What a kick: Kickball enjoys comeback -- by adults

Jen Bruning, league organizer, is up. Her team is down by one. Two outs. Fresh-cut clover smells sweet under her feet. A light mist of dust wafts across the infield. Bruning eyes the pitcher.

"Bring the heat," she taunts.

He winds up and bowls a bouncie. It bumps off her leg. Foul. Another pitch. She misses, strikes out.

"I can't believe I did that," Bruning says, turning toward the bench. A teammate slaps her hand, and they head to the field.

In a world where everything old is new again, the kickball craze probably shouldn't surprise anyone. The rubbery smell of the red ball has the power to take adults back to simpler times on grade school playgrounds. But unlike freeze tag or Big Wheels, kickball seems to translate to adulthood with surprising ease.

More than 1,100 people participate in organized leagues in the Twin Cities area. The Midwest Unconventional Sports Association (MUSA) and the Cities Sports Connection (CSC) have nearly 400 players each. Edina, Plymouth, Apple Valley, St. Louis Park and other city leagues make up the balance. The World Adult Kickball Association (WAKA), which has 6,000 players nationwide, is starting a Twin Cities league.

Although organized adult kickball has existed since at least 1998, the sport didn't really emerge locally until last fall, when MUSA and the city of St. Louis Park began leagues. Bruning was inspired after watching friends play in Milwaukee, where the game attracts 2,500 participants and competitors play to win the coveted "golden lunchbox" trophy at the end of the season.

"There are still people who don't know about it," she said. When she tells them about the league, their response is usually: "Are you serious?"

She is -- about having fun.

"It's a fourth-grader's game. You can hardly build any stress into it," she said.

It's that lack of stress that separates kickball from its more sophisticated cousin, softball, which requires more equipment, more skills and more practice. The Plymouth Station Sensation team used to play softball. Not anymore.

"Last year, we had a hard time getting enough people to show up at games," said captain Liz Nalezny, 25. "For kickball, we have tons of people, and we do a lot better at it than softball. Everyone feels like they can play."

Matt Meyer, his 6-foot-6 frame draped in surf shorts, argyle socks and Converse sneakers, bounces up to the plate to the beat of house music from a boom box. A leftie, he wallops the pitcher's roller, sending the ball into left field. Meyer overruns second base, then backpedals, hands dancing up and down in a crazy permutation of the moonwalk. His kick ignites a rally. When a teammate's single sends him flying home, the bench erupts in celebration.

Excuse to socialize

For others, kickball is the focal point of a social evening with old and new friends. Players show up ready to kick and run, and even be smacked by a thrown ball, wearing everything from cowboy hats to baseball caps, rubber cleats to work boots. They are teachers, consultants, cashiers. Their teams have creative -- and sometimes strange -- names: Kickballin' on a Budget, Rubber Thunder, the Hairy Funbags.

Players also show up to evening games hungry and thirsty. At the Bassett Creek fields in Minneapolis, where CSC teams play, brats sizzle on a portable grill behind home plate and a cooler chills the beverages that wash them down. When teams come to bat, dinner is served. If they aren't finished when it's time to head back on defense, they simply carry the brats out to the field.

Kickball players pull on socks, tie shoes and catch up on conversation as they wait for the current game to finish so their team can take the field. Lighthearted chatter about Milli Vanilli stops suddenly when the batter toes a pitch way, way . . . way up. There's an impressive backspin, and when the ball comes back to earth several seconds later, it's yards from where the third-baseman waits. The fielder lunges, arms comically splayed, and the ball drops through them.

Baillargeon, in his first season of adult kickball, was talked into playing for a friend's team. He admits that he gets grief when he tells people he's going to play kickball. But he doesn't mind. "It's a lot more fun than I thought it would be. It's pretty cool."

The sun is sinking. The swimming pool near the kickball field closes and three kids weave their bikes along the sidewalk, trying to ride without hands. When they spot the game, they wheel into the grass to watch. A player kicks a high foul ball, and it spins into the street. A city bus nearly flattens it as it bounces crazily down the slope.

The pleasure of diving for pennies, telling knock-knock jokes or catching lightning bugs might fade as kids grow up and go to work. But the urge to reach back to those days, and the desire to have simple, sheer fun, is still alive -- and kicking.