re: Watcha got? Old school elementary games..

I'm a '71 kid and STQ didn't seem like a term until the late 80s or 90s. But then, who knows. No one knew what many other places called anything in those days. No real way to communicate. Visitors, camps and cousins was about it.

Butts up. Where we threw a tennis ball at the side of the school and if you didn’t field it cleanly you had to stand there and get drilled. The best was double doinking nerds as they ran to the wall, hit the wall, bounce off their face and get em again

Might not be as old school but we played this game called Killer Soccer. It was basically rugby. It was a lot of fun but teachers hated it. Also Cops and Robbers. That’s probably problematic these days

Totally forget about Tug of War when the hefty kids became suddenly popular.

I 100% remember the teachers adding a mud pit to the middle.

quote:

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Smear the queer was appropriately named, as “queer” just means odd or strange. The person with the ball is the odd man, thus “queer.” That’s where the name derived and should have remained.

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Don’t remember associating it with “gay” in elementary school at all.

Of course my mom worked at a state agency that was the “Center for Mental Retardation” and we never thought anything of that either.

quarters

I thought it was Seven Up Heads Down?

Freeze Tag
Setback
Kill The Man *

* teachers constantly hassled us for tackling, so we changed the rules, when the ball carrier was in the grasp, he had to fumble the ball. So one of the black kids at school named it "USA Fumblin".

Crack the whip

We had a sub PE teacher for a while. She put out a box of PE equipment and told us to make up a game. We invented bean bags vs tennis balls. Every kid got one or the other the object was if you had a tennis ball you tried to take the bean bag from be bean bag kids and vice versa. The team that had the most of the others balls or bags was the winner.

First day it was kind of fun. The second day it got serious. I didn't know 5th graders could have a blood thirst until then. I remember the teacher blew the whistle and this kid David tore off towards our team and threw a vicious flying fore arm shiver to a poor girls throat and snatching up her ball. Half the kids dropped there balls and bags and ran. The few of us left behind grabbed them up and then it happened. A pile of 5th grade catholic school boys in a fight to the death for bag or ball.

I remember at one point having torn the entire collar off a kids uniform shirt while holding him so my ball teammates could rip the bag from his hands. The sounds of the whistle being blown by the PE teacher made it even more intense. Who knew that you could tell by the tone of a whistle that the person blowing it was in fear.

The battle was fast but furious the ball team was berserking through the bag team. At one point a bag teamer in a last ditch kamikaze attack threw a bean bag at me. He must have learned to crow hop the previous night at little league practice. The bag smacked me right in the eye but even though dazed and partially blinded I had the wherewithal to grab his bag. Tucking it in with others i had while I curled up into a ball. Looking up I saw the whole bagger team had chose to throw their bags in defeat. I stood up and saw the looks on the faces of my classmates and the PE teacher.

The looks of fear and confusion were on most of the kids. But on the girl David had maul dragged was a look of thanks. The combatants had to kneel on the side walk for the rest of PE. My eye ended up swelling up and giving me an impressive black eye for school pictures.