I’m sure you can look back at a time when you were in gym class and suddenly realized how long it’d been since you’d played a particular game or sport. Maybe it was because you just didn’t have a gym class anymore. Maybe when you did, the class just never played it. Or maybe the game was all-out banned never to be played again. Take the fabled game of dodgeball…Remember how much fun it was? But why is it that the only memories of dodgeball seem to reach all the way back to elementary school?

Well, the simple answer to this is that the game was tragically softcore banned in West Virginia back in the early 2010s. What I mean by this is that there is no law specifically stating that we cannot play the game, but it is a generally understood consensus that it is not allowed in schools anymore. In my opinion, losing dodgeball and many of the other fun and engaging games we played in the past is one of the worst things that ever happened in our school career. Obviously, losing the ability to play the game doesn’t have the most upfront and apparent repercussions but it does carry weight. I feel that the loss of competitive and engaging games like dodgeball has led to the downfall of ambitious natures in young adults everywhere.

We were one of the last generations to even have a remote taste of the joy that is felt when winning a hard game of dodgeball or any sport of that nature. Now, you might say, “So what? It’s not like playing a dumb game in the gym is really going to have an effect,” but I disagree. Without competition there is no progress. Humanity’s greatest innovations have been made in response to the need to win, or to achieve a goal the fastest. Space race, anyone? Never giving new generations the experience of dodgeball will inevitably lead to a decline in American technological and civil advancements.