Can't Stop the Spike (Part 4)
How to you grow a game into a sport without destroying what makes it special?
Home from Santa Cruz, I felt exposed and self-conscious. Caught in an uncanny valley between an enthusiastic pickup player and a tournament novice, I was unsure of what this sport was and if it really had a home for me. Trying to make sense of our crushing defeats and feeling frustrated with how serve heavy the Santa Cruz Classic tournament had been, I logged onto Facebook. This was something I hadn’t done since election anxiety drove me off of that platform in the fall of 2020. I ended up on the Spikeball Roundnet Association page, the largest online hub I could find for Spikeball. In between tournament announcements and pleas for numbers at local pickup games, I found several surprisingly heated threads about the state of the sport and grim discussions of whether or not it even had a future in its current incarnation. Spikeball, it turns out, was at a breaking point.
Clicking into threads and scrolling through comments I felt like Gandalf piecing together the story of the ring of power in the library at Minas Tirith.
What I learned felt validating and worrying all at once: competitive Spikeball has become so serve dominant that to many it’s no longer fun to play or fun to watch. There’s even a cheeky shorthand for this: “serveball.”
The age of serveball is the logical endpoint of thousands of players all seeking a competitive edge against each other in competition. Since serves are the easiest part of the game to practice (requiring just a net, some balls, and a wall), a serving arms race had been going on for the past few years. The top players can now hit the ball so fast, with such unpredictable spin, and in so many different ways that about half of serves are functionally impossible to return. This means that more points than not start and end with the serving team scoring. These high velocity, spin-heavy serves are so complicated to execute that many of them don’t even make it off of the net, resulting in a frustrating amount of scores happening from double faults. No matter which team ends up getting the points, serving, not rallies, now determine most of the score. There’s a Darwinian effect in the player population, too. Since serving is so important at the top level, teams without excellent serves can no longer make it as far in tournaments. Defense is maddeningly difficult at best and impossible at worst. Rallies may be an endangered species hurtling towards extinction. Long live serve ball!
Am I over exaggerating? I’m honestly not sure. Watch game 1 of the finals of this major tournament and decide for yourself how much fun you think high-level Spikeball would be to play or spectate. What worries me is that while Spikeball highlights feature insane dives, rolls, and long, athletic rallies, these plays may now be the exception, not the rule. The very proportions and principles I once believed were key to the games staying power could end up becoming irrelevant at the highest levels of play.
This hasn’t gone unnoticed. The governing body of roundnet has tried to correct this imbalance with some rule changes in 2021 explicitly designed to nerf offense. First, they added a no-hit-zone, a circular radius 1.5 feet from the edge of the set that offensive players are forbidden from stepping inside of when hitting. This was to prevent skilled offenses from having essentially limitless hitting options from a good set. They also moved the serving line back from 6 feet to 7 feet, hoping added distance would make precision serving harder and give defense more of a fighting chance. I’ll note that this second tweak was a change I only learned about at that Santa Cruz tournament, much to my chagrin, having practiced 6 foot serves for months.
These changes have altered where as well as how the game is played. Chatting with our friendly Folsom high school opponents in between games in Santa Cruz, I’d learned that one of them shared my love of beach Spikeball. He then wistfully reflected that ever since the no-hit zone and serving lines were added, there had been far fewer beach tournaments, since these lines were hard to implement on sand.
Have these changes had their intended effect? It’s really hard to tell. The community on Facebook, at least, seemed divided into two camps. The first camp felt that enough had been done and that those who were still complaining may just be sore losers without good serves or the ability to return good serves. The second camp felt that much more dramatic rule and equipment changes were needed to create parity and make the sport legitimate and sustainable.
This second camp had voices calling for more changes like: trying a bigger ball, adding an outer boundary so big shots would be out of bounds, creating a smaller net, allowing both players to field the serve, or even playing 3 on 3.
Thus far rule changes have been the go-to approach for understandable reasons. Any change requiring new equipment like a bigger ball or smaller net would require tens of thousands of people discarding their current Spikeball sets and replacing them with new ones. This would surely be profitable for Spikeball if they could pull it off, but could just as easily be a logistical nightmare that would further alienate and frustrate an already miffed player base. So instead the “powers that be” keep tinkering around the edges with rule tweaks, not because they’re necessarily better for the game or more effective, but simply because they’re much easier to implement.
What’s particularly ironic about Spikeball’s identity crisis is that while the top 5% of players are acutely aware of it and spend loads of time complaining about it and debating the details, I’d wager the majority of people to have ever played (perhaps including you, dear reader) have no idea and frankly don’t care. Most people I’ve ever played with don’t play with real serves, have no idea what the no hit zone is, don’t call the game “roundnet,” and are often surprised when I share rules with them, lightly taken aback that formal rules for this volleyball knock off even exist, much less matter. Rapidly changing norms and power dynamics only matter if your community uniformly abides by these norms, and the Spikeball community is far from unified (or normal, for that matter). This brings up the obvious question then: Can a sport truly be at a crisis point if the majority of people that play it don’t know about the crisis or don’t play in a way where it matters to them?
The existence of a no-hit zone or a new serving line doesn’t matter to people who play casually on the beach. The defense breaking, 360 degree hitting potential of mastering the pull, push, flick, and drop shot don’t matter if no one in your group of friends has these shots. The dominance of serves is irrelevant to players who either play with “gentlemen’s serves” or haven’t spent hours grinding their serves at a local park or racquetball court. Yet serves do seem to come up a lot as being at the core of making the game more competitive or more fun for everyone.
The threat to joyful play and parity posed by serves is particularly interesting to me personally. For casual players, aces are literally antithetical to the game they want to play. I’ve experienced this backlash directly. Once my serves improved enough to be hard to get to, multiple friends insisted that I can’t be allowed to serve it such a way that they don’t have a shot at returning it. I feel their pain but am unsure of how to respond sometimes. Having a tough serve fired at you certainly feels unfair even if it’s legal, which hits at the very crux of Spikeball and its’ current identity crisis to me. How can you play to win while still winning in a way that feels fair?
There’s a key distinction here that matters in the discussion: Spikeball the game vs Spikeball the sport. One of the hardest things to do in this world is to scale something gracefully, and Spikeball is in the awkward adolescent phase between being a niche game and a respected sport. Growing pains are to be expected.
The key question seems to be: who is Spikeball for? This is a particularly salient but tough question to answer since roundnet the sport is all-but-monopolized by Spikeball, the business. The business has close to market dominance, but likely makes most of its money selling sets to college kids, youth groups, and ultimate frisbee teams, not hyper-competitive tournament players. While tournament players are some of the biggest and most vocal proponents of the brand, their incentives aren’t necessarily aligned with those of the business whose sets they’re playing on. The tournament players want the sport to be as competitive and legitimate as possible so they can have higher-level tournaments, try to monetize the sport, and maybe even be in the Olympics one day. The business wants the game to be appealing and accessible to as large a group as possible so they can sell more sets. So Spikeball the game is working just fine since the majority of its player base are only demanding a good time at the beach. quad, or picnic. Spikeball the sport, however, is at a crossroads. This disconnect explains a lot. Why would the company want to invest in equipment changes to please the top few percent of players if the majority of players are casuals who aren’t even asking for such shift and wouldn’t understand the incentives to buy new equipment in the first place?
With all of these existential questions burning in the background, Spikeball the business has long tried to stay neutral, trying to calm down the competitive players in message threads while continuing to grow their casual player base. Yet they showed their hand on social media when they released a Youtube campaign titled “rally anywhere.” Clearly they are aware that good rallies are in fact the secret sauce of the game, both hooking newbies and keeping fans loyal. They formally picked a side in the equipment vs rules debate when they re-released their standard set, tellingly branding the improved equipment as as “rebuilt for more rallies.” Manufacturing speaks louder than words.
Since I first started writing this series, Spikeball helped organize its first worlds competition, with the US unsurprisingly winning it all (we dominate at liberal artsy plastic games, I’ve noticed) and producing a truly epic highlight reel:
Watching this reel, rallies looked alive and well to me. The game may thankfully be returning to equilibrium after a serve-dominant era. The thoughtful trio of gents at “That Roundnet Podcast” speculated that after serving got a head start in the player population, the skill of serve-receive has finally caught up to it, producing the more well-rounded game seen at worlds.
Watching these highlights also made me think of an even more obvious“theory of the case” about Spikeball. A key component to the game being fun to play and watch is not just the rules being used, but rather everyone playing being roughly at the same skill level. Just as I’d loathed playing with advanced players who’d easily smoke me, I bet any of the players at worlds would find my pickup games to be fairly boring and easy-to-win. Part of what’s difficult for a young sport is the challenge of growing its player base quickly and uniformly. Right now the player population isn’t evenly distributed around the country or balanced across different skill levels. This makes tournaments likely to be top-heavy, since elite competitors are inherently more motivated to travel to play, while novice players may not even know about tournaments, be interested in them, or feel comfortable going. So maybe the secret sauce to Spikeball’s future is also building out the population of players until there are enough intermediate teams for a player like me to not have such an intimidating first tournament experience. My own twin struggles of finding games and then finding competitive games is a microcosm of Spikeball’s larger challenges in this way.
What’s crazy about Spikeball to me is that it’s such a new and young sport, with such a youthful core player base that its identity and future can be this ambiguous. Even youthful Ultimate Frisbee, which wasn’t invented until the late 60s, is a dinosaur compared to Spikeball, which isn’t even old enough to legally buy a drink yet. The athletic lava is still cooling, meaning there’s a lot of potential ahead, but also a lot of conflict and uncertainty about what the sport is and what it should be. While Spikeball’s ups and downs are so noticeable because the sport is so young, that doesn’t mean other sports don’t go through this type of upheaval. It’s worth remembering that more established sports have all been through this type of turmoil too, it’s just less noticeable because the dust has settled and it’s in the past now.
Equipment changes are a necessary part of the evolution of any game. FIFA has used 22 different soccer balls since the first World Cup. In tennis, the invention of composite rackets allowed for harder hits with more spin. Titanium drivers revolutionized distance hitting in golf. The NHL even famously tried a glowing puck to make hockey easier to watch on TV. Some gear changes have clearly worked better than others, but no sport stays with its original equipment forever.
All major sports have also changed their rules in order to grow. Football became safer, more fun to watch, and much more sophisticated strategically when they added the forward pass. The NBA added a shot clock to speed up games and add excitement. When Ultimate Frisbee finally went professional in 2012, they did away with self officiating, allowed double teams, and expanded the size of the field. Just this year, Major League Baseball announced that they’re adding a pitch clock, banning defensive shifts, and adding larger bases to make baseball move faster and have more action. All of these updates dramatically changed parts of a sport in the name of making it more competitive, more spectator friendly, or both.
It strikes me that Spikeball’s future has to involve both rule and equipment changes because no sport grows without them. What is less clear to me is which it will prioritize because the jury is still out on who this game is for and what growth can look like.
At the moment, Spikeball has a laundry list of diagnoses and potential futures. Right now, depending on who you ask, Spikeball can be accurately described and earnestly defended as: the next great American sport, a silly game to play in between IPAs at barbecues, a broken sport where serves are overpowered, beach fodder for attention-hungry shirtless dudes trying to replicate the volleyball scene from Top Gun, an awkward college game worthy of a “Bad Trend Alert” write up by the Harvard Crimson, or a niche lawn game that’s too broey to go anywhere besides to another fraternity.
Which of these versions of Spikeball will be the one that survives?