Why We Love Broomball

by John Gorman
Love of Sports Correspondent

Do you skate like a three-legged bull?

Did your mother not trust you with hard objects when you were a child?

Was your family unable to shell out roughly the GDP of a small Pacific island?

Wish you could play hockey anyway?

You’re not alone, and help is on the way. Doctors are now prescribing broomball.

Play once a week next semester; repeat as necessary.

We were up at Niagara last weekend for the university co-ed broomball championship. Alright, it was a Sunday night; there was nothing good on TV.

Broomball is a fascinating sport. It works just like hockey, except without skates – and with, you know, brooms. However, the ends of the brooms have been slightly modified to look more like the reverse side of a snowbrush. (If you’re from outside the Northeast, please google “snowbrush.”)

If you’ve ever played Mario Kart on the Vanilla Lake level, then you pretty much know where this is going. The game featured overly intense college students flopping around on ice and spinning out, struggling to maintain their balance. Every now and again, a goal was scored – including one goal by a girl who swears she’d never played before. Did we mention this was the championship?

The students at the quaint campus just 400 yards from Canada choose up sides at the beginning of the semester, and keep a few ground rules. No hitting (although this is open to interpretation), at least three girls on the ice at all times, and at least one girl in the shootout. You know, since guys are so much more athletic than girls when they are all sliding like special-ed penguins across a frozen pond of shame, in sneakers.

The semifinal was hotly contested, won in a shootout by the host team Optimus Prime. (Yes, that’s the team name. Apparently, “Thundercats” was already taken.) The final was a bit of a blowout, with Optimus Prime losing big to Super Metroid. We only wish we could make this up.

Thankfully, the playoffs weren’t played as a series – lord knows we couldn’t deal with somebody winning in a sweep.

Lest you think only vaguely almost-Canadian types would subject themselves to such icy silliness and take it so seriously, an alumnus admitted as much to us that they play it at Penn State, one of many colleges that claim to be a drinking school with a football problem.

As a matter of fact, Broomball pops up as an intramural sport at numerous high schools and college campuses across the country. You can play it with your sorority sisters, you can play it drunk and you can play it while skipping your night class. (Not that we condone that kind of behavior.)

Broomball is a chance for you to live your shootout dream of flipping one five-hole with the playoffs on the line. Broomball is a chance for you, Mr. non-athletic scholarship, to meet playfully competitive women that love sports!

Broomball is also a sure-fire way to instantly feel like you are seven years old again and playing a winter sport for the first time.

It’s social, it’s nostalgic and it’s hilarious. We love it.

(For more amateurish-looking pictures of broomball, please visit our Facebook page.)