick in Spikeball unless someone needs to be taught a lesson. We had a father and son come and play for about an hour. What better pre-Father’s Day present could you ask for? They got their own set and made plans to play the next day with 10 friends that were coming to town. The love is spreading.
Saturday night we basked in the glory with a band called Alaska Thunder F*%^. They were incredible. If I wore a bra, I would have thrown it on stage. These guys rocked. We covered the bar in www.doihavespikeball.com posters and got our groove on. Some got too much of a groove on and left early, thankfully. Trying to spread the word a bit more, I left a stack of Spikeball business cards near the sink in the bathroom. About two minutes later someone asked me why there were 20 Spikeball cards in the urinal. Brilliant! Spikeball urinal cakes in the future?

Anyway, enough words— check out the pix on Facebook Spikeball Photos and Flickr Spikeball Photos.

Enjoy,

Chris

chris@spikeball.com

PS: have you checked out doihavespikeball.com ? One word: Spikeballicious.

Tags: beach volleyball, chicago, kankakee, lake, launch weekend, ocean, sand, spike ball, spikeball, volleyball

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.