I’m excited that you’re here to learn about my dodgeball experience this fall! As the newbie blogger for Dodgeball Winnipeg, I’ll be writing a post every couple weeks to share my journey with you as the season progresses. To give this post some context, my name is Cat and I have joined the Women’s league of Dodgeball Winnipeg. I have high hopes for this season; I think it’ll be a great new experience and be a lot of fun even if I’ve never played in a league before.  I hope this will give some of you, who might be interested in joining, a better idea of what to expect and maybe convince some of you to join too!

My previous dodgeball experiences can be listed off very quickly. I have played dodgeball 3 times in my adult life: I attended a DW drop-in, I played in a mini (very amateur) tournament with friends at school, and more recently attended a DW throwing workshop where I got some excellent coaching and feedback from our awesome instructor, Kahleigh. That’s it. I’ve played 3 times. But I got enough of a taste for dodgeball that after some encouragement from my brother and his dodgeball friends, I have decided to give it a shot and join the women’s league. To give you a taste of what to expect from my Dodge Blog posts once the season starts, I’m going to share the story of my first experience with Dodgeball Winnipeg.

As I said before, my previous experience with dodgeball has been fairly limited. Earlier this year, I decided to join a Dodgeball Winnipeg drop-in event the day before a casual dodgeball tournament with some friends from school. As the (perhaps overly) competitive woman that I am, I wanted to give myself an advantage over the other newbies that had signed up for the tournament. I didn’t really know what to expect but I was hopeful this training would give me the advantage I needed to carry my team to victory the following day (high, high hopes). So, I dug my old knee pads from middle school volleyball out of my closet, got my workout clothes on and drove across the city to meet my brother at this drop-in event with his dodgeball friends. I arrived at the gym for the drop-in event and had a quick crash course on how to play dodgeball and the general rules, followed by a quick warm up that consisted mostly of trying to whip the ball as hard as I could at my brother and getting nailed by a lot of his much more accurate throws. Side note: I highly recommend this for all you siblings (or friends) out there as a fairly harmless way to relieve your stress or aggression, it feels great, very cathartic! Anyway, everyone was then split into teams and I proceeded to spend the next 1.5 hours doing my best to dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dodge while occasionally actually hitting my target as I tried to throw as many balls as I could get my hands on. This is not a strategy I would recommend…if you could even call it a strategy. And it didn’t really help my team at all. But to be fair, I could barely remember all the rules and no one was expecting me to know what I was doing or be a great team player. By the end of the games at drop-in, I had to drive home with only my left hand on the wheel because my right arm was so worn out from throwing balls around for a couple hours that I could not lift it up to the steering wheel. I left with a much better understanding of how dodgeball actually works, an appreciation for how fun it can be, and a fear that my arm would be too weak to use in the tournament the next day! I started to think that just maybe this brilliant idea was poorly timed and I had handicapped myself instead of getting an advantage. Luckily, I wasn’t too sore the next day and was ready to kick ass on the court. My team didn’t end up winning that day but it was still a lot of fun and I was a much more confident team player than I would have been without my limited 2-hour experience the night before.

So, I’m excited to be joining the women’s league this season and have just as much fun. Maybe learn to play as a team and make some new friends along the way. I’ll be kicking ass on the court by the end of it!

I’ll be back with my next update when the season starts!

-Cat Brandt