Crab Soccer

Crab Soccer is one of the few phys ed games I didn't mind. I knew this was not exclusive to my school system when I saw it being played on an episode of Freaks and Geeks.

Kids in the gym period are separated into 4 equal teams. Each team forms one side of a square.

When all the students are sitting down, the gym teacher assigns everyone a number (say there are forty students in all. The kids on each team would then be given a number from one to ten.) A giant ball is placed inside the square that the sitting students make up. The gym teacher calls out usually two or three numbers at random, and the students who were assigned these numbers crab walk out to the center and try to kick the giant ball over the heads of the kids on one of the other three teams. The students whose numbers were not called remain seated on their sides, trying to prevent the ball from being kicked over their heads.

Every time the ball sails over the heads of one group, that team earns a point. The team with the least number of points at the end of the period wins.

This was the first physical education game I played when I was in kindergarten. As a senior, we still play this in gym (which is no problem, as it's far less stressful than other games).

A variant, played at my elementary school:

Everyone in the class (often times as many as sixty people) are split up into two teams. Each team defends one of the back walls of the gym; the walls behind the basketball hoops. Each team may have two goalies, who are allowed to stand and use their hands to defend their wall. Whenever a team manages to kick the ball so that it hits the opposing back wall, they get a point.

I played this at least once a week during phys ed at my school, however growing up in the insanely PC area that I lived in resulted in one of the following rules being put in place, depending on the teacher:

• everyone on a team has to have kicked the ball at least once since the last goal for a goal to count
• at least three girls had to have kicked the ball at least once on a particular drive down the court
• a particular person was only score once during any given game; if they scored again, the other team was given a goal

I could go off on a rant describing how these rules hurt the competitiveness of the game and was an example of political correctness gone horribly wrong, but I think you can form this for yourself.