Editor’s note: This is part of a series in which The Athletic highlights offbeat sports you may not have known are contested at the college level. Follow the full series here.
Thirty minutes into a 10-plus-hour journey from Allendale, Mich., to Harrisonburg, Va., the Grand Valley State dodgeball team had to pull the car over.
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Snow nearly blinded the windshield of the 15-passenger van. The conditions were only going to make the drive to a tournament at James Madison longer.
“Do we really want to do this?” the team questioned.
“JMU was probably the No. 2 team in the country at that point in time,” former GVSU player Austin Morley said. “So we wanted to go to their hometown and show them who the real No. 1 team in the country was because they were obviously thinking they were.”
So they continued. And with a roster missing many of its starting players, GVSU won.
That’s just what the winningest team in the National Collegiate Dodgeball Association does. Yes, dodgeball. The collegiate club sport has been nationally governed since 2005. The Lakers have won 11 of the 17 NCDA national championships — winning their first in just their second year in the league before notching six in a row from 2013 to 2018.
Each NCDA team is created by students. All it took for GVSU founder David Soukup was a simple pitch to his friends: Let’s play a game of dodgeball.
“Doesn’t matter who you are, deep down inside, everyone wants to hit someone else in the face with a ball,” Soukup said in an email. “Dodgeball just made it acceptable.”
Bro got absolutely annihilated 😭
(via ncdadodgeball/TT) pic.twitter.com/4HX1SRfsAP— Overtime (@overtime) May 11, 2023
Soukup advertised the club at campus-wide activity fairs — where many teams still do the bulk of their recruiting — and said he even approached Grand Valley State’s baseball coach to ask for a list of players who didn’t make the team as walk-ons. The recruiting efforts resulted in 500 people showing up to GVSU’s first official practice, including many former baseball and softball athletes.
“These people could just throw the ball so, so hard, between like 50 and 70 miles an hour dodgeballs,” said Jon Horstman, GVSU’s dodgeball vice president at the time. “Thinking back on it, it was really, really dangerous and, you know, brutal at times.”
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At one practice, Horstman shattered his left ring finger so badly he was given the option of experimental surgery or amputation by his doctor. He opted for the surgery, which was successful.
The Lakers’ home games were another testament to their intensity. The club hung flyers around campus that said “headshots guaranteed” and “delivered on it,” Soukup said. The pompon team did halftime shows, the club’s T-shirts sold out at campus bookstores, and, Soukup said, the games “routinely outdrew the men’s basketball team in attendance.” It was an atmosphere unfamiliar to the other clubs and further proved that “Grand Valley came not only to play, they came to win,” said Aleks Bomis, founder of Michigan State’s dodgeball club.
“The way one player explained it to me after the game was, ‘Aleks, there’s nothing else for us to do around here. We’re a dry campus. Football is over. This is it for us,’” Bomis recalled.
For years, Grand Valley State was the story of college dodgeball, following a narrative of greatness all too familiar to any sports fan.
“Every once in a while, there’s just going to be one of those teams that becomes a dynasty early on,” said NCDA director of content Kevin Bailey, who also played dodgeball at GVSU. “And we might be straying away from that now as the sport gets more popular, but Grand Valley State, in their first year they made it to the title game. Since then, the worst season ever for GVSU was losing in the Final Four.”
The Lakers are still the most accomplished team, but the NCDA has grown. It’s no coincidence that the origins of collegiate dodgeball align with the release of the movie “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” in June 2004. Many current and former players acknowledge the lucky timing but dismiss any direct comparisons between the sport and its on-screen comedic adaptation.
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“Right now, if you talk about dodgeball it’s, ‘Oh, was it like the movie? Can you dodge a wrench?’” NCDA president Dylan Greer said. “And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s definitely not the direction that we as leaders of the sport want people’s minds to go toward. Growing up, nobody has a dodgeball in hand because they want to be a professional dodgeball athlete, but that’s something that certainly could happen in the future.”
The NCDA began as a group of five schools — DePaul, Kent State, Ohio State, Michigan State and Delta Community College — and was referred to as the Midwest Dodgeball Conference for its first two seasons. The league now has around 25 active teams, director of expansion Wes Peters said. All clubs are coed and student-run, meaning “ultimately it comes down to the teams running themselves and so sometimes teams come and go,” Peters said.
Teams typically recruit new members when they get to campus in the fall and the season runs from September through April, with the national championship held in a different location each year based on a leaguewide vote. Some teams are coached by alumni and others follow the lead of their most veteran players. Tournaments are streamed on the league’s YouTube channel.
“We think about dodgeball as the best sport so many people have never heard of or don’t realize that it’s more than just that thing from the movie or from gym class,” Bailey said. “It’s an actual competitive sport.”
The teams also have a say in the rules, and they vote on adjustments to improve the game in the offseason. At its core, college dodgeball follows a familiar format: If the ball hits any part of a player’s body, they’re out. If a target catches a direct ball, the thrower is out and the target retrieves a teammate from their jail. But there is an additional level of strategy involved that makes the league unique in its competitiveness.
“There is truly a very sports mindset in playing a game like this,” former Miami (Ohio) captain Elly Schipfer said. “It’s very intense, very competitive. When you go to tournaments, you’re moving all the time.”
Check out some quick clips from Nationals 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/2xr6USmade
— College Dodgeball (@NCDAdodgeball) May 11, 2023
The sport plays in a 12-on-12 format with 8.5-inch rubber dodgeballs — a size and ball type that is key for the pinch grip used to put spin and power behind each throw. Games are 50 minutes, split into two halves, and a point is scored when one team eliminates the opposing team from the field of play. Most teams practice twice a week. They will even review film of their opponents in the days leading up to a tournament. There’s a shot clock, a neutral zone and attack lines on the court, all complexities that initially stunned former Michigan State captain DQ McClean.
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“I remember distinctly when we first got there they said, ‘Have fun.’ But then, as the season started going, they said, ‘Stop playing like it’s gym class dodgeball,’” McClean said. “There’s actually a lot of strategy involved with it.
“It was not at all what I expected it to be.”
McClean helped lead Michigan State to its first national title in April. The win was sealed in a match that pushed to overtime and the Spartans ended the season with a perfect 19-0 record. Even sweeter, the title-clinching win came against in-state rival GVSU.
“It’s almost like a brother kind of rivalry,” MSU’s Alec Deen said. “Each one of us goes into every game knowing it’s going to be one heck of a good fight. Every throw counts, every throw matters, you can’t make a mistake.”
The 2023-24 season could open the door for another new champion, as GVSU is ranked No. 4 in the power rankings behind Ohio State, Michigan State and Penn State. The Buckeyes will return 10 starters as one of the most experienced teams in the league and could threaten GVSU to go two consecutive years without a national title, a drought that has only happened once since the Lakers joined the league.
“We’ve got a lot of chemistry, we’ve grown together,” Ohio State’s Evan Miller said. “You look at all the other teams across the league graduating seniors and we are probably the favorite.”
But aside from the competitive aspect, college dodgeball has created a sense of community for its members. Most athletes throughout the league know their opponents on more than a competitive level. Many described the camaraderie as family-like.
“It was a really big life decision for me,” Greer said. “I found a lot of my lifelong friends through that club that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. And you know, it was what made my college experience great. If I didn’t have this club, it would be a lot different.”
Squad goals. pic.twitter.com/xKpUUrK7wx
— College Dodgeball (@NCDAdodgeball) April 28, 2023
The NCDA wants to expand beyond the cluster of schools it has in the Midwest. The league also launched a women’s division in 2022 that it hopes will increase participation from female athletes.
Post-college opportunities have sprung up within the sport as well. In 2017, the NCDA became a founding member organization of USA Dodgeball. The semiprofessional National Dodgeball Association is in its inaugural 2023 season now. Some of the tournaments hosted by these leagues include prize money.
“I’m pumped because I know that in a decade it’s going to be spanning across the country in every school,” Bailey said. “It’s going to be one of those things that is going toward becoming mainstream. And we’re just at the tip of the iceberg right now.”
(Top photo courtesy of Kevin Bailey)
