IN SEARCH OF CALVINBALL, Vol. 1: Tchoukball

Football causes life-altering concussions. Baseball is boring. Basketball doesn’t matter until the fourth quarter! Hockey is for Canadians! Nobody ever scores in soccer! It’s clear we need new sports, and our mission is to find them. Welcome to SEARCHING FOR CALVINBALL, which will scroll down the LIST OF SPORTS on Wikipedia to find games you probably didn’t know existed, and tell you why they’re amazing.

Today’s sport: TCHOUKBALL

To quickly summarize: Tchoukball is one group of people hurling a ball as hard as they can at a trampoline, and another group of people hurling their bodies to try and catch it. They do this at a comically frenetic pace, and while jumping and diving like madmen.

It is insane, and the best way to explain it is by having you watch these highlight videos:

A more full explanation: So, you know team handball? The game they play at the Olympics? It’s like soccer, but you’re chucking the ball as hard as you can? OK, so, this is essentially that, except one important distinction: instead of chucking the ball at a goal, you’re chucking it at a tiny, diagonally-set trampoline which ricochets the ball back into play. The other team’s job is to catch the ball before it hits the ground.

Unlike most sports, which come about somewhat organically, this one was invented. In the 1970s, a Swiss biologist, Hermann Brandt, thought sports led to too many injuries. So he decided to make a sport that involves no contact between players. A lot of contact in sports comes from the fact that you have to defend a person -- tackle them, take the ball away from them, keep them from shooting -- but in tchoukball, this doesn’t happen. You aren’t allowed to interfere with the attacking team as it handles the ball. Everybody on defense is a goalie, and the goal is the ground.

You have to start your throw from outside of a 3-meter circle, and the ball has to land outside that circle, too. You can only take three steps, and you can only pass the ball three times before you have to shoot. But perhaps my favorite part of the game is that there’s no transition between offense and defense: If the defense catches the ball before it hits the ground, it’s in possession and can commence hucking the ball off the same tramp it just caught the ball off of. The only time the ball has to cross midcourt is after a score or the start of a period.

Well, it’s pretty obvious. This sport legitimately uses trampolines. Newton’s Third Law of Trampolining (discovered when he spent 45 minutes doinking an apple at a trampoline) states that where X = A Fun Thing, X(trampoline) = A More Fun Thing. (Newton’s Third Law of Trampolining is widely considered Newton’s crappiest work, but we stand by it.)

Here, look, animals are great, and here are animals on trampolines.

They are greater than animals not on trampolines.

Of course, nobody is jumping on the trampolines in tchoukball, especially not adorable baby goats, but still. The springy nature of trampolines make this sport more appealing.

Besides the actual gymnastic discipline of trampolining, I can only think of one sport involving trampolines. I’m talking, of course, of the ill-fated SlamBall, a basketball offshoot that featured guys dunking on trampolines while other guys on trampolines tried to stop them. The high-flying nature of SlamBall was its main attraction, but also the gimmick that ensured the made-for-TV sport wouldn’t really work. Gameplay was awkward and a bit nonsensical, and the sport was logistically impossible -- not to mention over-the-top dangerous -- for not-on-TV humans to play.

In tchoukball, the tramps aren’t gimmicks. They’re just a thing that’s an essential part of the game. Throwing against a wall, the ball dies, plopping down with most of its momentum gone. Throwing against a tramp makes everything turbo-charged. Shooters can spray the ball all over the court at an instant’s notice, and defenders have to rush and dive and flail themselves as quickly as they can to have any chance of saving the shot.

This -- and the fact that a save instantly turns offense to defense -- makes this game preposterously fast-paced, which is a good thing. There’s no way to play this game and simultaneously look like a sane person, and that’s a good thing.

Manny Machado: Machado is perhaps baseball’s most entertaining third baseman to watch, and clearly displays all the attributes needed here. He has the reflexes to react to balls bashed in his direction quickly enough to snag them within a matter of moments, which would come in handy on defense where players splay their bodies wildly to catch zooming balls. And he has a powerful, accurate arm that would make him a vicious force on offense -- there’s a lot of jumping and throwing going on here, which left-side-of-the-infield guys do, albeit somewhat differently. I woulda gone with Andrelton Simmons, but opted for quick reaction time over range.

There’s no professional league anywhere, but this sport does get played. There are international competitions -- Taiwan is DOMINANT (Singapore is No. 2, Macau is top 20, shout-out to tiny Asian enclaves.)

Tchoukball’s American presence is pretty slim -- note the complete lack of presence of any US team on the international federation’s rankings, which is pretty rare in any sport. This article explains how a PE teacher from New Jersey and a guy who organizes games in Boston got together for the “national championships” and organized a national federation, but as you can tell it’s just a few casual players.

This website’s primary focus appears to be convincing schools to add tchoukball to their PE curriculum, to which I vote a resounding YES. I woulda been so down to do DIVEY TRAMPOLINE BALL-THROWING for 45 minutes twice a week, and it’s cheap to set up and easy to teach. This is the ideal sport for hyperactive kids.

There are a lot of crazy highlights, which is great. However, the sport seems to be *entirely* crazy highlights. One cool jumpy trampoline point or trampoline save is awesome, but there are like 100 per game, and we imagine we’d get bored. Still gets high marks, though.

There’s next to no setup and the rules are all easy to understand. And the sport is THROWING THINGS AT A TRAMPOLINE, which we would like to do. We would do it now if we could.

Very ludicrous. I like that this sport makes no qualms about the fact that it doesn’t have an organic beginning. It’s very clearly something invented in our lifetimes by somebody who set out trying to invent a sport.