Having a (broom) ball
The sport with the air of a snowball fight may be the biggest thing to sweep college campuses since streaking.
from the May 3, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 4
"When I was 7 you could have given me a tennis ball and a sweater, and in an hour I would have created a new sport and started a league. Broomball has that feel," says Lee Camp, a New York comedian and recent University of Virginia graduate who covered offbeat sports for his college newspaper and hears about broomball at his many campus gigs.
Denesen hopes that raising the profile of the college game will expose players to safe play. Last month at the national adult-league championships in Blaine, Minn., a college division was added for only the second time. Bethel College, from Minnesota, beat Iowa State in the final.
But don't expect the sport to acquire NCAA status – or a Zamboni sheen – anytime soon. The high-quirk, grass-roots feel endures even at the adult level and even in broomball's Minnesota hotbed. Some 500 teams play at one level or another in that state. "We had a team at nationals called the Fat Boys who practiced on a backyard pond," says Denesen.
Levity is inherent. "Nobody has a clear-cut advantage because you're running on ice," says Mike Delduke, a BU sophomore from Erial, N.J., who plays for the Dust Bunnies – a name the team agreed upon after Cinnamon Toast Lebowskis was discarded. "You end up laughing until your gut hurts."
You can also meet girls, he points out, echoing the first comment of several other male college players. Recruiting the requisite female component for a coed team calls for knocking on dorm-room doors. In that regard it's a better social mixer than hacky sack on the quad.
"It seems to be not particularly different from ultimate frisbee, lots of fun and very physical – quite coed," says Andrei Markovits, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who has written widely on sports in American culture. He recalls a night when a Michigan staff member he knows left a dinner party at 10 p.m. for a broomball game. "It's sort of the way villages played games: participatory, democratic, relatively noncompetitive," Dr. Markovits says, though an "imperative to win" attitude does creep in at some levels.
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