PLAYout: misfit tether-ball.

I shall let you in on my dirty little secret.

A secret which becomes pretty readily apparent if you spend any time with me on ANY athletic endeavor.

Im completely wholly and utterly uncoordinated.

There’s a reason I LOVE THE IRON as there’s never a ball or birdie or ANYTHING flying at my face & requiring me to lob it back.

I shall let you in on another dirty little secret.

As much as Im all YAY YAY RAH RAH!! WE PLAYout NOT WORKOUT!! GO TEAM MISFIT-FUN!! Im a consistent no when it comes to playing tether-ball.

A consistent fear based, smacked in face by BALL afraid no.

Until one fateful morning when I made the calculated error of instigating a surprise YES-DAY (<—-foreshadowing! foreshadowing!).

None to my surprise, the Tornado immediately asked if Id play tether-ball and I was compelled to embrace my ball-in-face fears and say YES.

And, as with all things PLAYout and Tornado, I learned more than a few things along the way.

Tether-ball game is over when a player wraps ball around pole & theres no mo’ rope to wrap.  Or, if you play with my child, the game is over as soon as it starts because she swats maniacally at the ball until all rope-slack disappears (silver lining? I barely had to hit the ball).Players cant touch pole/rope during game, no throwing the ball,, touching ball with anything but hands/forearms is *illegal.*  Translation: the Tornado plays by different rules.  There was no pole touching (due to my shouts of CAREFUL!! TETANUS SHOT!! Im sure) but homegirl threw, slammed, whacked, played DIRRTY and HURLED.Tether-ball works the core, balance, reaction time, and bob & weave muscles.  Id viewed tether-ball as not just a purveyor of SMACKED-FACE, but a waste of my playground PLAYout time.  I was incorrect.  My balance & reaction time was challenged in the same way as juggling! My CORE? Sore the next morning from dodging, bobbing and waving from the Tornado’s crazy smacks.  Which leads me to… Few fears are truly irrational as evidenced in the clip below.  She’s grown up the child of a vlogger.  The video was her idea—the final few seconds were not.

To my OAKtown-dismay that’s where our tether-ball story abruptly ends.

The good news is I learned—thanks to YES DAY–to embrace my fears and enjoy the tether-ball.

The bad news is when we returned to our playground to play the *very next day* this is what we found:

no.mo.BALL!

Sadly you’ll have to imagine my fancy look-at-me pose with our *real* peel’y rusty tether-ball pole.

Sadly, you’re just getting this:

When was the last time you played TETHERBALL?The last time you were smacked in the face by a swiftly moving round object?

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