The Supersized PhysEd Podcast
The Supersized Physed Podcast is dedicated to providing new ideas, activities and inspiration to our physical education field. Each week a new episode about various physed topics comes out, sometimes with a guest, sometimes it's just me!
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The Supersized PhysEd Podcast
Ultimate Fish Ball: An Invasion Game
What's up PE Nation!
Let's unlock the secrets to revolutionizing your physical education curriculum with the creative game of Ultimate Fish Ball. Imagine a sport that combines the best elements of Ultimate Frisbee and Ultimate Football, with the added twist of an inflatable fish and dynamic rules. By tuning in, you'll learn how to transform your class into a hub of agility, teamwork, and communication, with strategies that encourage students to take three steps towards skill mastery. Discover how integrating this game can serve as a bridge to more complex sports like tchoukball, and why it's a perfect fit for small teams on a third or half basketball court.
Prepare to redefine traditional PE lessons as we explore the fast-paced world of Ultimate Fish Ball, where the action shifts seamlessly between offense and defense, keeping players on their toes. The game fosters inclusivity with mandatory passes to female players and features creative variations like playing with a rubber chicken or inflatable fish to keep things fresh. Together, we'll enhance your teaching toolkit with foundational games like Keep Away and Defend the Pin, building a curriculum that progressively develops student skills. Don't miss the chance to follow my journey on Medium and Substack, where each post aims to push the boundaries of physical education and inspire a new generation of active learners.
Take care,
Dave
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Hello and welcome to the Supersize Phys Ed podcast. My name is Dave and today I want to talk about Ultimate Fish Ball. Yes, it's a very cool name and I want to tell you all about it. So let's get ready, here we go. All right, welcome back everybody.
Speaker 1:So, along with my last podcast on Blindfold Games, this one also is outside on my screen in Lanai, so you might hear a few birds and my dog and some cats and things like that, but there's no lawnmower today, so that's a good thing. So hopefully the sound quality will be a little better than the last episode. I'm just trying to get outside and be with the dog and also my kids are sleeping, so I just figured this would be the best way. Now, today I want to teach you or tell you about a game I've been playing with my students called Ultimate Fish Ball. Now, if you've ever heard of Ultimate Frisbee, ultimate Football, ultimate, I guess, ball, that's really what we've been doing, which is adding different layers to it, and the rules I use are leading up to when I do jukeball, when I teach them jukeball. So a lot of the rules are similar, even though if you play ultimate frisbee it might be a little different or ultimate football. So in this game I tell them they get three steps with the ball. And if you play ultimate Frisbee it might be a little different or ultimate football. So in this game I tell them they get three steps with the ball. In this case we start with a ball like a Gatorskin ball and so if they have the ball they can take three steps. Now in real ultimate they can't. I don't believe, but I'm playing this way because again it'll lead up to Chookball and some of the rules there. If the ball hits the ground in any way, shape or form, it goes to the other team right there. So again this is leading up to chook ball and some of those rules.
Speaker 1:As far as defense I go, I go over the three types again with them and if you've never ever heard of this, it, it's pretty simple and pretty basic to teach them, which I really like. So what I do is I bring a student up and I have them pretend like they're going to throw the ball or just they have the ball in their hand. They don't pretend they have a ball in their hand. They have a ball in their hand and they pretend like they're going to throw it, or that just they're looking to pass to somebody and they I show them what hot defense first. First, like it's basically all in their face, like I tell them that we don't ever play any games with hot defense that I can think of. And then we go I tell, show them cool or cold defense, which is, and shoot ball, is cold defense. You just get in position off the you know for the ball, off the rebounder, or get in position to catch the ball, or if somebody drops the ball on the other team, just to go from there. So cold defense is just basically standing there being an obstacle in the way, you can't really jump and catch it, can't intercept it, can't knock it down. That is cold defense.
Speaker 1:So then I show them what we do for warm defense, kind of like the Goldilocks and three bears, like just right. So the way I do it is um, I actually just started this because I read in the book that it's like your arm's length away and I realized that's too, still too close, that's still like almost hot defense. So I have the student put their arms straight out towards me and I put my arms straight out towards them and I say that's the distance. It's like basically two or double arm's length away, and that is warm defense. They can jump, they can knock it down, they can intercept it, but they cannot slap it out of their hands, the ball out of the person's hands. They can't touch the person anyway, and that is how I go through the defense. First, I want to make sure they understand how to play this game and the rules to it.
Speaker 1:Obviously, now, the reason I don't play cold defense during ultimate is because, you know, because that that would lead up to chook ball is, if you played cold defense with this game, it'd be way too easy, just like you stand there and they catch the ball and they go all the way down the court and they catch it in the end zone and that's it. So it'd be way too easy to score. So there has to be some defense. Now, the way I organize this is I have teams of hopefully six at the most, and one team has jerseys, one team does not, and I just have them tucking in their pocket. If they don't want to wear it, or if they want to wear it, that's fine. Some of the girls put around the wrists just so we know what team they're on. So I'll say, okay, yellow team over there, the non-jersey team facing them, go on the court with them.
Speaker 1:And we always start with a rock paper scissors to see who gets the ball first. And again, that that goes along with the Chook Ball tournament. Every game starts with the rock paper scissors to see who gets the ball first. So a lot of this is a lead up to that, and even if you don't do Chook Ball or don't even know what I'm talking about, it's still a good practice to see who gets the ball first. It's not just like, well, I have the ball in my hand, so it's my ball. It's a good way to do that and build, you know, a good sportsmanship.
Speaker 1:All right, now I should talk about some of the games that led up to ultimate, not just ultimate leading up to Chookball. So some of the games we have been playing before ultimate, fish ball and ultimate is defend the pin, which I've done a podcast on in the past about. You have a hula hoop and a pin and one person is guarding the pin while the other, like four or five or so are in a circle around that person and they're trying to pass, pass, pass, and then someone takes an open shot and tries to knock the pin down, Then they switch. So it's looking for an open shot. It's uh, students get their hands like up and ready to catch the ball, and it's a lot of communication. So that's defend the pin, which again, I did a whole podcast on before and then we also played.
Speaker 1:I don't even have a name for this. It's just like a keep away type game where four catches equals one point and it's set in a dynamic situation where it it's not just here's my goal, here's your goal uh, like an ultimate is actually like that. This game of keep away is just a like a third of a court, or sometimes they can play half the court, depending on how many students I have, because I have two like basketball courts and there's teams of again, this is I'm looking for more four V four on this one, or three V three, and three catches in a row equals one point and they have to keep moving, moving, moving, and they can't move with the ball, um, and they just pass, and again, it's warm defense. So they're getting used to getting open, supporting the person with the ball and uh, talking, so that all leads up to this game, which again is ultimate or ultimate fishball getting open, supporting the person with the ball and talking, so that all leads up to this game which, again, is ultimate fish ball. So here's how we play that.
Speaker 1:First, we start with a dodge ball, a gator skin ball, whatever you want to call it, and there's two goals, basically like end zones. They do rock paper scissors to see who goes first and that team starts from mid-court and they're trying to move the ball down and catch the ball in the end zone. And I tell them they can't use their three steps to walk into the end zone. They have to actually catch it in the end zone. And, yeah, that's about it. They get three steps. I tell them three seconds with the ball, but it's more like five or so. I tell them they can't be like one, two, three. It's just getting them ready for these kind of games where they have to be in a fast situation.
Speaker 1:And when I demonstrate this, I usually do this under our pavilion, but it could be on the court or wherever, and I'll get a small group of like three v three going and just show them how to move the ball and how fast it flips from offense to defense. Like one moment you'll be on offense and all of a sudden the ball hit the ground and all of a sudden you're on defense. You have to get back really fast and fence, you have to get back really fast. And there are some students that just kind of, you know, take their sweet old time and don't really run back and forth all the time, and there's kids that go go all out. And there are times when I want to and you could as well do a more competitive court versus a more just kind of getting to know the game court. There are times when I'll do just girls versus girls on one court and boys versus boys on another court. I know that's not, you know, politically correct or whatever, but sometimes the girls just want to be with the girls to learn the game and then, you know, get integrated with the boys later.
Speaker 1:And with Chookball I definitely have, you know, I have like three girls on a team and three boys on a team, if it works out like that. So it's always mixed when it comes to the tournament and other upper-level games. But when they're learning the game, sometimes I will just give them a choice and I'll ask the girls kind of like more privately or something like would you want to just take it easy and learn the game, because a lot of times the boys don't pass to the girls and I'll have to make that rule where boys, in order to score each drive or whatever you want to call it down the court, at least one girl has to touch the ball, like get, get a catch, because some of the boys just want to throw it you know, a 50-yard bomb to their friends, things like that. So I try to discourage that. So it's those kind of things that you definitely need to look at if you're going to play this game. You know how you want to run that, what kind of teams you want to make.
Speaker 1:I've also done it where, just because of the size of the classes, you know we might have again 20, what? 24 would be ideal, six v six on two courts. But you know it just doesn't work that way. We have extra kids and so when you get into 7 versus 7 or 8 versus 8, that's a lot. But when we do the Chute Ball Tournament that's what it's going to be I take a class and I divide them into four teams. So they do have to eventually get used to that and I don't want that, but that's the reality.
Speaker 1:So what I might do, and what I do sometimes, is take a smaller group like a 3v3 or 4v4, and put them under our pavilion. So I have three games going on at once. Again, it just makes the group smaller. Maybe 5v5 on the two courts and then 4v4 under the pavilion, something like that Just to get them used to the game, used to the rules, things like that. That's okay. So what I do is I start with a dodgeball and if I see that they're doing a really good job, I'll switch it up. Now I might give them and I've done this in the past like a rubber chicken and they have to move that down the court, that's harder or a deck ring rubber, deck ring and if they do a really good job, I will give them a fish.
Speaker 1:That's what's called ultimate fish ball, and I actually did learn this game a long time ago. I'm going to give Nathan Horn credit for this. I believe I learned it at the 2015 PE Institute and I loved it. It was great. It was the adults and us. We were playing it. I just thought it was a great idea.
Speaker 1:So it's a big, big, and if you don't have these, that's okay, but I have a big a few of these inflatable fish that I got from palo sports at the time I think it's called something different, I can't remember the name of it and, um, they just have to pass them and they can't. The good part about these things, these inflatables, is they can't pass them like like I was talking about just a moment ago, these long bombs. You can't throw a long bomb with these fish. They're semi-durable but they're not, and they're different. They're not exactly like beach ball material they're heavier than that, but they're definitely not something you could just throw 40 yards down the field, especially when you have wind and things like that. So definitely more short passes and that'll work out a lot better and the students really like it. It's just a novelty of using the fish. They really enjoy that.
Speaker 1:Of course, you have to go over the rules of you can't like sit on it or you can't pop it or you can't I mean, I don't know. Just go over all these rules at a time that I'm thinking of right now. But it's the same game, just add different objects. And you can do that with many different games, not just an ultimate. Just switch the objects up and see what they can do. I've done that many, many times with different games and it just seems to add a little wrinkle into it. It adds more strategy, it adds more creativity and it provokes more questions you can ask and different thoughts from the students. So that's basically it. That's Ultimate Fishball.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to do a couple of the day because I just want to talk about that today and hopefully you can get that started if you'd like in your PE program either Ultimate and again it's great for invasion games Just Ultimate is really basic or the Keep Away game or even Defend the Pin. That's what I'm teaching now with the third graders, just getting them ready for these type of games. So reach out to me if you have any questions for Ultimate Fishball or anything else and, as always, go to supersizephysodcom for more information. Or join me on my journey, my new journey on Medium and Substack just getting things out there, more blog posts, more material out there. It's going to take a little bit, but I'm working on it and I'd love for you to be a part of the journey. So I'll put all those links in the show notes and have a great day, great weekend, whenever you're listening to this PE Nation. You guys and girls are awesome. Let's keep pushing our profession forward. Thank you.
