Hand Soccer; its story

My brother and I were both introduced to mini-soccer balls, the inspiration of the sport, about three-four years ago when I was about nine or ten and my brother, Henry, was about 12. At the time my family was using our sun porch, a room that used to be a porch, as a den. We watched TV and sometimes used the computer in the sun porch. I often watched TV with my brother and whenever we had something like a mini-soccer ball in the room, we would toss it around. From there the game evolved. At the beginning we used the TV stand and a shelf as goal posts and the couch you sit on to watch TV as the other goal. Before I go on you must understand the dimensions of the room we played in: the TV was about 8-9 feet from the couch and the room is about 7 ft wide. We played and played and began to treat the game a bit like hockey. We slapped the ball around and towards the opposition's goal. The rules also began to evolve and become more official until we finally started to call penalties on each other for holding the ball(firmly gripping it with one or two hands). At the time my brother was substantially bigger than me and participating in school wrestling which he prove to be good at so beating me was no problem for him. And seeing as he wrestled daily during the winter(prime hand-soccer season) many rules of wrestling and tackling other players were incorporated into gameplay.

What started as a hockey game with a mini-soccer ball in the sun porch was now an aggressive half-wrestling half-soccer ball hockey game... in the sun porch.

More recently we moved the TV watching room to the basement and the sun porch seemed like a useless room, only one thing kept that room the same; hand soccer. Now that there was more space and my brother and I had gotten older the game itself matured just as we had. Other than rules being further instigated they were also being created. One of my favorite rules of the game which I created in result of being battered by my brother on and off the ball was unnecessary roughness. To my brother, and I must admit; myself this rule sounded silly, and at times it seemed that way. But eventually we saw it's purpose. Unnecessary roughness is now defined as over aggressiveness toward the option at an unnecessary time. This cut down the amount of times my brother scored a goal or won out of pure strength. After playing this game for years now we naturally avoided holding of the ball completely and found strategies around each other, but a new holding rule was formed: holding of the player. Often the ball would fly into open space and while both rushing to get the ball one of us would always hold the other player back (usually my brother held me back) from getting to the ball first and so we determined that holding the other player, whether is meant holding one of their arm or clothing, was illegal in the game of hand soccer.

And so now the game is waiting to hit prime season in winter when almost every night will end in an in tense sweaty teenaged game of hand soccer... in the sun porch.