Streetplay.com: Rules and Rites

Rules and Rites

• Hanging Out Home
• Related discussion

Balls
• Pink balls
• Roofing it
• Urban fishing
• Over the fence

Choosing Teams
• Choosing up
• Once, twice, three: shoot!
• Odd man out

Rules and Rites
• Making the rules
• Chips on the ball
• Do over
• Fields of play
• Imaginary runners

Moods and Seasons
• Tops Season
• Making a league
• Calling the game
• The Dark Side

Our Neighborhood
• The candy store
• The ice cream man
• Neighborhood etiquette

Memorable Games
• Death Step
• Stickball in the Sticks
• Johnny on the Pony
• The Boxball King

• Streetplay Stories Home

Member Spotlight
• Kickball
• Beating the big kids
• Superballs off the roof

Hanging Out
• Pink balls
• Choosing up
• Making the rules
• The ice cream man

Special Topics
• Early memories
• Favorite food story
• Celebrity Stories

Related discussions
• Tell your story
• Where was your hang out?

Streetplay.com on Facebook

Chips on the ball!
When starting up a game, you'd hear someone yell out "dibbs" or "chips on the ball!" In grown-up terms, this meant that by engaging in the activity, all participants had knowingly entered into a binding agreement by which they took responsibility to replace the item if their actions directly resulted in its loss or physical destruction. In other words, if you hit the ball over the roof - you had to get it or buy a new one.

Of course, collecting on this agreement would usually depend on the status of the person calling chips, the size of the person who lost the ball and the relationship between them. To put it bluntly, you might never collect. Still, social norms would at least require the offender to supply the next ball for the group's activity.

It should be remembered that all requirements were off if someone had screamed "No Chips", before you said Chips. If they wanted to make sure that they were totally covered, they really needed to call "No Chips No Nothin," just in case you had another method of registering your case. Given the central role the pink rubber ball had in our world, our methods for restitution were pretty simple.