Inside Whirlyball: Chicago's Weirdest Sport

Before I visited Chicago for my DMC training as a new employee, I had never played Whirlyball. In fact, I had never heard of Whirlyball until the week prior. I was excited to have the chance to play last week during a DMC activity fund event. It’s a fun tradition for the Chicago office. After trying it myself, I decided to spend some time researching this unique “sport”.

Whirlyball Origins

Despite its conception in Salt Lake City in the 1960's, there is a complete lack of properly outfitted Whirlyball facilities in my native southwestern U.S. I first thought that there may be some correlation between Whirlyball availability and regional lacrosse ability, but the presence of a location in Dallas in conjunction with the absence of any locations in the Northeast disproved this theory.

Whirlic-Ready

This hybrid mashup of bumper cars, lacrosse, and basketball was totally alien to me. All ball handling is performed using a 'scoop', which looks like a sawed-off piece of lacrosse equipment. I used to play tennis, and I assumed that the requisite hand-eye coordination involved in using a racquet effectively would bridge to using the scoop. Not so. I only managed to pick up the ball once, and after having done so, I grossly overestimated how much force would be required to pass the Wiffle ball ten feet to my teammate who was in perfect position to score a Whirlic. For those who don't know, a Whirlic is the primary method of earning points in Whirlyball. The only other ways to score involve being fouled by a member of the opposing team.

Despite the fact that the most gracious thing that could be said for my performance was that I wasn't an active detriment to my team, I had a blast playing! Now I just need to figure out how to get some solid scoop-handling practice in before the next time I play…

Whirlyball Miscellany

While researching the sport on Wikipedia to learn the proper terminology to write this article, I learned a couple of interesting things. First, there are advanced maneuvers for me to attempt the next time I play with names like “roll-offs” and “wall bouncing.” I also learned that the “pillow block” was one of the few positive contributions I brought to the court. 

DMC isn’t quite ready for the professional Whirlyball stage, but I found out that players at the national level prefer Trac Ball scoops over the standard Flo-Tron scoops. I now have a new bucket list entry: Watch the national Whirlyball championship!