A dilettante's guide to inventing a sport
A retrospective on the 20th anniversary of Tennis Polo (Toccer)
Last month, Toccer celebrated its 20th anniversary. Unless you attended summer camp in New England in the early 00s, played high school tennis for me over the last decade, or randomly stumbled upon it online, you've probably never heard of it.
Tennis Polo (the more formal name) is pretty straightforward. Two teams try to score goals using a tennis-sized ball, defended by a goalkeeper holding a tennis racket. The team with the most points wins.
How to Invent a Sport by Accident
It rained too much in the summer of 2004 at Camp Awosting for Boys in Bantam, CT. We'd built a solid intra-camp tennis program, but Toccer was born out of necessity.
We never expected it to be the thing everyone wanted to do, but it took over camp that summer. Even on hot days, kids would sign up for tennis just to play Toccer. I'd send my co-counselor to run lessons for the few kids who wanted them, while 30+ others streamed onto the soccer field for this hybrid sport. The guy who ran "sportsfield" used to get annoyed with me, and decades later, our rivalry (jokingly) lives on because of the summer where I 'pickleballed' the soccer field with a new sport that didn't really belong there.
As summer ended, the kids insisted others would enjoy this hybrid sport. Skeptical but intrigued, I bought a domain, and on a rainy day, we wrote some rules. There are no videos or photos from that first year of the sport, any original photos I have from Awosting toccer came from 2005 when I went back to camp as a frequent visitor. (It’s where this awesome grainy video was shot.)
Over the years, I took Toccer with me to other places. Kids in far-flung states got to play, including one winter where we took it indoors. Different setup, foam ball, but just as popular. I realized we were onto something.
Occasionally, I'd get emails from people wanting to adapt Toccer for their gym classes. I also researched other sports, their rules, origins, and what made them popular. That's when I discovered Pesäpallo, though it'd be another decade before that sport became part of my personal lore.
Iterating the Game
The second act of Tennis Polo started 230 miles north in Vermont, at another summer camp. In 2010, as Head Counselor at Windridge Camp (a tennis & sports camp), I mentioned Toccer, thinking it might be fun for a group of athletes to try.
Everyone was on board, except the camp director, who worried about kids swinging rackets around. The soccer director suggested keeping rackets only for goalkeepers. With the camp director's approval for a one-time pilot, we took to the field.
Just like in 2004, it set the camp alight. Kids demanded Toccer for weekly evening activities, and it was so popular that it was added to the camp's "color war" Olympics. We also added holding rules and penalties that the original version lacked. There were probably 100 games of Toccer played that summer.
The best part of 2010 was that girls got to play. We invented Toccer at a boys camp, and prior to 2011, I’d only ever coached boys high school teams or worked at single gender camps. Seeing very athletic kids of all ages and genders play the sport make it look even more like a “real” thing.
Even better, the rules were institutionalized enough that counselors could run games without me being there. It was probably as close to James Naismith watching people play basketball as I'll ever get as a sport inventor. I remember the first time I took an evening off and drove past the soccer fields as there were multiple games happening, it was such a cool feeling.
Since that summer, I’ve had a few opportunties to introduce teams to the game including several of my high school teams. These days, I’d never let a varsity tennis team play my quirky hybrid sport because it turns out state championships are more rewarding, but it’s a decent JV presesason activity to break things up sometimes.
Why It's So Hard to Make a New Sport Take Off
Since then, Toccer's mostly been something in my back pocket that I don't bring up much. Saying you invented a sport doesn't usually come up in casual conversations, and as my career has grown, it feels odd to talk about something that seems almost frivolous.
The difference with Tennis Polo is that we've had tons of playtesting, hundreds of people from around the world both playing and coaching it, which is significant and unusual for an experimental sport. The sport is too similar to other things to be viable in an everyday context (why play toccer when you could just play lacrosse?) but at camp, the right mix of salesmanship, diverse communities, newness, and boredom can create the perfect exilir to make things that shouldn’t work pretty workable.
Starting a new sport at a camp isn’t exactly a viable goal either, because kids are fickle. New sports usually head straight to market, hoping to build an audience. It’s why things like cornhole and pickleball and even ultimate frisbee have managed some modest commercial success. People already know how to play them and were going to do it anyway.
My research on the origins of sports helped me understand this conundrum, which is why I didn't chase the futility of turning Toccer into something bigger.
People still email occasionally for practice plans, but that's about it. I still haven't convinced two colleges or universities to stage the first collegiate Tennis Polo match, which might be fun someday.
So much of my own journey through life is about iteration, creativity, and brazen confidence where it's perhaps slightly unwarranted. Maybe that's why I identify so much with Tennis Polo and why, despite not wanting to make it part of my identity, it bears my resemblance.
Thanks to everyone who has ever stepped onto the field.