Angleball
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Angleball is said to have been started by Rip Engle, a football coach at Penn State before Joe Paterno. Engle devised the game as a way for his players to maintain fitness in the off-season. Deliberately, it has light contact and few rules or requirements.
Two large balls are placed on standards at opposite sides of a field. In a mixture of soccer and basketball, teams pass a smaller ball back and forth trying to get close enough to attempt to knock the other team's ball off its perch. A goal is worth one point and any offensive player who is touched by a defensive player has three seconds to pass the ball or it's a turnover.
Like basketball, teams don't have goalies and the goal is surrounded by a key area where offensive players aren't permitted. Teams don't have a set number of players either. However many who show up to play just split in half, although five or six per side is considered ideal.
There is no regulation field size and out-of-bounds are arbitrarily set.
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The first Angleball game played was between the Corry High School Beavers and the Titusville High School Rockets in the late 1960's. The game was played on Corry's home field, and won by the Beavers. Corry's Athletic Director, Lou Hanna and Titusville's Athletic Director, Roy Van Horn were football teammates on the 1939 Slippery Rock State Teachers College undefeated championship team. Van Horn was the owner of Pioneer Ranch, a boys camp on the Allegheny River near Tidioute, PA. As documented in the June 25, 2001 Sports Illustrated Hanna and Van Horn began the Northwestern Pennsylvania Football Camp at Pioneer Ranch, the nation's first summertime football camp for high school gridders in the late 1950's. They hired the Penn State coaching staff and hence the relationship with Rip Engle was born.
