Kickball
Photo credit: Photo: David Morris, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The great equalizer of elementary recess: a big red rubber ball, a diamond scuffed into the grass, and a game of baseball you played with your feet. The same ball did double duty for four-square and dodgeball.
Kickball is essentially baseball for kids who couldn't yet swing a bat — you rolled a big inflated rubber ball to the plate, the "batter" kicked it, and off they ran around the bases. Its origins trace to around 1910 in the US (an early "Kicking Baseball" appears in a 1910 book, and a Cincinnati playground supervisor codified the rules in 1917), and American gym teachers had adopted it as a physical-education staple by the 1920s.
For 90s kids, though, kickball was pure recess: captains picking teams, arguments over whether a kick counted, the satisfying thump of a sneaker meeting rubber. The ball itself — the ubiquitous red (or red-orange) playground ball — was the single most important object on the blacktop, pressed into service for four-square, dodgeball, and wall-ball whenever a kickball game wasn't on.
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