The islands\u2019 only indigenous sport, Rocball, returns for its 26th year early next month at the Marianas High School Gymnasium.<\/p>\n
The sport\u2019s founder, Jim Feger, said the longest uninterrupted extra-curricular sport activity of the CNMI\u2019s Public School System will start with its preseason games on Oct. 6.<\/p>\n
\u201cTeam net sport players interested in competing in this year\u2019s Rocball games need to form a team, choose a captain, and register with me at the MHS Gym during the MHS Drug and Violent Free Safe Haven Program,\u201d said Feger.<\/p>\n
The aforementioned program runs between 5pm and 8pm Monday through Thursday, and Saturday.<\/p>\n
Feger said seven teams have already signed up for this year\u2019s season of Rocball competition. They are led by last year\u2019s champion Evenflow, No-Mercy, Soul Rebels, Okies, Naturals, Uraiwak, Section A, and Ghasias Brothers.<\/p>\n
The Ghasias Brothers were former triple crown champions and are raring to make a comeback in the 2008 season.<\/p>\n
Feger first wrote about the rules for Rocball in Ebisu, Japan in 1979. The sport itself went through a two-year experimental period at Hopwood Junior High School from 1981 to 1983. Rocball started being played as a regular sporting activity in 1983.<\/p>\n
Feger said Rocball is unique because it is the first team net sport to develop offensive and defensive scoring, multiple-point scoring, penalty point scoring, and included goals for scoring in this kind of sport.<\/p>\n
The offensive and defensive scoring developed for the indigenous sport of Saipan predated the Federation International de Volleyball\u2019s adoption of rally point scoring by 15 years.<\/p>\n
Rocball is also the first sport of this kind that developed a scoring system, where a team could win a game by total amount of points scored using a set system of play.<\/p>\n
The unique sport is played on a slightly modified standard volleyball court with an overhead net bisecting team courts and a 6×12-foot soccer type goal located 10 feet behind each court. [B][I](Saipan Tribune)[\/I][\/B]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The islands\u2019 only indigenous sport, Rocball, returns for its 26th year early next month at the Marianas High School Gymnasium.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}