(Above) Talking team strategy, freshmen Sarah Easum, Amelia Dunlap, Cameron Guy, Charlie Carr and Hannah Reed get ready for their game. They were members of  the Freshmen Do Somethin’ Crazy kickball team. Photo by Joseph Anderson

By Kendra Schwartz

Senior Matt Dominguez of Average Joes pitched a red bouncy ball across the softball field to the opposing team, We Came In Like A Kicking Ball. Members of We Came In Like A Kicking Ball ran to retrieve the ball.

Although friends were pitted against one another, this wasn’t just a pickup game; these students were raising money for Habitat for Humanity.

Co-presidents of the Habitat for Humanity club, senior Campbell Drake and junior Sadie Keller, initially led the club in a brainstorm. Club members were quick to decide on a kickball tournament as their method of fundraising.

“As a club, we were trying to come up with different fundraisers that would make sense,” Drake said. “The seniors had a kickball game this summer, so we played off that idea. We thought it would be good to do something like the mud volleyball tournament, but not exactly like the mud volleyball so it would be something different and fun.”

The club members’ idea was easily approved because of its similarity to the spring Mud Volleyball tournament.

“We talked to administration, and we pretty much just based the guidelines off of Mud Volleyball, like the forms and the sign-up. The price is the same as Mud Volleyball,” Keller said. “So, they were pretty quick to accept it because Mud Volleyball was such a success. We wanted to make it the fall version of mud volleyball.”

Representatives in the club worked to earn money through donations from local businesses in addition to the fee for players in the tournament.

“It’s $5 per person, so we’re hopefully going to raise $400-500 through the games because it’s an average of $45 per team,” Keller said. “But, most of the money we’re making is coming from sponsors. We have raised about $700 just through sponsors. We organized within the club, assigned a couple sponsors per person, wrote letters, talked to mostly Lawrence businesses and just got money from them.”

Junior Emily Murphy was also in charge of organizing a bake sale to accompany the Nov. 2 kickball game.

“We thought that it would be a really good idea to have food kind of like they have at Mud Volleyball, except that since this is a fundraiser, and we could get more money to donate,” Murphy said. “We just figured people would like to have snacks there.”

All snacks were priced at $1, and students were able to purchase treats between games.

On the field, students were lucky enough to have official Fall Ball kickball league referees. Although the referees used the Fall Ball league’s official rules, they kept games to a 10 minutes or run rule.

“We just want to keep moving along, and we don’t want one team to just get demolished,” Keller said. “It’s going to be their rules, but just twisted a little bit to make the tournament run smoothly. They were really generous. We contacted them originally just seeing if they could donate kickballs and they were like, ‘We want to help you in as many ways as possible. We would love to donate some refs for the game.’ We were just going to have some students do it, but this is even better.”

Although all teams put out a good fight, the team to take the win was the Average Joes.

“When we won, it felt great because we worked as a team to win,” Dominguez said. “It was really nice knowing that I got to help the community while playing a game alongside my friends.”

Despite the success of the kickball tournament, Drake and Keller did not anticipate another large event in the near future.

“We aren’t really planning another one right now just because this is a huge fundraiser, and we’re really hoping to get a lot of money out of it,” Drake said. “But last year we did Brick by Brick where you would pay 25 cents for a brick. You wrote your name on a slip of paper, and we hung that up. But, we will probably do some smaller fundraisers like that throughout the year, but this is our big one.”