For three grueling days, I went undercover at the National Spike Ball tournament 2025. I’d been intrigued by the game for years (it’s basically a reverse hacky-sack) and wanted to learn more about it. Why is it so popular? Why does everyone take their shoes off to play? Do people genuinely think it’s fun? In the words of Robert Neets a.k.a. Spike t. Ball, “If you don’t play Spike Ball you really don’t matter to me.”
Day 1: The very first thing I saw when I walked into the tournament was a giant and slightly unsettling bronze statue of Jeff Knurek, the inventor of Spike Ball. I had forgotten cargo shorts and had instead opted for khaki, so the very second I stepped foot inside the building I was tasered. 45 minutes later I awoke in a cold sweat on the makeshift medical table. Once that got sorted out I was finally off to compete in my very first match. My teammate, Chauncey, was the head of his fraternity back home in California and was not there to mess around. 30 seconds before the match started he whispered to me that he had just injected steroids straight into his heart and had about 20 minutes of good game time before he fainted from exhaustion. We lost 97-2. He had to be carried out on a gurney.
Day 2: We were all woken up at 4:30 a.m. to a blaring alarm and yellow flashing lights. I suspected an air raid or perhaps a tornado but my roommates informed me that it was standard wake up procedure. For breakfast they fed us dry oats and creatine which I later found out was the only food they had in the entire facility. I then learned that my previous teammate had left early after our devastating loss and was now partnered with his twin brother, Cletus. He told me that the taser was a right of passage for all players and I was lucky they only got me on the arm. He got tasered on the back of his neck and hadn’t been able to eat solid foods since. We tied at 201.
Day 3: I awoke at three a.m. after tossing and turning all night. From the corner of my eye I could see my roommates dressing in what looked like neon yellow sheets. They left our room in single file and headed towards the boiler room in the basement of the tournament. I thought there might be some kind of night meeting where we all planned our game strategies for the next day so I followed behind them. The farther we went in the basement, the darker it got. The walls were lit with candles and strange yellow orbs. Finally, we got to the center. In it was a giant Spike Ball net, almost like a really big trampoline, and everyone was bouncing up and down. They chanted in tongues and a bright light shone from the ceiling. Before I could get a good look at it, someone snuck up behind me and broke a vase over my head. When I woke up in my bed four days later, I still had a bump.
