Writing Prod - Sporting Chance

            The Olympics are over. I hope everyone enjoyed them as much as I did. Since it was so much fun to watch these finely honed physical machines demonstrate what the human body is capable of doing I have based my weekly writing prompt to excellence in sports.

            This actually led me to create a new prompt that I hadn’t considered before. I call it . . . Sporting Chance. The concept is to combine two sports to create a new one and use that as a centerpiece for your story. If you’re exceptionally creative, you can just dream up a whole new sport on your own (as they did in Blood of Heroes).

            Probably the thing to consider here is that a sports movie is more than just a movie about that particular sport. It is the setting for a story about the people involved with the sport, watching the sport, or sponsoring the sport. Rollerball uses its made-up sport to explore government controlling the masses and the savage nature of the fans.  So while you are busy slapping together a new favorite past time think of what it should represent.

            Here’s what I came up with:

            Ball

            Touted as the ultimate team sport they just call it Ball. Some think of it as a mangled version of volleyball, soccer, and dodge ball. Allen just considers it awesome. He is on the fast track to becoming the first Ball player drafted out of high-school. The big teams are wooing him to sign when he is contacted by a government rep to play for the National team. But when he signs with the Nationals he finds out that it isn’t a game at all. The government is using the sport to influence the minds of the country’s citizens. Now Allen has to choose between playing along and becoming the greatest Ball player of all time or destroying the very game he loves.