Professional Four-square?

[SG30]

New crest is much better! Me like!

Ahhh i love childhood sports!

PRoFESSIONAL MUMBALL

[josdin00]

You haven't lived until you've played drunken four-square at 2:00 in the morning on a college campus.

You haven't lived until you've played drunken four-square at 2:00 in the afternoon on a college campus. We do it every other day or so.

Nah.... the afternoons were reserved for drunken scatter-ball and drunken rugby. (That last one didn't always go so well. I still have a limp.)

[Coast2CoastAM2006]

You can have...

Professional hop&scotch

Professional crushed can soccer

Professional paper, rock, scissors

Professional Chicken on the playground equiptment (log as substitute)

Professional Chicken hanging off playground equiptment (bars to hang off of)

Professional Tag

Professional Hide & Go Seek

Professional Heads up, 7-Up

Professional California Kick Ball

Plenty of movies there as well for Vince Vaughn or South Park creators.

no Professional Master Painting?

[josh_cat_eyes]

What about pro capture the flag?? I can actaully see that happening too!

[DelayedPenalty]

What about pro capture the flag??

Yes! I totally forgot about capture the flag! I was king of that game! Always had to have the track kid be the runner while everyone else blocked and distracted!

[illwauk]

Can't believe no one's made a professional Calvinball joke yet...

[AndrewPF]

Professional Off-The-Wall (also known as Gutterball or Suicide or Double Touch)

[elliott]

AAAhhhhhhhhh, I remember 5th grade. We kept score and had a points system. (Ala NHL) Those were the days.......

If I had artistic talent, I'd make a logo for a league.

Yeah, we had a tournament in 5th grade, and I'm pretty sure I cried when I lost. Calvinball...always my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips.

[ShinyHubCaps]

Anyone play Tips or Pinball (New-school dodgeball with pins, knock over the other team's three pins and you win... our dodgeball in grade school was different, where we stood in a circle and threw balls at the kid in the center)...

Anyway, Tips was good. 500, kickball, and four square were our recess classics. Also there was a game called matball, like kickball but you had to run the bases both ways, could steal, and could NOT step off the mat (base) unless you were running forward. Lead off, they hit you with the ball, you're out. I always wanted a professional league of that sport.

By the way, there is professional "rock, paper, scissors," which is weird because of all the games we've listed, it would be the worst spectator sport.

Oh, and good logo. If this is ever an actual league, I'm in, because I rock at it. Problem is that it usually isn't done with teams, but could be. Also there is no official scoring.

[LMU]

Nice to see the game represented. Hell, I broke a finger playing four square back in 4th grade.

[WJMorris3]

Can't believe no one's made a professional Calvinball joke yet...

Only because professional Calvinball wouldn't hold a candle to professional House Rules Parcheesi.

[DelayedPenalty]

Anybody remember Redass? Or Redbutt as we used to have to call it in elementary school. Wikipedia has a few other names for it.

Fumble aka Wall Ball, Murder, Butts Up

In this increasingly popular playground game, a tennis ball has to be thrown or kicked at a wall. When it bounces off you have to catch it/pick it up and throw/kick again, however, if the ball hits you and doesn't hit the wall, you have to run and touch the wall. If another player returns the ball to the wall by throwin/kicking it before the 'fumbler' has touched it, then the 'fumbled' player has to run the length of the wall, while the person who fumbled him, has a free chance to throw the ball and hit him, which is optional. A variation is calling the fumbler 'out' and is set to a number of outs. An optional setting is saying "blackmail" to the person throwing if he/she is far away from the wall. This means the thrower must throw it over a certain colour of the wall. The game continues, until the owner of the ball decides to finish.

Another variation of Wall Ball is that once the ball bounces back off the wall, a player must try to catch it (or stand aside to let someone else have at the ball, although this is seen as cowardly). If the player touches the ball but fails to catch it, drops it, or is hit by it while it is bouncing/rolling, the player must run to touch the wall before another player throws the ball at the wall. If the player fails to reach the wall before the ball is thrown he/she gets a point. After a player receives three points they must then get face up against the wall and spread their limbs for a "pegging" with the tennis or raccquetball. Each player (excluding the one on the wall) then throws the ball at the player on the wall as hard as they can, aiming for the person (except for the head) on the wall. If the player is hit in the head, the thrower then goes up for a pegging. This version is extremely painful and most players will "chicken out" and decide not to play. When a player runs away, players try to hold them back and call it an 'execution'.

Also known as Redass, Red-A, or "Murder".

[ltravisjr]

You can have...

Professional hop&scotch

Professional crushed can soccer

Professional paper, rock, scissors

Professional Chicken on the playground equiptment (log as substitute)

Professional Chicken hanging off playground equiptment (bars to hang off of)

Professional Tag

Professional Hide & Go Seek

Professional Heads up, 7-Up

Professional California Kick Ball

Plenty of movies there as well for Vince Vaughn or South Park creators.

I swear a couple years ago one of the cable channels aired some sort of rock-paper-scissors championship. I don't know if it was the comedy network or one of the sports networks, but they had color commentators and everything.

LT

[DelayedPenalty]

You can have...

Professional hop&scotch

Professional crushed can soccer

Professional paper, rock, scissors

Professional Chicken on the playground equiptment (log as substitute)

Professional Chicken hanging off playground equiptment (bars to hang off of)

Professional Tag

Professional Hide & Go Seek

Professional Heads up, 7-Up

Professional California Kick Ball

Plenty of movies there as well for Vince Vaughn or South Park creators.

I swear a couple years ago one of the cable channels aired some sort of rock-paper-scissors championship. I don't know if it was the comedy network or one of the sports networks, but they had color commentators and everything.

LT

I remember that, and I honestly think it was on ESPN2...sad. Sounds more like it belongs on ESPN8: THE OCHO!

[BallWonk]

Revised logo per scarygood's suggestions!

More ideas:

Professional Foot Hockey (tennis ball with no sticks, just feet!)

Professional Red Rover

Professional 500 (throw the football, call out a points amount, first to catch 500 points wins)

Keep the suggestions coming!

First off, go here:

To see the championship final of International Stare-Out, a sport which badly needs a logo.

On to your logo, I'm still seeing too much negative space. Changes I'd like to see:

- Close up the white space around the four squares. There should be no blank space inside the crest beyond a uniform white outline around the squares to echo the white painted or chalk outlines of an actual playground foursquare court. That may require you to change the shape of the crest. But right now it looks like you started with the shape of the crest and tried to fill it, rather than starting with a concept of the league and building the crest around it.

- Fewer, bolder stripes in the striped squares. Your U.S. flag motif is completely undermined by having 13 stripes in each square. That's 26 stripes in the logo, top to bottom. The American flag doesn't have 26 stripes. Plus that many narrow stripes will not scale well. At a size not much smaller than the web display image here, those aren't red and white stripes. They're just pink squares.

- Find a way to communicate playground ball without using this kind of a textures. Two shades of red and a grid, or dots, or something. Check out the shading on the ball in the San Francisco Giants logo to see how this can be done well.

- The wings at the top of the crest look like ornamentation, not like good design. They distract from the concept of foursquare. Foursquare doesn't have little sharply-angled wings. Like any element of this kind of broad-concept logo, if taking away those little wings at the top of the crest won't absolutely destroy the whole logo, they should be removed. A league logo needs to be very direct and clear. Only elements that absolutely, positively must be there belong at all. Simplify, simplify, simplify. There will be plenty of time for random adornment and ornamentation when you start working on team logos, where that sort of thing can help to distinguish individual team identities.

- Too much text. If you have to spell out what USFSF means, then don't use the acronym. Look at football and baseball. In the NFL logo, old and new, you see the letters "NFL" but "National Football League" is not spelled out. In the MLB logo, the acronym MLB is not used. Instead, below the logo, "Major League Baseball" appears in full when words are needed. Using both the acronym and the full name accomplishes two, and only two, things: 1. It adds unnecessary clutter to your logo; 2. It tells viewers that you think they're stupid. If you're just going to throw the words "United States Four Square Federation" around, why is there a logo at all? The whole point of the logo should be to create a visual symbol that you can use instead of spelling out the name of the league all the time. So please, have some confidence in your logo design and in the intelligence of your viewers and at minimize the text. Acronym or full name, one or the other, not both -- and preferably neither.

Hopefully, you'll read the above as the minor nitpickery that it is. I love your idea here, and I think you've produced a strong conceptual basis for a good logo. I'd love to see a third draft that shows as much thoughtful improvement as this second draft shows over the first!

[Mac the Knife]

if this does become a series, then paper football should be next...period

Someone beat you to the idea. Do a GIS; there's a guy who's set up an organization for it.

[DelayedPenalty]

The series is probably going to have to wait for a while, I'm getting slammed with projects in class now, so all of my free time will be dedicated to those. Keep the ideas coming though, hopefully I'll get a chance to do some of them soon!