We got back from Beaver Camp on Sunday afternoon. Aside from swimming and boating, one of the kids’ favourite activities was playing gaga ball, so I decided to look up the origins of the game. According to Wikipedia they are murky with two main possibilities.

First, what is gaga ball? It’s a version of dodge ball that is played in a pit, which is usually hexagonal or octagonal, with knee-high wooden walls. In our case the gaga pit was filled with sand. The aim of the game is to be the last person standing. You smack the ball with your hands and get other people out by hitting them with the ball at or below the knee. It’s a face-paced game of jumping and dodging as the ball bounces off the walls.

At Beaver Camp the sign by the gaga pit says it is also called Israeli dodgeball. Wikipedia confirms that the predominant origin theory is that gaga ball was invented in Israel and imported around the world. It may have been brought to the northeastern United States in the 1950s by Israeli counselors working at Jewish summer camps. Israeli counselors also brought the game to Australia and it was reportedly very popular in Jewish communities in Perth in the 1980s.

Alternate reports say that gaga ball was invented in 1975 by Steve Steinberg when he was a teenage camp counselor at a Jewish Community Center camp near Baltimore, Maryland.

Either way, the game was definitely popularized at Jewish summer camps. Today it is common at all kinds of summer camps and on school playgrounds. In 2011 the first facility dedicated to gaga ball (The Gaga Center) opened in NYC.