by Ashlyn Seibert, Staff Writer
September 1, 2020
In compliance with COVID guidelines, Ouachita’s Recreational Life team has decided to introduce human foosball as an intramural sport for the first time ever. As a strictly non-contact sport, human foosball allows players to follow social distancing guidelines with few or no issues, while still offering a way for them to spend time with their teammates.
“We still believe that it’s really important to have a strong community here at Ouachita, in the midst of all that we’re going through right now,” Matthew Cook, Assistant Director of RecLife, said. “We wanted to come up with something that would still allow us to social distance and maintain those guidelines… something that would be still a lot of fun, and still keep everyone as safe as possible.”
The game is, as the name suggests, much like regular foosball, except it is life-size and humans take the place of foos men. Team members are evenly spaced and hold onto horizontal poles that limit their side-to-side movement. These restrictions allow for exciting gameplay, while ensuring that everyone involved is able to maintain Ouachita’s COVID guidelines.
The RecLife team has been working hard to engineer and construct the human foosball court for the upcoming season. According to Shane Seaton, Ouachita’s RecLife Director, it has been a bit of a challenge figuring out how to organize and put the court together in a cost effective manner, but it is going to be well worth it.
“I had seen human foosball courts built at different camps, and I thought ‘Oh, that’s neat,’” Seaton said. “I have experience building stuff, and so I just started looking at different pictures of people’s courts on Google and kind of just started building and putting it together.”
Human foosball has already received really positive feedback, and many students are signed up to participate. There are fifteen teams in total this semester. Starting this week, the teams will be playing against each other for the next four weeks, with the playoffs taking place toward the end of September.
