Can't Stop the Spike (Part 2)

May the fourth spike with you

I first played Spikeball at a work social event in Golden Gate Park in 2019. I’d seen the circular trampoline net before on the sidelines of dozens of ultimate frisbee tournaments, but in my exhausted post-game haze I’d never had the energy to learn a new sport. The two on two miniature volleyball spin off was everywhere but felt incomprehensible. I just didn’t get the appeal.

My first few games in the park I got absolutely demolished by my coworker Jeanne who had played before in Minnesota. Getting owned by a more experienced opponent is the first constant in my Spikeball journey as you’ll soon see. Yet even in defeat, I found the pace, the movements, and the gameplay surprisingly captivating. Despite getting clobbered, I felt like I was close enough to success that each point felt like a cliffhanger. With my long limbs and penchant for diving honed through hundreds of hours on the ultimate frisbee field, I sensed if I could just clean up my game I could be really good at this one day.

The passing of many months and a global pandemic obscured this tantalizing taste of a new sport until another friend came along to awaken it again. In the depths of that first COVID spring, my good friend Matt texted me to come over to a friends backyard to play some Spikeball. Starved for in person human contact and remembering how fun it had been in the park, Alexis and I agreed. Since there were only three of us, we played 2 on 1, with Matt allowed two hits. Since Alexis and I were so inexperienced, he counted rim hits as a redo, something I would later learn was not in fact a rule. Struggling to find a fourth player is the second constant in my Spikeball journey, along with slowly unearthing the rules like a rookie archeologist. While I was yet again losing, despite having superior numbers, playing was a bright spot in an otherwise anxious and lonely phase of my life. With ultimate frisbee on hold due to Covid, a new game was a warmly welcomed arrival. Its portability, predictable excitement, and fewer players needed to play felt like a breath of fresh, unmasked air to me.

I decided to buy Alexis a Spikeball set for her 27th birthday. I reasoned that having once been a frisbee couple, we must surely now evolve into a Spikeball power couple. Even then, it felt a bit analogous to Homer buying Marge a bowling ball with his name on it. In retrospect it was clear who the gift was really for.

One of the first group social events we planned after the terrifyingly lonely first phase of Covid was a camping trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park in June of 2020. We brought Spikeball on that trip and I still remember the gleeful squeals and laughs that echoed through our wooded campsite while we played. Giddy from seeing people and live sports for the first time in months, our entire group crowded around the pine-scented clearing where teams were playing, cheering and heckling like they were gladiatorial games. I don’t remember winning any games. I do recall playing half of them in felt slippers that made me moonwalk across the forrest floor when I tried to shuffle for a hit. Despite being largely winless, Spikeball was now simmering like a Sunday sauce on the back burner of my social & athletic life.

Yet I don’t think I would have fallen down the rabbit hole if it wasn’t for a fateful trip to San Diego in March of 2021. Our friends Christina and Jonathan were headed back from a cross-country road trip so we were going to meet them in Southern California to break up our work-from-home monotony. On a whim I threw our Spikeball set into the trunk before we left. This proved to be a great decision. Each evening, after working all day from our Airbnb, we’d wander down to Pacific Beach, set up the net, and play a few games that quickly spiraled into a few more.

Playing against two former frisbee teammates brought out a more athletic, competitive side of me that I hadn’t connected with, much less enjoyed, in years. I lost myself in the flow of the points and suddenly found myself making plays no one expected me to make. Having loved volleyball in middle school, I reawakened my old ability to keep the ball aloft and give my team a chance to fight on. Finally playing on sand instead of grass, I could use my length to reach for tough defensive hits and dive like an Italian soccer player performing for the referee at the World Cup. All of the cleans and snatches we’d been doing at the gym felt like they were paying off for me all at once. In this springy sport, I felt as bouncy as the ball, flying across the net to defend drop shots like I’d been fired out of a cannon. The losses kept coming thanks to Jonathan’s years of practice, but I was finally bringing games within a few points of victory. Walking home to shower off the sand and crush dinner and beers, I felt another type of hunger awaken within me.

I came home from San Diego determined to up my game further and knew just what gear I needed to buy to make this happen. Without hesitating, I ordered the Spikeball pro set: advertised as having a thicker, more durable frame & legs, grippier balls (giggle away), and better net tension. The new gear was a symbol of my renewed commitment to playing better.

A few months later, on a friends trip to Kauai, Spikeball was an obligatory occupant of a carefully checked bag. Bringing Spikeball anywhere was becoming the athletic equivalent of Chekhov’s gun. Christina’s Dunkin’ Donuts themed pro set predictably became the center piece of afternoons at Hanalei beach. With cloud-covered volcanic mountains draped in jade foliage as spectators, we battled for Spike supremacy on that crescent of sand. Yet as the sandy struggle heated up, a new struggle came along with it: the struggle to preserve the joy of the game. As games got more competitive, it also became harder to keep everyone happy.

The tricky part of any game is parity, as I was learning firsthand. Close games are more fun and less frustrating for both sides. This is hyper-pronounced in a new game like Spikeball. Someone who has played it a lot before will have a huge advantage over novice players, possessing a softer touch, greater hit selection, and a better sense of where to be on both offense and defense.

To try to make the games closer we shuffled around teams incessantly, hunting for the optimal 2 on 2 matchup that would produce the closest games. As games that felt fair and fun for everyone kept proving elusive, Jonathan finally mentioned that Spikeball had rules and broached the topic of “real” serves for the first time in my life.

With the soft “gentlemen’s “serves we had been playing with, the defense had a noticeable advantage. Fielding a serve up close with an accommodatingly high bounce, they should be able to put the ball away in three hits every time. Real serves, six feet back from the net, with a pivot step and one fault allowed would theoretically keep the defensive team honest and add a new way to win points for offense. In practice, this put everyone but Jonathan on the back foot since none of us had experience with real six-foot serves before. The gameplay grievances continued. Parity proved elusive, even in paradise.

Back home, having quit club ultimate frisbee for good and hopelessly hooked on Spikeball, I set out to make it my new hobby. I felt gleeful, like I was setting out on the first chapter of an open world video game. Surely a vast skill tree full of upgrades, combos, and breakthroughs lay ahead of me. My potential felt virtually limitless for the first time in years. This glee was quickly replaced by more frustration.

Two central conflicts have defined by relationship to the Spikeball since I first became hooked. The first is the struggle to find people to play with and the second is the struggle to find competitive games. While the second one would eventually eclipse the first, for months just organizing a group to reliably play with felt like an uphill battle.

Finding three other people to play a fun game with shouldn’t be a struggle on paper, but many weeks locking down three other busy adults felt like a Herculean feat of logistics. While I had dozens of contacts in my phone who were excited to play in theory, on any given week there were always visiting parents, work conflicts, vacations, or freak mountain biking accidents.

For avoid Spikers like me, finding a fourth person to play with is such a recurring struggle that it’s something of a meme, as comedian Trevor Wallace hilariously lampoons: “some people are out here looking for an eighth, I’m just out here looking for a fourth….to play Spikeball with.”

This struggle to find players felt especially disorienting to me coming from Ultimate Frisbee. During my seven years playing that sport in the Bay Area I’d been part of a community so large and hyperactive that I’d often felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of beach leagues, hat tournaments, summer leagues, and pickup games that I wasn’t able to go to. FOMO is the second biggest threat to ultimate frisbee players behind torn ACLs. Spikeball presented the exact opposite challenge.

I finally decided to take matters into my own hands and look beyond my social circle. I tried looking for pickup games on the Spikeball app (think Tinder for Spiking) but there weren’t any closer than Palo Alto. I wasn’t that desperate for action just yet. I joined the Spikeball subreddit only to find it was a ghost town. I started following every Bay Area Spikeball account on Instagram and messaged them about pickup games. Leads dried up. I felt desperate bordering on frantic, like a college stoner who has to accept that there may, in fact, be no weed on campus this week no matter how many people he texts about it. Finally, I caught a break when Bay Area Spikeball announced a tournament on Alameda Beach on June 5th. I quickly signed me and my friend Pat up as “Salted Rim” and counted down the days until I’d finally be guaranteed a lot of games against some new competition.

Arriving in driving rain on that fateful Sunday morning, I wasn’t sure what to expect. As the youthful participants hopped out of cars they weren't driving, the scene slid into focus. Every single competitor except me and Pat was in high school.

Our first game was against a lanky duo of high school boys who appeared to be some of the more athletic ones there. I was excited at the prospect of some legit rallies. Once they began serving, this excitement blew away faster than the rain had. The shorter one of them served with such pace that each ball rocketed off of the net and flew far over my head. There was no way I could have gotten a hand onto it even if I jumped. I had never seen serves like this before. I tried cheating back a bit to cover these deep bombs, only to have him put one shorter that was an instant ace. He went on a twelve point run that took the wind out of both of our sails and made our opening game short and irritating.

Confused and disoriented after our opening loss, I gulped water while Pat frowned at his phone.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure all of their serves were illegal,” he said, looking up from the phone.

“What do you mean?”

“I just checked the rules and the serve can’t go higher than your shoulders.”

“Wow. This explains a lot.”

I felt validated and a bit frustrated all at once. We let our high school rivals keep their W out of courtesy but politely informed them of the rule for future reference. We held our own in the rest of our pool play games and got eliminated from bracket play on a nail-biter against some Juniors from El Cerrito.

Now confined to in the consolation bracket (competition was too young to legally call it the beer bracket), we were all out of close games, now playing against inexperienced teams that we were beating by double digits. These games ended quickly and left us as spectators.

The host of the tournament, Zach, and his partner ended up in the finals against the team that opened the day by beating us. I couldn’t help but root for them as their best of three series went to the third “rubber match.”

After Zach and his partner beat our illegal-serving nemeses we walked over, congratulated him, and asked if they’d be game to play a few games for fun against us. We still had more in the tank after such chill consolation games and wanted to prove ourselves We’d played against Zach to warm up in the morning and had some really good rallies. The idea of having some close games against good but friendly competition was tantalizing.

“Sounds fun guys, but we have to get to ultimate frisbee practice.”

To play a Spikeball tournament as a pre-game to an ultimate frisbee practice was the ultimate youthful flex. For me, these games had been the focal point of my whole day and weekend. To these kids they were a mere athletic appetizer. I spotted one of the high schoolers in an ultimate frisbee jersey adroitly leaping on top of a Skimboard and sliding down the beach and had a sudden dissociating feeling that I was looking at my replacements. Like Woody staring into the shiny visor of a recently arrived Buzz Lightyear I saw both myself and the other, the past and the future, all blurred into one.