As the kickball tournament for sixth grade is going on now at McAullife, some people might be wondering what the history of kickball is because sometimes such an interesting sport might be confusing. Well, here we go, into the history of kickball.

In the later part of the 1910s, Nicholas C. Seuss, then a supervisor of Cincinati’s playgrounds, created documented rules in his book ”The Playground Book” which gave the reader a field diagram and 12 rules. Instead of kickball though, he called it “Kick Baseball”.

In the 1920s, PE teachers used kickball as a way to teach young students the basics of how baseball worked, setting them up for later. 

A bit later after that, the first reported account of adults playing kickball was by Daniel Chase, who was a Physical Education Supervisor for the New York State Department of Education, when at a rural teachers’ conference in NY, teachers were given games they could teach to students, and taught the rules.

In WWII, soldiers would play kickball, and the United States Department of the Army promoted it as an informal game but in a different version that we know today. 60 years after it was created, kickball became famous as a after-school and recess sport in the 1970s.