I don't know how schools operate today. I am older so I am very judgemental about how it appears as though kids at school aren't really allowed to do a great deal of stuff out of fear that the kids will get hurt. When I was a kid it was kind of assumed that someone was going to get hurt and that is just the way that physical activities were. You got back up and kept playing after a fall or if you were really hurt you stayed down, probably cried, and then your friends would make the choice of whether or not they were going to help you or laugh at you. Perhaps I had a good group of friends because mine would almost always choose to laugh at first, then realize that you were actually not ok, then feel bad and start to help you.
There were two games that can be considered somewhat athletic that we did a lot of back when I was in elementary school and just like the title says they were called dodgeball and red rover.
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Dodgeball isn't just a totally ridiculous Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn movie, it is also something that basically anyone around my age could expect to play on a regular basis at school. The balls that were widely used I'm guessing almost everywhere were this plastic thing that would bounce like mad and was easy to grip. I think most people that played this game with any sort of regularity, can still bring back memories of how this ball felt to grip and can probably hear and smell the damn thing too.
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Given how basically everything is illegal now I would imagine that this game has changed a lot so that people can't get hurt. The balls are probably made of foam and no one is allowed to hit anyone. When I was playing it the entire idea of the game was to hit people in the face, or if they were a dude, a nut shot would be the highest accolades that a person could possibly achieve.
Did people get hurt? Absolutely. But none of these injuries were very bad. They mostly just hurt their feelings more than anything else and at least with my group of friends, getting smeared by a dodgeball only meant that you were waiting to join the next round in the hopes of getting vengeance on the person that did it to you. I don't recall any real fights taking place because of this game and all of us started out as friends and ended as friends once it was over. I think it was a pretty perfect game.
Now moving over to another game.... Red Rover... I'm surprised this game ever existed and would probably be ok with them deciding that this game is not allowed on the playgrounds anymore.
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Apparently, this game has been played basically all over the world and perhaps even you had played it. It works by having two as close to even teams as possible opposite one another, and the chant happens to call out the people on the other side by singing this
"Red Rover, red rover sent Johnny on over" but you know, substitute in the name of whoever is opposite you to come on over.
When your name is called you charge at the opposing interlocked arms of opponents with the idea being that the force of your body weight is going to be strong enough to break through the interlocked of the two people there. If you make it through, you win and return to your team, if you don't make it through, you are now on the team that you were running towards. The game continues until one team is reduced to only one member.
I have seen a ton of people get absolutely rag-dolled by this game meaning that they will run into arms and end up doing backflips because the two hands they are trying to break though have a very firm grip. I've seen boys get airborne in an attempt to force their ways through and with their body weight manage to knock down an entire line of people.
There was a ton of opportunities for horrible injury when you look at the physics of this game. It is basically an arm injury waiting to happen... but yet in all the recess time that I had over the years that never ended up happening. well, not that I remember.
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Then again, there was always this too.
For the most part playing these games made us have a sense of unity as a group. We became closer to one another if we were on their team, or on the opposite team as them. If you absolutely creamed someone on the dodgeball court or in a game of red rover, you likely kind of felt bad about it and made sure that they were ok. These games, which almost certainly are not allowed these days in this protective society, were early stage team building exercises and I think it made all of us closer as friends.
I hope that they still have things like this for the kids these days. I don't really have a great deal of interaction with children in my life so I don't know what they do. I hope it isn't just an hour after lunch for everyone to play on their phones and update their social media.