Why Hacky Sack and Spikeball Are So Popular With Kids Now: A Teacher’s Observation
Last Wednesday, I stood at the edge of my 7th grade recess field, half-empty iced coffee sweating through the paper cup in my hand, and counted: 18 kids spread across two loose groups, none of them scrolling phones, none of them yelling about tryouts or tournament rankings. Twelve were huddled around a beat-up spikeball net near the bleachers, and six were passing a frayed neon hacky sack under the big oak tree. Half the kids in the spikeball group weren’t on any school sports team this year. One of them was Jake, the quiet kid who usually spends recess reading graphic novels in the library.
He spotted me leaning against the fence and waved me over, asking if I wanted to sub in for a minute. I declined, stuck on hall duty, and asked him when he’d gotten into spikeball. He wiped sweat off his forehead and shrugged. “A kid brought it in last month. It’s just fun. Unlike basketball, you don’t have to be good to join. If you miss, you just start again. No one’s counting how many points you cost the team.”
That weekend, I saw the same energy at my own house. My 16-year-old son had four friends over, and I expected them to camp out in the basement in front of the Xbox, like they usually do. Instead, they dug out a dusty hacky sack I’d kept in the back of the garage from my college days, dragged folding chairs out of the way of the patio, and spent almost an hour kicking it around. No one got eliminated when they missed. No one took a break to post a reel of the best kick. When one of the kids tripped over the garden hose, everyone laughed, and they started right back up. My son told me later that half his friends can’t afford the $100 monthly club sport fees or the latest $70 video game releases, and this is just free. You don’t need Wi-Fi, you don’t need to plan anything.
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple weeks now, talking to other teachers and parents, and it’s pretty clear why these two simple games are blowing up right now. For as long as most of our kids have been old enough to join activities, every option has felt like it’s gotten higher and higher stakes. Recess is sometimes structured to fit soft learning goals, travel sports require three practices a week and thousands of dollars a year, even after-school game nights mean buying a $40 board game with 12 pages of rules that no one wants to read. Kids spend half their free time on social media, where every interaction feels like you’re being judged on how funny you are, how cool your clothes are, how many likes you get.
Hacky sack and spikeball flip all that. Anyone can join, any time. If you’ve never played before, you learn the two basic rules in 10 seconds. You don’t need a full team – you can play with 2, or 8, whatever shows up. There’s no bench. If you’re bad, you just stand a little closer to the person passing it to you, and no one minds. I saw that two weeks ago, when our new student Miguel, who barely speaks English yet, wandered over to the hacky circle. No one made a big speech about welcoming him, no one pulled me over to mediate. They just moved over to make space, and when he missed the first three kicks, they just laughed and tossed it back to him. He’s been there every day since.
I’ve also noticed that even kids who struggle with focus do really well with these games. Our student Liam, who has ADHD and can rarely make it through 10 minutes of whole-class instruction without fidgeting or getting up, will stand in the hacky circle for the whole 20 minute recess waiting for his turn. There’s no pressure to perform, no test at the end, just a small, moving thing to pay attention to, and a group of people standing with you. That’s the kind of low-stakes social practice kids don’t get a lot of these days.
For teachers, this isn’t hard to work with. We added three extra hacky sacks (they’re $4 each on Amazon) and one extra spikeball set to our recess equipment closet this month, and that’s it. We don’t schedule games, we don’t enforce official rules, we just let them work it out. For parents, it’s even easier. Keep a $10 hacky sack in your car, and a $30 spikeball set in your garage. Next time your kid says they’re bored and all their friends are over, or you’re having a family cookout and everyone’s hovering by the punch bowl staring at their phones, just pull it out. You don’t have to be good at it. You don’t even have to play if you don’t want to. Just having it there gives kids a low-effort way to interact that doesn’t involve screens or pressure.
Last week, I stayed late to grade quizzes, and looked out my classroom window to see a handful of 6th graders who stayed after for math help playing spikeball with two of our 8th grade teachers. No one was keeping score, one of the teachers tripped over the net and landed in the clover, and everyone yelled so loud I could hear it through the closed window. I grabbed my hacky sack out of my trunk when I left, and kicked it around with my son in the backyard after dinner. I’m terrible at it – I missed more than I hit – and no one cared. It’s not going to fix all the pressure kids are under, or cut down on screen time entirely, or solve every social problem at school. It’s just a cheap, simple thing that kids are choosing right now, because it meets something they’re not getting anywhere else. For now, that’s more than enough.
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