DORIAN GEIGER
Sports Editor

A barrage of snowballs fall around me like a meteor shower as I scramble behind a wall of ice. Clenching two snowballs in my trembling hands, I see steam escaping from the frozen river beyond my cover. The Delta Bessborough looms up like a medieval structure behind me.

I decide it’s now or never and pop up like an arctic commando trapped on the front lines and unleash my two ice grenades at a blue-helmeted opponent several feet in front of me. Before the second snowball leaves my hand my peripheral goes white — I had been hit.

Exploding within my caged hockey helmet, the now disintegrated snowball leaves a hovering cloud of residual snow dust that stings my eyes and temporarily blinds me. “Number Four! Off the field!” echoes behind me. The referee just disqualified me.

No, this isn’t a touching excerpt from my playground memoirs; but rather a documentation of the Japanese sport yukigassen that visited Saskatoon’s Meewasin Park on Jan. 27 and 28 as part of Saskatoon’s Wintershine Festival.

Blending snowball fights with capture the flag and dodgeball-like rules, yukigassen is a popular sport in Japan and Europe and now has found its niche in Saskatoon. It’s surprising yukigassen hasn’t caught on in Canada until now, considering the sport has been in existence for twenty years.

In all the childhood chiding received from teachers for hurling snowballs at your pals on the playground at recess did you ever anticipate snowball fights would become an organized sport? Probably not; I know I didn’t. But there I found myself — face stinging and feet numb in the frigid temperatures, launching snowballs at fellow Saskatonians for the tournament’s $1,000 first prize.

Entering the tournament, I had little knowledge of the rules, having only watched YouTube videos of the sport and glanced at rules on the Internet. You might say I was arrogant and didn’t anticipate the intricate strategy yukigassen requires. My baseball background told me not to worry and that my pitching arm would save the day. I was used to throwing strikes so how much harder could it be to hit a person with a snowball? Pretty damn hard I learned.

Over the course of two games I managed to maybe hit one opponent and even then I wasn’t sure if it was my snowball that impacted him. This was my painful journey to learning that yukigassen is all about strategy. But it’s tough to integrate strategy when you’ve adopted the mindset of your giddy 12-year-old self; you just want to throw and throw and throw until you smoke someone right in the cranium. Maybe my attention deficit disorder had gotten the best of me but harnessing my childhood mentality proved to be one of the most difficult things to overcome in learning the ropes to yukigassen.

Set up on a tennis court-sized playing surface that includes two blue-lines and a red-line, teams consisted of seven competitors — four offensive and three defensive players. As a forward my task was not only to snipe opposing team members but to help defend our team’s front against encroaching opponents looking to capture our defensive zone’s flag. Matches ended when a team eliminated the opposing team’s players with snowball hits or by capturing that team’s flag. Flags only needed to be touched to claim victory and weren’t required to be dragged back to a capturing team’s territory in these best-of-three matches.

All our games seemed to play out the same: ending in an abrupt loss. Rounds lasted about three to five minutes and the dilemma of the flag was never solved until our final game. Even then, we lost the third and deciding game against that team.

In true Japanese fashion, the flag aspect of yukigassen led to the ever-so-popular kamikaze tactic by our opponents, a scheme we were rarely able to counter and only able to duplicate once. After eliminating a few of the opposing team’s players, this strategy included blindly sprinting past that team’s red-line with the hope of reaching the flag without getting splattered by a flock of snowballs.

By the time our final game had arrived we had mastered the “single file kamikaze.” This saw our team running fearlessly into enemy turf in a straight line with the idea of creating a human shield.

The only qualm our team, the Yucky Gas Inn Bed & Breakfast (a poor play on words, I know) had with the wonderful winter-filled weekend of snowball fights was the snowball making process. Though the snowball-making machine was a cool element and produced goose egg-smooth and perfectly rounded snowballs, each team was required to make their own snowballs before each game. The consequence of this manifested itself in massive game delays throughout the weekend and would have been better handled if managed by tournament organizers.

Snow mixed with water from a hose in a plastic tub would be dumped into a nine-by-five mould. This copper-tinged tray was reminiscent of an oversized metallic egg carton and could make 45 snowballs per batch. Contrary to how efficient this sounds our team was not the greatest snowball-makers and maybe only 25 to 30 of these snowballs would be usable. And of these, many still managed to break apart in mid-air when thrown.

Teams were allowed to make 130 snowballs per game with the maximum of 45 to be thrown in each match. How can a team, let alone the referees of yukigassen, be expected to keep track of this amidst the hectic, frenzied atmosphere of yukigassen?

Moreover, no tournament officials rigorously enforced the limit of a team’s snowballs and left it up to the teams and the honour system to count how many snowballs they had made.

Despite these minor shortfalls, yukigassen is poised to grow throughout Saskatchewan and Canada in coming years. I can only hope next time I’m better prepared for the tactical shenanigans yukigassen requires.

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image: Robby Davis