Kickball

Kickball is a team sport that resembles baseball, known as soccer baseball in much of Canada and football rounders in the United Kingdom. It belongs to the safe haven category of games: one team scores by sending a ball from home plate into the field and then running around the bases, while the opposing team tries to tag runners "out" with the ball before they can return home. Unlike baseball, players kick an inflated rubber ball instead of hitting a small, hard ball with a bat, which makes the game easier for young children. Teams alternate half-innings, and the winner is the team with more runs after a set number of innings.

The game is most commonly played by school-age children, both on playgrounds and in physical education classes. Because it requires no specialized equipment and lacks highly skill-dependent positions like a pitcher, it serves as an accessible introduction to baseball and softball. In recent decades, kickball has also become popular among adults, and many cities now host organized adult kickball leagues.

Kickball likely originated around 1910 in the United States and began spreading from the 1920s onward, primarily through public school PE classes. It became a widespread recess sport on American playgrounds in the 1970s and is now played in various forms in countries including Canada, England, Japan, South Korea, and parts of South America.

The World Adult Kickball Association (WAKA) was founded in 1998.

The exact inventor of kickball is debated, but it probably evolved from baseball or softball, which was first played indoors in Chicago in 1887. In the late 1800s, the YMCA was a center for sports innovation, giving rise to basketball and volleyball. Around that time, Charles Gregory Lang, a respected physical director, created a lesser-known sport called Lang ball, which combined baseball with kicking an inflated ball while hanging from a horizontal bar. The ball was pitched, and the rest followed baseball rules with bases and scoring.

The earliest known rules resembling kickball appear in Stewart Culin's 1891 book *Street Games of Brooklyn, NY*, which describes a game called "Kick the Ball." A diagram shows four street corners used as bases, with four innings per game. Outs were made on fly balls and when a defender at home threw the ball to a base before the runner arrived. A kicker was out if they missed the kick, and there was