The name 'WallyBall' (pronounced woll-e-borl) comes from the famous quote by Mr Gainford passed on by his PE teacher in high school, who killed his wife with a brick.
"I have mastered many sports, WallyBall to name but a few" The PE teacher was most likely of middle-eastern descent and he was meant to be saying Volleyball (according to Gaino) little did the teacher know at the time, that his mis-pronounciation of a sport (he had mastered) would in fact lead to the creation of one of the greatest sports ever played by men and women alike.
The actual gameplay is deriven from a variety of modern day sports and games. The most noticable being vollyball, soccer and handball. But there are sprinkles of other games in there aswell. The idea to create a game sprung to the diligent minds of the Big Man, Tough Guy and Tom Lung one sunny afternoon at the first grade (tennis) arena in Kingsford back in term 4 of 2001. We (along with fellow tennis'er Ruo Yang Li) had all finished our matches and headed over to the half court and had a quick game of 'ARSE' and then we started playing 'Footzies' which we also created. It combined tennis and soccer, where you'd use everything but your hands to get the (tennis) ball over the net. We played 'Footzies' for a good while (when we probably should've been supporting Peter Pereira or something but anyways) but we soon realised it was too hard to maintain a good point with a tennis ball. It also occurred to us that teamwork was not present in 'Footzies' This was the major turning point in the development of WallyBall. With input from Nick Poranek, Dom Byrne, William Kwok and Warren Logge, we came up with the concept of using a stolen Shore ball and playing in the (much larger) squares provided by the basketball courts.
We came up with a few rules that were followed by most and a game was created, now all we needed was a name. The Big Man, Warren Logge and Nick walked into F maths with the infamous Mr Gainford and we requested his input, this was only the second time we had heard his 'WallyBall to name but a few' quote and it was enough to pursuade us into calling the sport WallyBall. This was also the beginning of the Gaino Quotes section (which no longer operates) and to this day, the game has been called nothing but WallyBall. Such tags include, 'Sport of Kings''A game for those who believe' and so on and so forth. So the next time you find yourself thinking, 'how'd they come with that stuff?' you'll know.... |
