Zumvolley: The Dance Sensation Sweeping the Gymansium

The best part about picture day?
No buzzers!

Betty, my third grader, likes to play basketball. She takes a laid back attitude towards sports in general, and early on in her basketball career at the YMCA, she discovered that you really don't have to move outside the circle in the middle of the court because, eventually, everybody just runs back and forth anyway. This was an excellent way of conserving energy; while everyone else was working up a sweat running, Betty spent the better part of a season strolling casually from one side of the circle to the other before her father finally threatened to take her out of the league if she didn't actually attempt to play basketball.

One area of her game she always focused on with laser intensity was the scoreboard. Not because she wanted to win (they didn't keep score that young), but so that, when the clock was in danger of running down to zero, she could immediately stop drifting around the circle and put both hands over her ears before the buzzer sounded. She really hates loud noises.

Anyway, once we convinced her to leave the Magic Circle and get within a few feet of the basket, she discovered that she had a natural advantage on both defense and offense, being about a foot taller than any other player and even scored some points.

This tragedy could have
been prevented by simply
running away from the ball.

Regrettably, basketball is not a spring sport in the youth leagues, so this spring Betty is trying volleyball at our local community center. Eleanor played volleyball, so I am an experienced Volleyball Mom, and I can tell you that, even in the best of circumstances, 3rd/4th Grade Volleyball is tragically entertaining. Balls fly EVERYWHERE. True, a simple serve can go across the net and land in-bounds, but this rarely happens. Sometimes the ball hits the rafters at the top of the ceiling. Sometimes it lands on the other court. Often it lands in the bleachers (Pro Tip: Never, ever, ever look at your cell phone while watching an elementary volleyball game. In this case, being a spectator is NOT a spectator sport.)  Frequently, it flies backwards over the server's head. Periodically it sails through the doorway and out the gym. On the rare occasions when it arrives at the opposite side of the net, the girls on the other side do the logical thing that any sane person would do when a ball comes flying at their face: they duck. Sometimes, they run away, usually plowing into the girls next to them. Sometimes the ball will land splat in the middle of the court because every single girl on the team has seen it coming and backed away. The winner of an elementary school volleyball game is usually whichever team lands the most serves in-bounds, because no sane girl returns a serve (on purpose). This can take as long as a regular game because somebody has to chase all the balls and also nobody ever knows when to rotate so the umpire is continually rotating and unrotating and rerotating the teams.

O.M.G.!!! Totes adorbs!
SQEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Betty's team is called The Pandas, because of course that's what is going to happen when you ask a bunch of nine- and ten-year-old girls to name their own sports team. They rehearse on Monday nights at the community center gymnasium. In the sort of brilliantly horrible scheduling only possible at a busy and diverse small community center, the Pandas have Court 1B, while Court 1A is used by a small but very energetic Zumba class. To be perfectly clear, a single gymnasium contains, at the same time, a combination of Latin dance performed by a small group of game but rhythm-deprived middle-aged women (fortunately, the buff male instructor has enough rhythm, shimmy, sashay, and even twerking for all of them) with a very robust sound system and ten 3rd and 4th grade girls with the attention span, energy level, and generally high pitched squealing of a group of overly caffeinated squirrels in a helium factory. The results take tragically entertaining to an almost mythical level, the level of Zumvolley.

The Zumba class gets to slide and spin around flying volleyballs, adding a new level to their workout, but not, alas, enhancing their coordination or ability to locate the beat. The Pandas get their very own dance track. There was spontaneous dancing breaking out all over that court. Even with three coaches, any time a coach got distracted by coaching (it happens, although it happens at their peril with nine-year-olds), two or three random Pandas would break out of volleyball formation and take on an entirely different kind of formation, eyes glued to the Zumba instructor, taken by the rhythm. Even when they managed to face the correct direction (the other side of the net; it is surprising how often this has to be said), at any given time, half the team was doing some sort of more or less random dance move. Volleyball has never seen so much twirling. As a spectator, it was frankly mesmerizing, sort of like being on the freeway and seeing the debris from a wreck between a live poultry truck and a Jello pudding truck, except that you don't have to pretend to not rubberneck because you're in the bleachers. The biggest danger to a spectator was getting distracted by the Zumba end of the wreck and getting pounded in the head by a stray volleyball. Even Eleanor (a teenager) put away her phone because nothing on Netflix was as exciting as Zumvolley.

Sadly, Zumba ended half an hour before volleyball, and the dancers dragged themselves out of the gym in exhaustion (except for the instructor, who had barely broken a sweat and appeared to be trying not to skip). The Pandas actually played worse without the music and spontaneous dancing. It was like the little disco lights in their souls had gone out. If they lose the first game, we may have to petition the community center to get out the speaker so the girls can get their Zumvolley on.