Tchoukball

A couple weekends ago I played beach ultimate in the "NUS Beach Fiesta" (teehee and ended up on the photo website for the event). The event was a bunch of tournaments for various sports: soccer, volleyball, ultimate, and.... something called tchoukball. Tchoukball, apparently, is a "popular" sport in Europe, and is getting more attention here in Singapore, but most of the people I was with still didn't really understand it. It's kind of a ridiculous and random sport, with no real concept of defense, but it's oddly entertaining to watch.

Basically, you have a court with two slanted nets, one at each end, the type that you might use for practice shots in soccer or lacrosse. A semi-circle is drawn around each net, kind of like in lacrosse, and basically you score by bouncing the ball off the net in such a manner that the opposing team can't catch the rebound. You can only shoot from outside the the semi-circle, too, which makes for a lot of flying leaps like this one:

Aside from catching the rebound, there's no real form of defense. You can't strip, you can't steal the ball away, there's no real dribbling of any kind.... just that. It's odd. Here's a completely indiscernible video:


Ok, that is all. I just wanted to mention that there exists a really crazy sport.