Jackson, Missouri is not known for being a hotbed of counterculture. A town of roughly 15,000 nestled close to the Missouri bootheel, it could easily pass for Anywhere, USA, its quaint Main Street surrounded by farmland, local businesses, and quiet subdivisions. Churches abound on nearly every corner. It is about as far from punk-rock and secret societies as a town can get. Yet, for a brief time from 2002–2006, it was also home to the Jackson Underground Dodgeball League, or JUDL, a collection of misfit teenagers who would eventually go on to fight city hall.
JUDL’s origins started with a video game. A group of friends from Jackson Senior High School gathered to play Super Dodgeball for the original Nintendo console. Unlike the traditional form of dodgeball played in gyms across America and portrayed in a Ben Stiller film, the video game sets two opposing teams on a pixelated court. Inside each half of the court are the dodgers, surrounded by the opposing team’s throwers on the outside of the field. Rather than being knocked out with a hit, the game relies on whittling down a team’s HP, almost like a points-based system. It did not take long for the group to realize that the game’s premise was not a far-fetched video game facsimile but an easily-understood and adaptable representation of a childhood favorite. So, why not try it in real life?
They drafted the first set of unofficial rules in one of the all-night diners of the neighboring city of Cape Girardeau. A tennis court worked well with the net providing both a hard barrier between teams and opportunity for intense play at the line. Scoring would work similarly to volleyball: the first team to ten points wins, and they must win by two.
They decided on using “The Cage,” a line of tennis courts in Jackson City Park located along a nearby highway and surrounded by a towering chain-link fence. Their first game took place on a Friday evening with just their close group trying out their impromptu ruleset and letting off steam for the end of a school week.
It did not take long for others to join.
“This was before cellphones, before Facebook. It was all word-of-mouth,” reflects JUDL founding member Josh Tomlin. “That first week we went out there with just, like, six of us. Then there were more the next week. And more the week after that. I still have no idea how people even heard about it.”
Asking others who took part in JUDL over the years reveals similar answers. Most don’t remember who exactly invited them or when they started playing. JUDL had simply become common knowledge, a ritual to kick off the weekend for study-weary students. By the end of 2003, JUDL crowds filled the parking lot of The Cage every Friday night at 8pm when the rest of the town largely packed into the high school football stadium.
When most people think of punk-rock, they probably imagine venues like Los Angeles’s The Roxy or boards crashing out in skate parks. Yet JUDL held its own as Jackson’s local repository for the alt-youth. The “sweet spot” for a match is 10–12 players, and there were nights that filled multiple tennis courts. But there was also a sizeable portion of students who went just to hang out, an eclectic mix of crowds from the popular to the alternative of the time. Typical attire featured band shirts from Warped Tour, upscale designer brands, and overly-baggy jeans from Hot Topic. Speakers blared anything from Ska to Heavy Metal. Musicians brought their traveling electric guitar rigs to jam at the nearby pavilion. Fridays became a ritual, hampered only in the most extreme cases of ice during the winter. None of it had any formal organization; members just asked each other “You going to dodgeball?” in the school hallways every Friday. As the crowds grew, so did JUDL’s mythos. A member might spend every year of high school there without even knowing another person’s real name, relying instead on monikers like “Spinderella,” “Slim,” and “Frog.”
Rules were fluid and often figured out on the spot: headshots did not count unless ducked into and the ten-point rule may be raised if the teams were up for longer matches. Games operated on the honor system, and players were largely honest in deciding if they had been tagged by the ball. When uncertain, their own team would often chime in on whether they had heard the rustle of rubber-against-denim during a particularly heated dodge. For a group of hormonal teenagers in the heat of competition, JUDL matches were surprisingly diplomatic. Everyone seemed to understand the ragtag playstyle of pickup dodgeball, where fun was the most important aspect and arguments only delayed the next match.
With time, JUDL became more than dodgeball. It was a release, a self-made community where the barriers of the normal high school cliques faded and people who might not have spoken to each other in the school halls became allies and enemies under the eye of a bright rubber ball. Games started at 8pm and lasted until the park’s timers shut down the lights at midnight. Afterwards, the players broke up into smaller groups and often made their way to the Denny’s in Cape Girardeau to unwind and talk about video games, music, and the other pillars of early-00’s teenage life.
Eventually, JUDL grew large enough to organize in some fashion, holding tournaments once or twice a year and inviting teams that normally did not participate in the weekly sessions. They had referees brought in — usually regular members not taking part in the tournament — to accommodate teams known for being “tryhards” in the high school’s formal athletics. Parents and community members came to spectate. Yet even with these large-scale events of 15+ teams, JUDL maintained its roots in the underground with its makeshift merch booths and Sharpie’d cardboard signs. For those who came only for the tournaments, they were more trophies for the shelf, but for regular members, they offered opportunities to let others in to their end-of-week social circle. They wanted to show that dodgeball, too, could be a legitimate way to have fun that didn’t rely on the traditional sport structures provided by the school.
Around 2004, the City of Jackson began to take notice of JUDL’s weekly games. It started with law enforcement patrols lazily pulling into the Cage’s parking lot to keep watch. They’d “received numerous complaints” about the club’s activities, despite the tennis courts not being close to any residential areas and most accidents happening from players themselves. As the officer patrols grew more regular, JUDL quickly turned into a case-study of small-town policing and rural attitudes towards “youth” culture. Despite several attempts to find otherwise, JUDL’s only crime was being a large crowd in a tennis court next to a highway and not playing tennis.
Tomlin laughs as he recalls one evening in which an officer tried to bust a member after confusing a Barq’s root beer for a can of Silver Bullet.
“Silver Bullet? Really?” he chuckles. “He could have just said ‘a beer’ or ‘Coors’ or something. It was ridiculous.”
Eventually, the reasoning for the patrols came to light as Jackson’s city council stepped in, led by Alderman Phil Penzel. JUDL’s activities, they decided, were a nuisance. Their reasoning included complaints to the city that were not elaborated on and concern for damage to the courts. Included in this damage was, supposedly, cracks in the pavement caused by the players not wearing tennis shoes. That Alderman Penzel’s daughter played tennis for her school’s team did not go unnoticed by JUDL members.
The dodgeball league continued their activities regardless of the city council’s declarations. Officers would come by to try and shut down the games or turn off the court’s lights before the timers were set. The games would return the next week. If JUDL members felt the patrols became too much of a hassle, they would move to alternative tennis courts nearby or to a separate park across the town known for its seclusion.
For a group that had prided itself on being wholly unorganized, many of the older and founding members put their organization skills elsewhere. They went through the proper channels to set up a public meeting with the council and rallied support from the community. They wrote letters to the local newspaper. As one of the first generations to live both with and without modern internet technology, they understood the need for classic, teen-oriented spaces while utilizing early social media and internet forums to their advantage.
When their meeting with the council came, JUDL founders presented a brief of over 30 pages to the council, detailing their activities, their willingness to compensate for any damage to the tennis nets, and scientific explanations that, no, their shoes were not going to cause more cracks to hard pavement than the soil underneath them.
The council laughed at them.
Divisions between older generations and youth, rebels against the government, and the poor against the rich are the staples of punk-rock culture. No better moment encapsulated this mindset in Jackson than JUDL’s struggle to simply find a place to play. They could be loud, raucous nerds, but where the older citizens of Jackson saw a group of delinquents causing mischief on the tennis courts, the reality was that JUDL members were largely good kids trying to have fun on Friday nights when they really didn’t have a lot of other options. A town like Jackson is the kind of place that embodies the adage “make your own fun,” but when attempting to do that, the city council decided JUDL was not the right kind of fun, not the kind that involved putting money in the football stands or participating in the “real” sports of the high school athletics department. No unauthorized gatherings of teens allowed.
JUDL’s work had not gone unnoticed, however, especially by the supportive parents of many of its members, parents happy to see their children getting involved with a safe community and getting out of their houses for a time. With the weight of tax-paying voters behind them, negotiations between JUDL and the city council eventually led to an agreement to refurbish the older set of tennis courts in the park across town for use for dodgeball. It was a smaller cage with only two courts instead of four and none of the facilities of the primary city park, but upon moving there, officer patrols diminished and the group continued as normal. As long as passing WASPs could not see them from a highway, all was well.
To celebrate, these refurbished courts hosted the 2006 JUDL Invitational. After all of the press and rallying, the tournament brought over a dozen teams, their families, and cars lining the road to the court’s parking lot. It was a last hurrah of sorts. Without their old courts and with many of the founding members moving away to college or careers, JUDL no longer had the time or energy to continue. While players of all ages could come play on any given Friday, few in Jackson Junior High School seemed willing or able to keep the torch burning as they graduated into upperclassmen. The word-of-mouth association of JUDL eventually hampered it as a phenomenon relegated to a specific group of classmates at a specific time in history. A few times a year since then, members Pat Kennedy and Brian Rhodes gathered local members of the old guard for a few games at a different court, but the times of Friday night rallies had long since gone.
JUDL recently held a 20th anniversary reunion at The Cage. No patrols stopped by. Even if they had, they only would have found a group of easily-exhausted 30-somethings fighting 90-degree temperatures. The Cage, bleached and cracked and seemingly no longer a priority for the city without JUDL to bring attention to them, remained largely empty. Some members brought their children while others discussed their careers between matches. The only memorial to their high school antics was printed on an entry sign to the courts, which displayed “TENNIS SHOES ONLY” in large letters. Still, they played on, even with extended breaks between games, able to relive the spark ignited in the early 2000’s and recapture the love of a classic dodgeball game.
In the end, the Jackson Underground Dodgeball League was little more than a gathering of bored teenagers in one small, rural town. Yet it is precisely because of this that it exemplified the gatherings of any bored teenagers in any small, rural town. While no one outside of Jackson (and, indeed, many inside of it) has likely ever heard of JUDL, they are certainly not the only group of kids fighting to make their own fun only to encounter pushback from a generational divide over something largely harmless by any other measure. It was one of many examples of how underground movements can thrive in the unlikeliest of places and continue on regardless of what those in positions of power think of them.
In a town that derided its own children for refusing to conform, JUDL found the joy in launching a rubber ball at the system.
