Playing with Balls: what happens when art school kids start a sports team?

For as long as nearby institutions like Brown University have fielded sports teams, so has RISD. In the days of wool-uniform baseball and leather-helmet American football, architects and textile engineers squared off against local high schools, colleges, and even a state penitentiary. For a few hours, the future of the creative industry pretended they were athletes.

Despite inadequate facilities and schedules built around the needs of art college curricula, athletics at RISD have thrived for over a century. In the 1910s the basketball team held practice in the textile department’s building. Later that school year a baseball team could be seen practicing fielding in alleys around campus or taking swings in a batting cage built inside the Liberal Arts department. Decades later, the basketball team found a new practice space within an old bank building owned by the school. The sidelines of the court were the hard, stone walls of the building itself.

Like a lot of art, the basketball team was left “untitled” with no identity throughout much of the 20th century. In the early years they were called “the Designers”. During the sixties, RISD students followed the movements of the time and took pride in their strange – possibly drug-influenced – behaviour. Known as the “Red Devils”, a dozen art students would load into a friend’s van, face local naval bases, and be cheered on by friends with scraggly beards and rolled up blue jeans who would smack the floor yelling “GO… GO… GO… NADS!” while they motioned to their crotches.

It was clear from the beginning that basketball was the perfect sport for the type of people who found themselves at a place like the Rhode Island School of Design. Crowded into a prestigious institution with alumni who would go on to become some of the world’s most influential illustrators, animators, and architects, they saw the game as a break from their daily performance. Student newspapers at RISD felt the same way. Players earned odd nicknames like “Eel”, “Steamboat”, and “Zippy”. A fictional sportswriter held a weekly column making up stories of the team’s victories and reported their decision to decline an invitation to the National Invitational Tournament. Then, as if no one seemed to care anymore, the team disappeared over the summer.

Basketball at RISD reemerged in the late eighties, but just for a moment. A few years of games against local company teams made up of hungover union workers soon passed and left with the graduating class. Just as before, another student-led, student-funded, and student-designed team was claimed by college clubs’ worst enemy: apathy.

A group of freshmen in late 2000, led by Joe Gebbia, realised that RISD didn’t have a basketball team, so they made their own. Players sketched out a logo and identity for the latest incarnation of the team. They drew from the genitalia-inspired Nads and called themselves the “Balls”. Club forms were filled out, ads posted in student magazines, and flyers hung around campus.

It wasn’t until the following year that the Balls played in their first game. As Clark University walked into a high school gym in Providence, Rhode Island to face the team, their coaches were shocked to see the man they had talked to over the phone was just a sophomore in college wearing a thin mesh jersey and sweatband bearing the word “BALLS”.

I don’t have to tell you that Clark University destroyed the RISD Balls. It’s obvious that a Division III team from Massachusetts that held daily practices and wore well-fitting jerseys crushed a team made up of designers and painters lucky to get court time at a local fieldhouse once a week. But I will tell you that sometimes that same team of art students dressed up as basketball players beat a team who never thought someone could be a painter and have a smooth three-point shot. I will tell you that student rock bands, breakdancing clubs, amateur puppeteers, and a seven-foot tall penis named “Scrotie” performed during games. I will tell you that buzzed 20-somethings on a Saturday night make signs with phallic puns, paint “Balls” on the side of their faces, and yell – or sometimes flirt – at the other team, just to have something to do on the weekend.

Jocks and art kids don’t mix – any movie taking place in high school will tell you that. The guys on the basketball team rip up the sketchbooks of scrawny freshmen and then go out on the weekend to fondle their unsatisfied girlfriends. At RISD, the toxic stigma of sports culture is immediately wiped away by the names of the teams themselves. Nads, Balls, Pricks, and many, many more innuendos take the symbols of masculinity and sexuality and turn them into a joke. “Good D!” “Who has the balls?” and “Help, he’s coming!” are just some of the things you can hear shouted on a basketball court, so why not laugh at how the other team is taking this seriously? Athletic clubs like the RISD Balls have become havens for students who were once turned off by the culture of sports teams, but can now enjoy what they love, minus the misogyny.

The Balls’ trophy case is small, but not empty. In 2014 the team took home the highly coveted New England Art School Basketball Invitational (NASBI) trophy. The tournament, in its second year of existence, was organised by RISD, Cooper Union, MassArt, and the New School to give art school basketball some semblance of a conference championship. After a few years the tournament stopped happening, Cooper Union’s team dissolved, and MassArt and other art schools in New England suffered from waning numbers and poor financial support.

The Covid-19 pandemic almost killed the RISD Balls altogether. Without the ability to practice or play games, the team was in danger of digging a grave right next to the Red Devils. But the team survived. Maybe just motivated by the prospect of wearing jerseys with “Balls” on them or a realisation that no atmosphere matched our home games, people kept showing up to join the team, watch us play, or buy one of the thrifted shirts we screenprinted the Balls logo on.

There is a tradition of athletics at RISD – though recent administrative changes within the school criticise the inappropriate naming conventions, and the school store stopped selling club team merchandise – the student population continues to show up for us. The team constantly battles the disinterested attitudes of privileged college students that threaten the futures of student-led organisations. But as much as cynical, former victims of high school bullies might be quick to dismiss going to a basketball game on a Friday night as something only meatheads and vapid spray-tanned legacy students would ever be caught at, the Balls are different. As someone who has played on the team for close to four years now, I can admit I never cared about winning. It was never about the season record or the number of championships for anyone on the team. From the beginning we sucked, but our friends still show up at every game because they know who we are.

It’s a cliche repeated ad nauseum by sports analysts and documentary narrators, but it’s the truth: basketball is an art. Among the chaos of ten players running around a small court, bouncing and throwing a ball – hoping it makes it through a small metal hoop ten feet in the air – there is a rhythm of beauty as captivating as architectural drawings or the strokes of paint on a canvas.

James Naismith invented basketball less than ninety miles from RISD’s campus. Looking for a game rowdy college students could play indoors during winter, he grabbed a peach basket and figured it out from there. Over 150 years later, we’re still looking for something to do when New England winds bite at our faces and we don’t want to think about the horrible crit we had earlier in the day. Once you swap Doc Martens for basketball shoes, you become a version of yourself that might not fit into the rest of your life, but is still undeniably a part of it.

Every time I sell merchandise with the Balls logo on it, it sells out just as fast as I can make it. When I set up at an art sale or lay a blanket on a lawn around campus, I look for people from outside the RISD community craning their necks and mouthing “What the hell is that?” Sometimes they ask about the team, but other times they just buy a shirt to own a copy of the logo. I’ll never know for sure how a team like the RISD Balls has survived so long within the borders of an institution not built for typical athletic programs, but the answer is somewhere inside the motivation to walk over and take a look at what I’m selling. The Balls, like any great work of art, invite a conversation.