Dodgeballers take one game to the edge
Bryant students get credit after match on the equator
With a yell, the players charge toward the blazing red line at the center of the earth. The video jerks and jiggles with the action as they dart, duck, and catapult dusty rubber balls back and forth.
One ball bounces off a knee just inches from the zero latitude marker. The referee yells: "Player out!" Another rolls behind a cactus into the northern hemisphere. Frantic feet chase it. A third ball careers across cobblestones into the southern half of the earth. A player scoops it up, steps, and throws.
The ref again: "Equatorial line infraction: you're out!"
Within 10 seconds, it's all over.
It was fast, it was loose, it was impulsive. But the quickie dodgeball game, played by five Bryant University students in January on the equator in Ecuador, could have global implications. If accepted into the Guinness World Records, it would be the first interhemispheric bout of its kind.
Sparring two on two - with one referee who has since become notorious for his "equatorial line infraction" call - the students lined up as southern hemisphere against northern hemisphere, with the red-painted stripe of the equator serving as the center line.
"It was just a totally random idea, awesome and spur-of-the-moment," noted Bryan Wojtowicz, 22, a Bryant senior from Palmer who dodged and pegged balls for the southern team. "We thought we were hilarious."
In the end, the northern hemisphere came out as the victor, 2-0. An unfair advantage due to some sort of equatorial pull, perhaps?
"It probably was," chuckled referee Brendan Sysun, 20, a Bryant sophomore from Leominster, "although we don't have any scientific evidence to prove it."
The students sent their claim to the Guinness Book in February, after staging the game on Jan. 12 during a two-week winter-break trip to Latin America sponsored by Bryant. After paying $3 each for admission to a strip of the Ecuadoran equator, they captured their 10-second game in a herky-jerky video amidst - tourists and puzzled native tour guides. "They thought we were crazy Americans," noted Sysun.
The London-based record-keeping authority, which tracks all things big, small, young, old - and very often unusual - is still reviewing the claim, according to Jamie Panas, a marketing assistant for Guinness based in New York City. If accepted, the students will receive a letter and a certificate of acknowledgment, she said.
Similarly, they could be featured in Guinness's annual hardbound book. Panas explained that, in all, Guinness keeps 40,000 records, but only 4,000 make it into the book.
The approval process can be slow. Panas said Guinness receives 1,000 claims a week, many of which are immediately disqualified for being too obscure.
The Bryant dodgeballers, who readily admit that their claim is just as wild and random as many of the others, are waiting and hoping. But they are trying to maintain a laissez-faire attitude about the whole experience.
They explained that they were inspired by the 2004 farce "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," which they have seen a number of times and can quote copiously. Also motivating the students' whack at the world record: As middle-schoolers, they each found hours of fascination in the Guinness Book, and engaged in regular bouts of often-aggressive schoolyard games of dodgeball.
Twenty-year-old sophomore Rob McNell (northern hemisphere team) once even suffered a serious injury from the duck-and-throw sport. During a game, he tore cartilage in his knee. "It's not a joking matter," the Darien, Conn., resident cheekily asserted of dodgeball.
And equatorial play makes a tough game even tougher, he and his fellow players contended. Hemispherical forces provided greater resistance with each step closer to the equator, they said, which required them to put more mustard behind their tosses.
But they might just have been feeling the pressures of battle. Although there is slightly less gravity at the equator, it's nothing people would be able to see or feel, according to James L. Davis of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge.
"I'm not saying that it wasn't harder for them to throw," he noted, "but there's no geophysical explanation for it."
In any case, the dodgeballs did more than just whiz and whir through the air during the trip. Everywhere the students went, they toted three of the 5-inch-diameter balls; they used them to create a promotional video that will earn each of them three elective course credits.
The nine-minute video splices dozens of images of the spongy spheres rolling down Ecuadoran streets, whizzing past tortoises or bouncing across the Panama Canal.
"This is the one we primarily used," Wojtowicz noted, gripping a dirtied dodgeball between his fingers. Altogether, it traveled 10,000 miles, took nine flights, and endured a seaweed wrap in the Panama Canal experiment.
"We're pretty sure it was the first dodgeball bounced across the canal," Wojtowicz noted with a smirk.
But that's a record for another day.
