Thinking back to when I was a kid, there were various games and sports we played to pass the time during recess and to have fun. I had a lot of favorites, which included the traditional sports such as basketball and soccer, but there were some that we kind of made up or which were a little bit different.

One of my absolute favorite games to play was dodgeball! It was so much fun trying to peg the players from the other teams as hard as we can to get them out. At my school, we used to bust out this really weird dodgeball that was shaped like an egg, and that thing was a beast! You couldn't really throw it hard, but the crazy bounces that thing would take were so hard to avoid. One time I got hit with that thing unexpectedly and it led to me scraping my knee really bad.

I also used to love playing a game called kickback. It was a pretty simple game, and to this day I don't really think we kept score. Basically we had this wall, and we would grab a soccer ball and drop kick it over the wall to each other. The goal was to catch the balls that the other team would kick. When the games would get bigger, we bypassed using the wall and just would just drop kick the ball back and forth to each other. My friends and I invented this special drop kick method that we swore made us kick further and higher that we called "the stink bomb". The stink bomb was a regular drop kick but you had to take your shoe off and kick the ball, which would seemingly make the kick more powerful.

I also really loved playing steal the bacon. This was a game of speed and agility in which you had to try to snatch an eraser or whichever object the teacher would place in the middle, and get back to your side before being tagged out. I was always one of the faster kids in my class, so I loved this game because I was pretty good at it.

Lastly, we made up this game that combined kickball with basketball. We played regular kickball on a basketball court, and the bases were each hoop. In order to get someone out, you had to either score a basket before they reach the hoop (base) or peg them with the ball when they were nearby.

And who can forget playing duck-duck-goose or heads up seven up? Those were the best to play when it rained outside and we couldn't go out and play. We needed something to entertain us during those rainy days, and those were always the game of choice. I remember being good at heads up seven up because I could often tell who was going to pick me because they usually were my friends. There was also this one kid named Eddie who was always very noisy and I could always hear his pants when he would walk by. He made it way too easy!