Kingball

Kingball is a game played at Magdalen College School, Oxford. The tradition, unique to the school, was first played at Magdalen some time in the 19th Century, and although to some extent the rules are passed down from year to year, every new year that takes up the game usually adopts its own rules as well. The game has been actively played during breaktimes amongst pupils using a variety of courts involving parking spaces and paving stones, but in more recent years, the school has painted several standardised courts on the main school playground.
Game Layout
The game is played on a court that is very distinctly shaped. The ball (a tennis ball) is bounced around the court and the players progress up the shaped squares (although in fact none of them are square-shaped) until he is in the 'King' square. Then he serves and so the game progresses until he is eventually knocked off the 'King' square. The game is predominantly played by younger boys, ranging from 8-13 years old. However, whenever boys from this age range vacate the courts and there are no tutors to tell them otherwise, older boys enjoy to play the unique "sport". The seven squares are, in order of descending rank: King, Queen, Prince, Princess, Small square, Big square, and Rabies. If the court has been filled up then the people waiting to play must wait outside the rabies square. These players are called slaves.
Rules
*After one bounce, a player has to palm the ball into his own square before it lands in an opponent's.
*After two bounces, the ball must be hit directly into an opponent's square, without bouncing.
*After three bounces, the ball must be kicked into an opponent's square without bouncing.
*On the fourth bounce or failure to comply with the above rules, a player is demoted to the lowest available square (or court-side if no squares are available) and all other players who were previously below that player in the hierarchy move up a square, one step closer to becoming king.
In the last few years the game has lost its true spirit at MCS with younger boys changing the rules to make it easier, with the square names in descending order as: King, Queen, Jack, Big Square, Triangle, Evil, and Rabies. One can play with one player per square (Seven), Or can double up (14). Slaves do not occur. When the game was played in the late 1970s and early 1980s the only lawful play was that identified at (1) above. If a player could not lawfully play the ball after the first bounce in his square (and at that time the squares were indeed square-shaped and measured about 1.5 to 2 metres from corner to corner) then he was demoted. Also at this time,the names of the squares were not fixed - save for the King square - although frequent references to Queen, Jack, 10 and so on (as per a suit in a pack of cards) were made informally. There was no fixed number of squares although the normal number was 6 (in a 3x2 formation); 8 was not infrequent and larger numbers could be chosen to avoid long queues of those described above as 'slaves'.
The service is played by palming the ball (having thrown it up into the air) into one's own square so as to bounce in another's square. The occupant of that square then plays as above.
In practise
The game is still played every day at the school.

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See Also

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