By Eric Heiberg, creator of MojoKickball

I was never good at sports. Maybe it was a lack of attention, ability or both. But for me, a lot of "sports ball" seemed to consist of someone much better than me yelling at me to "get my head in the game" every time I made a mistake.

For some folks, sports is the opportunity to be the animal they never have a chance to be in polite society. It's a pressure relief valve. For others, sports is an opportunity to experience the highs of being better than someone else, and have a score to prove it.

Team sports also have so many great aspects to it: camaraderie, exercise, and the opportunity for improvement. Regardless of the few bad actors, I continually found myself being drawn back to playing team sports. I was never good at any of them, but as long as my teammates didn't mind, I knew I was going to have a fun time.

When I was living in Austin, Texas back in 2006, I thought about what a sport would look like that I would want to play. It would have to have multiple roles, lots of opportunity to pick the level of exertion you wanted to play at, and above all else–agency.

I started to put together a game that would involve multiple balls, all potentially in play, all at the same time. I started with the base game of kickball because of its simplicity and relatively easy learning curve. After a lot of workshopping with other people, I created MojoKickball.

MojoKickball’s driving principle is inclusion with contribution.

There are many sports that have inclusion–most sports, even. If I'm the fifth person on a basketball team, technically I'm included. But the sad truth is that I'm so bad at dribbling the ball, I know if I ever get my hands on it, my best strategy will be to pass it back to literally anyone else. So yes, I'm included but I can't meaningfully contribute until I either find people who are closer to my level, or just get better.

What MojoKickball allowed me and other players to do was to immediately slip in and out of roles throughout the entire game. Everyone is needed all the time. Everyone has agency. Everyone has a chance to help out their team in ways both sparkly and mundane. It’s chaos with constant opportunities for greatness. Sometimes greatness arrives on the back of incredible athleticism, other times it’s because of incredible teamwork, or personal strategy. But a lot of time greatness appears as hilarious dumb luck.

There’s a good mix of alternations between laughter and squealing in terror in MojoKickball. When new players come for our quick-tutorial game, I pair with them with someone who’s played before, and give them my one-sentence summary about the game:

“It’s two teams, constantly screwing up, and whatever team screws up the least…. wins?...maybe?”

MojoKickball has brought so many people into a new style of play. The kind of play that fights for the fun before fighting for the win. It’s a game you can do your best at. It’s a game that will test your mental agility, your physical endurance, and your capacity for joy.

When I moved to the Twin Cities in 2013, I was pessimistic about being able to grow the sport in a new city I knew so little about. But all the great things about Mojo that I had seen in Austin were absolutely present here. The midwestern spirit of “we all do better when we all do better” fit hand-in-glove with the ideas of Mojo, and it flourished.

The game is free to play. We accept donations for field rentals, but our main goal is community through a fun activity, with a concentration on reaching people who have traditionally felt left out of "sports ball" type of sports.

A group of folks are playing MojoKickball weekly starting Sunday, May 18 from 1 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. through the summer at Kenwood Park at field #2. A tutorial game starts at 1 p.m. You can watch a video about the game online, too.

If this sounds like the place for you, just know we’re here and remain in this small place that you are always welcome.