Broom-ball in PE? ABSOLUTELY!!

Last night, I played in a broom-ball game here at school. I never knew what broom-ball was until I was approached to play on a co-ed intramural team here at SUNY Cortland and let me tell you, I wish I knew about it sooner! This is an awesome and fun game, yet challenging because you're playing on the ice with just your sneakers. It's not a very fast paced game either because many of the people are falling down or having difficulty controlling the ball with the stick and keeping you're head up to see your teammates. We won our game 2-0 to improve our record to 1 win-1 lose-1 tie.

 After playing I did a little research to see if broom-ball was being taught in any PE classes and I wanted to find some reasoning as to why the teacher had it in his/her curriculum. I found this great article from the Winston-Salem Journal out of North Carolina. Instead of playing it on ice, the teacher has his students play it on the gym floor. I believe that this is a great activity because it can help improve students in multiple ways. Spatial awareness, reaction time, cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance, and motor-skill development are just some of the psychomotor attributes that can be improved through broom-ball. Students also learn communication and teamwork by playing the game and when they are old enough to understand, they can learn the tactical aspects of the game, showing that broom-ball is definitely an activity that I would want to teach to my students because itcovers all three of the physical education domains: Psychomotor, Affective, and Cognitive. For more information on Broom-ball you can visit http://www.internationalbroomball.com/