Only one Kent State player remained.
He clung to his red rubber ball like a life preserver, quivering nervously as the half-dozen remaining MSU players danced around him like wolves ready to pounce.
On some unspoken signal, the Spartans players fired in unison on their helpless target, knocking him to the ground in a flurry of red rubber, giving MSU a victory during this weekend's Spartan Dodgeball Invitational.
Teams from DePaul University, The Ohio State University and Delta College also traveled to MSU for the event, which was the nation's first-ever intercollegiate club dodgeball tournament.
MSU's win over Kent State turned out to be one of few bright spots for the team, as it came in last place in Sunday's tournament. Ohio State was the champion.
Still, members of the MSU team said they had a ball.
"We've had one bloody nose, and everyone will need to ice their arm tomorrow, but things could definitely be going a lot worse," said Aleks Bomis, a political science and pre-law junior and president of the MSU Dodgeball Club.
Bomis said MSU's club has gained about 50 members since its inception last March and is one of roughly 30 collegiate dodgeball clubs in the country.
Jerseys on display at the tournament demonstrated the financial crunch that many of the fledgling clubs are facing - some wore nothing more than white T-shirts with names like "Sniper" or "Boom!" spray painted on the back.
Two teams of 15 players and ten dodgeballs are used in each game, which can make for a chaotic scene in the game's opening seconds. Players are eliminated when they're hit with a ball or when a ball they throw is caught by someone from the other team, in which case a player from the catching team gets to re-enter the game.
"It's just madness out there with balls whizzing everywhere," said JJ Adkins, a telecommunication, information studies and media junior and member of the MSU team. "It starts out as a free-for-all, but it gets strategic."
Teams employed a wide variety of strategies, from lobbing a decoy ball before firing a kill shot, to creating a protective human wall around its best players.
"It's probably hilarious to watch," said Brian Tochman, a physics junior and dodgeball team member at MSU. "It's a bunch of 20-year-old guys getting so intense just playing dodgeball."
But despite the budgetary constraints, sore shoulders and shots to the groin, most players said there's no place they'd rather be.
"It's the most fun I've ever had," said Kent Weaver, co-manager of Kent State's club. "Just that excitement - you can let it build all week and then let all your aggression out."
Staff writer Josh Jarman contributed to this report.
