Last weekend my wife and I babysat the fourth-grade daughter of one of our friends. On Friday night the three of us played Sorry!, a board game I partook in when I was a kid. It was a trip down memory lane, to say the least, and after several rolls of the dice, the game came back to me.

The following morning, the little girl we were watching – I’ll call her Sheila – was up and out of bed early. I was up too, and she gave me a jolt when I saw her quietly entering the kitchen – I’m used to being the only one up in our house at an early hour.

For a while I read the newspaper while she colored and played with our cat. Sheila also read a little from a book she brought from home. But by 9 a.m. or so, even with my wife now out of bed to help entertain her, I could tell Sheila was getting restless.

So she and I went outside and played in our spacious backyard. At first we shot some baskets on the basketball hoop, and then I suggested we kick the soccer ball around. That’s when things got interesting.

I suggested we kick the soccer ball around. That’s when things got interesting.

It was a chilly morning. I kept putting my hands over my ears because they were cold, and the grass was heavy-dew wet. But it was sunny out, a beautiful, blustery fall day, and I could tell Sheila was having fun. It had been years since I’d passed significant time in this way with a small child, so I was savoring the moment.

At first Sheila wanted to play a game in which the soccer ball was stationed in the center of both of us, and the first one to run toward it and kick it came out victorious. My tender left knee made this activity a no-go dud, so I suggested we go back to simply kicking the ball back and forth to each other.

Sheila completely whiffed with her leg on one of my kicks of the ball to her, and I yelled out “strike” to playfully indicate her foot missed the target. She found this funny and was soon yelling the same thing to me, though I couldn’t figure out why – I wasn’t missing the ball with my foot like she had.

Then I figured it out. Sheila called out “strike” when I failed to kick the ball before it stopped moving. If the ball came to a complete stop and then I kicked it, it was considered a “strike” by her. We’d invented a game!

Soon enough, she was kicking the ball at odd angles and extended lengths so that I wouldn’t reach it in time, and I was doing the same thing to her on my ball kicks. I quickly surmised that this was not only a fun game but would also make for a solid warm-up activity for a soccer team.

I quickly surmised that this was not only a fun game but would also make for a solid warm-up activity for a soccer team.

We played to twenty and Sheila won the contest and then had to go. Our thirty minutes or so in the backyard reminded me of the joys of being around small children and being young in general. How many similar games had my neighborhood friends and I made up on the spot while playing outside as carefree kids?

Strike! may already be a game invented by others, but Sheila and I can pretend like it’s ours.

Photo by Bunny on Unsplash