Throwball

The varsity throwball selection of the MSRIT institute. The coaches and trainers are in the front row. Behind, a deity looks on in approval, as they parlayed second place in the regular tables into a post-season championship.

“What is round and white and tastes like a volleyball?”

~ Sri Rudyard Kipling on a volleyball, when you eat it.

Throwball (or Throw Ball) is a sport played in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere in the world where they admire all things American but get them a bit wrong.

Throwball is an adaptation of the international sport of volleyball. When word of the sport arrived in India, the locals mistook the "carry," which classically was a rule violation requiring the concession of a point, interpreting it instead as a vital game strategy.

In throwball, this misunderstanding has been formalized as a requirement. Each "volley," in the throwball dialect of volleyball, involves a complete catching of the ball. This must be done flat-footed and the catcher must go on to throw the ball back within three seconds, a move that is whistled dead throughout the civilized world. Critics call throwball a blemish on the sport, as though India had set out to play American football and had instead invented Horse-collar-tackle Ball or Intentional-grounding Ball.

History

The Throwball Federation of India regulates the sport at the national level. The Girl Scouts brought the game to Chennai, where it was played as a women's sport in the 1940s. Male fans attended these matches and did lots of Girl Scouting. Throwball rules and regulations were drafted in the 1950s.

The MSRIT varsity team journeys to an away game in Srinagar. MSRIT is the only team in the conference to use buses that have grown mustaches.

Muslims loudly disagreed with this process. "Your players are simply carrying the ball," said Muhammad Ali Jinnah. "Every fricking time." Eventually, Muslim players walked out of the games. The reader can see how this looked by viewing a key scene in the middle of the movie Gandhi. This scene even shows a pick-up game of Throwball that turned fateful, as the only game pieces available on the trek westward were large rocks. The resulting scuffles led directly to the independence of Pakistan, "Paki" among other things being an acronym that means, "A single brief and momentary touch of the ball."

Pakistan became the only country to be founded based on a children's game, though Chile's lurches between right-wing and left-wing governments prompted the invention of ping pong.

Champions

The best throwball team in India is that of the MSRIT (the Microsoft Regional Institute of Technology), a degree-granting institution located in the Engineering College Nebula of Bangalore, just outside the Milky Way. This school is affiliated with, but just a bit autonomous from, the renowned Visvesvariya Technological University (VTU). MSRIT is certified in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, with optional total immersion in the command-line interface, a degree program leading to the M.S. of D.O.S., though the Institute's figures on the employability of its graduates is before the High Court. Since 2007, MSRIT's technical autonomy has allowed it to break most of VTU's rules without permanently staining the C.V.s of its graduates, nor putting at risk the prompt payment of tuition.

Thus it is that VTU's proud varsity volleyball program has served to shelter the budding throwball movement at little MSRIT.

Extraterritoriality

The MSRIT team is nicknamed "The Unicorns" and this is their mascot.

Just as the United States has used the FATCA act to move the dominion of the U.S. Code offshore — not just against Islamic fatwas but fat people in general, in or out of the banking sector — the U.S. government has compelled foreign refereeing crews to report instances of throwball directly to officials of the NCAA. Players and officials are blacklisted and, if they should play in United States competition in Division I, II, or III, domestic referees will have their eyes peeled for ball-handling violations. These foreign players react to any spike or dink by snatching the ball and holding on tight — accompanied by a bleep-eating grin that is itself a Yellow Card for taunting.

Real-world applications

Students from the real world who get student visas to American universities often make a bee-line for Flight Schools, where they tend to study takeoffs to the total exclusion of landings. The FBI has begun to focus on this Homeland Security threat, based on the fact that their athletic pursuits center on the sport of throwball, often to the total exclusion of catchball.

See also

• Volleyball
• Lost in Translation