Family Dodgeball, February 2014

The winter months can be long and quiet for a summer camp. We tend to thrive on sunshine, lake water and heat waves.

To break free of the winter, CWE365 held its first ever Family Dodgeball Night on the last Friday in February. Invitations were designed, printed, and mailed to every camp family. Pizza was ordered, dodgeballs were counted, and five different-sized brackets were drawn up, because we could only guess at what the turn out for this event would be.

Our goal was two hundred.

By the end of Friday night, we had over four hundred campers and parents throwing dodgeballs for twelve different teams. We ate eighty boxes of pizza and drank every bottle of water purchased, plus those that had been shelved in dry storage in our offices. In two and a half hours, we held over twenty-five dodgeball games. And it was glorious.

Christian Campbell, a sixth-grader who had dragged his parents all the way from Bentonville, said “It was awesome! My dad even played in the last two games! And Caddo won – GO CADDO!”

Dodgeball is a Camp pastime and on Friday night several parents took to the floor between students and CWE365 volunteers. Anyone over the age of thirteen had to throw with two hands, which forced dads into creative over-the-head, chest-pass and side-spin tosses. Elementary students scrambled about, lobbing dodgeballs back in forth in a flurry of minutes before the game ended and their team had to wait on deck for the next round.

The stands above the multi-purpose courts at the Jones Center were filled with parents, watching the game, eating dinner, and waiting for the night’s raffle. Besides the twenty-plus small prizes given away, the Jones Center gave away a year-long family membership and Camp War Eagle gave away to different student scholarships.

The night called for a multitude of volunteers from a few different organizations to hand out pizza, advertise programs and, most importantly, rally dodgeball teams. By the end of the night, both these volunteers and the community they were serving were exhausted and quite pleased. There’s nothing quite like throwing a dodgeball with your mom.