Childish Delight in a New Jersey Warehouse

My favorite summers were in middle school and early high school, when a few friends and I would monopolize three consecutive backyards to play a version of baseball with a pitcher, batter, and one or two fielders. We used tennis balls. Once our metal bats made it too easy to hit balls in the swamp, onto roofs, or over the tree line into the fourth consecutive backyard of the Harley’s¹ we switched to a heavy wood bat I bought at a hardware store years prior.

We played other games, too. Ball tag, wiffle ball, glow-in-the-dark football where the only goal was to successfully complete passes. We played HORSE and Kangaroo in neighboring driveways of empty-nesters who still had basketball hoops, and once in a while a large enough crew would form to play Capture the Flag.

Groups of two, three, and four were all large enough for some variation on a sport. We exploited rules and then changed them to make it fair. We had glorious triumphs and devastating failures. Nobody ever got so injured that we had to call a parent, and nobody ever get so mad that we couldn’t mend the relationship. We were creative and learned how to navigate the world together in those adolescent summers.

I expect that everyone who has played in the Jomboy Media warehouse had some version of that experience growing up. It’s populated by a gaggle of reasonably athletic sports nerds (and the occasional professional) in their 20s and 30s, reviving that spirit for anyone to watch on YouTube.

It can be a bit brash, and I’m not a fan of the predominant advertisers for sports content. But every person who plays in one of their shockingly intense and silly sports is so kind and willing to shed a bit of adulthood to have tremendous fun. They find a healthy mix of participants, get goofy with it, and maintain the essence of joy and friendship while always elevating their production quality. It’s been so much fun watching it grow from the cofounders, Jimmy and Jake, playing Blitzball in the alley behind their New York City office to a massive hit that now gets off-hour airtime on cable TV. Even then, the feeling is intimate and supportive alongside the fierce competition. Nothing drives that fury like wanting to defeat a friend.