From the Wall Street Journal: Walk Ball
The most unforgettable moment of Grayson Winters’s college-football career happened when the 275-pound lineman was in the weight room wearing sandals.
He wasn’t playing football. He was playing Walk Ball.
The first rule of Walk Ball is you don’t run during Walk Ball. That’s also the only rule of Walk Ball. It’s a game based on a simple code—and football players everywhere are obsessed.
Mr. Winters, who plays football at Division II Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma, trudged across the team’s weight room while teammate Mylic Ritchie, a 280-pound defensive lineman in Crocs, guarded him. Mr. Winters slogged across the floor attempting to break free of his defender, and as he stomped in his sandals, he quickly glanced to his right toward some exercise equipment.
“Everybody had been walking routes over there,” Mr. Ritchie says. “I tried to jump the route.”
“Then,” Mr. Winters says, “I went back.”
Mr. Winters left Mr. Ritchie in the dust. He caught a pass. Their teammates went bananas. It was a Walk Ball touchdown so sensational that hundreds of thousands of people watched it over and over as soon as it was posted online.
Walk Ball is football meets poker meets a social-media craze in which nobody wants the ignominy of getting burned, deked or faked out in slow motion. The sole object of Walk Ball is to catch a pass from a quarterback while someone guards you—and everyone playing the three-man game has to walk.
That one twist on a basic throw-and-catch game manages to flip traditional notions of football on its head. Speed doesn’t matter. Deception trumps athleticism. Enormous, plodding men are suddenly dangerous wide receivers.
“This isn’t about who’s faster,” said Rayquan Smith, a Norfolk State University running back who has made popular Walk Ball videos. “It’s who can get open and who can’t get open.”
Pretty much anywhere is a suitable Walk Ball arena. Football players around the country are playing in their locker rooms, in grocery store aisles and even on football fields. The hashtag #walkballchallenge has over six million views on TikTok. More than 500,000 people watched the initial 14-second clip of Mr. Winters, while hundreds of thousands more watched when it was posted by accounts on other platforms.
Everyone who plays Walk Ball says they do it because they saw someone else do it on social media, and the viral clips follow a pattern. The players move slowly. The action happens quickly. A walking defender is somehow totally faked out by a walking receiver.
Peny Boone, a running back at the University of Maryland, says the Terrapins do it almost every day before practice now. They get pumped up to play real football by playing its stranger, slower cousin. “It gets us hyped,” he says.
Mr. Boone learned that one of the traits that makes him valuable on the actual football field—his speed—is moot when everyone’s walking. Unlike race walkers in the Olympics, Walk Ballers don’t try to outwalk each other. They try to outfox each other. It levels the playing field between him and football players who may weigh over 100 pounds more than he does. And the bigger guys may even have an advantage because of their sheer size.
“You’d be surprised,” Mr. Boone says. “Linemen got feet and move like a receiver.”
The key, he says, is the nuanced difference between speed and quickness. It’s not about walking fast. It is about executing moves swiftly. In one of his favorite instances, inside the Maryland locker room, he faked out his teammate-turned-defender in rapid succession. He twisted right. He twisted left. By the time he headed back and walked to his right, his opponent had nearly fallen over walking to the left.
It was just before the start of a recent practice at Lakeland University, in Plymouth, Wis., when the coaches noticed a couple of the players squaring off in a similar fashion. It wasn’t long before all of the Muskies were either playing or watching. The coaches began creating matchups, pitting linemen against other linemen or kickers against one another. But then, defensive backs coach Patrick Johnson said, they realized something even juicier: they could pick two players who would be an uneven pairing in any other circumstance—like the fastest cornerback and the largest offensive lineman.
“It’s still an even matchup,” Mr. Johnson says, “because you don’t know if they can walk well or not.”
There was one matchup the players wanted to see even more. They demanded their coaches play Walk Ball.
Mr. Johnson was going up against Kendrick Burks, the team’s running backs coach, who also happens to be his cousin. It wasn’t a pleasant family affair for Mr. Burks. Mr. Johnson had already discovered the trick. “As soon as they look the other way, you put on another move,” he says.
He executed that to perfection. After bobbing his head every which way, he turned back to the quarterback. Mr. Burks’s head swiveled around. That’s when Mr. Johnson marched up field. He didn’t really feel like he was open. But even a small bit of separation turns out to be a lot when a defender can only walk to catch up. The players at the school in Wisconsin feted Mr. Johnson after his catch like he had just invented beer and cheese curds.
Because there isn’t a National Walk Ball League, or even any rules scribbled down in a drawer somewhere, some of the smaller regulations vary across the country. At Maryland, they limit how much defenders can use their hands—there isn’t any jamming the receiver at the line of scrimmage. At Southern Nazarene University, they say the ball has to be thrown within about 10 seconds. Lakeland has a less formal time limit: if it takes too long, you get booed off the field.
The only rule that exists everywhere: no running. This can also become a lightning rod, especially after clips become the hottest things on the internet and viewers conclude that the game’s only rule was broken.
“The first thing I said was, if you watch the end,” Mr. Ritchie says, “he ran.”
The Southern Nazarene football players were stuck in a lightning delay before practice when this particular game of Walk Ball struck. There was game after game until Mr. Ritchie, the defensive lineman, called out Mr. Winters, an offensive lineman. They go up against each other every day in practice. They were about to go full tilt walking.
Mr. Winters had carefully watched as so many of his teammates tried to get open by walking out routes to the side. That’s why he turned his head in that direction. That’s also why Mr. Ritchie bit on the fake.
But what happened next is still the subject of a simmering controversy. Social media commenters say Mr. Ritchie got roasted. Mr. Ritchie says Mr. Winters ran.
“In all fairness,” Mr. Ritchie adds, “he did get me with that move—regardless of if he had to run.”
The most unforgettable moment of Grayson Winters’s college-football career happened when the 275-pound lineman was in the weight room wearing sandals.
He wasn’t playing football. He was playing Walk Ball.
The first rule of Walk Ball is you don’t run during Walk Ball. That’s also the only rule of Walk Ball. It’s a game based on a simple code—and football players everywhere are obsessed.
Mr. Winters, who plays football at Division II Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma, trudged across the team’s weight room while teammate Mylic Ritchie, a 280-pound defensive lineman in Crocs, guarded him. Mr. Winters slogged across the floor attempting to break free of his defender, and as he stomped in his sandals, he quickly glanced to his right toward some exercise equipment.
“Everybody had been walking routes over there,” Mr. Ritchie says. “I tried to jump the route.”
“Then,” Mr. Winters says, “I went back.”
Mr. Winters left Mr. Ritchie in the dust. He caught a pass. Their teammates went bananas. It was a Walk Ball touchdown so sensational that hundreds of thousands of people watched it over and over as soon as it was posted online.
Walk Ball is football meets poker meets a social-media craze in which nobody wants the ignominy of getting burned, deked or faked out in slow motion. The sole object of Walk Ball is to catch a pass from a quarterback while someone guards you—and everyone playing the three-man game has to walk.
That one twist on a basic throw-and-catch game manages to flip traditional notions of football on its head. Speed doesn’t matter. Deception trumps athleticism. Enormous, plodding men are suddenly dangerous wide receivers.
“This isn’t about who’s faster,” said Rayquan Smith, a Norfolk State University running back who has made popular Walk Ball videos. “It’s who can get open and who can’t get open.”
Pretty much anywhere is a suitable Walk Ball arena. Football players around the country are playing in their locker rooms, in grocery store aisles and even on football fields. The hashtag #walkballchallenge has over six million views on TikTok. More than 500,000 people watched the initial 14-second clip of Mr. Winters, while hundreds of thousands more watched when it was posted by accounts on other platforms.
Everyone who plays Walk Ball says they do it because they saw someone else do it on social media, and the viral clips follow a pattern. The players move slowly. The action happens quickly. A walking defender is somehow totally faked out by a walking receiver.
Peny Boone, a running back at the University of Maryland, says the Terrapins do it almost every day before practice now. They get pumped up to play real football by playing its stranger, slower cousin. “It gets us hyped,” he says.
Mr. Boone learned that one of the traits that makes him valuable on the actual football field—his speed—is moot when everyone’s walking. Unlike race walkers in the Olympics, Walk Ballers don’t try to outwalk each other. They try to outfox each other. It levels the playing field between him and football players who may weigh over 100 pounds more than he does. And the bigger guys may even have an advantage because of their sheer size.
“You’d be surprised,” Mr. Boone says. “Linemen got feet and move like a receiver.”
The key, he says, is the nuanced difference between speed and quickness. It’s not about walking fast. It is about executing moves swiftly. In one of his favorite instances, inside the Maryland locker room, he faked out his teammate-turned-defender in rapid succession. He twisted right. He twisted left. By the time he headed back and walked to his right, his opponent had nearly fallen over walking to the left.
It was just before the start of a recent practice at Lakeland University, in Plymouth, Wis., when the coaches noticed a couple of the players squaring off in a similar fashion. It wasn’t long before all of the Muskies were either playing or watching. The coaches began creating matchups, pitting linemen against other linemen or kickers against one another. But then, defensive backs coach Patrick Johnson said, they realized something even juicier: they could pick two players who would be an uneven pairing in any other circumstance—like the fastest cornerback and the largest offensive lineman.
“It’s still an even matchup,” Mr. Johnson says, “because you don’t know if they can walk well or not.”
There was one matchup the players wanted to see even more. They demanded their coaches play Walk Ball.
Mr. Johnson was going up against Kendrick Burks, the team’s running backs coach, who also happens to be his cousin. It wasn’t a pleasant family affair for Mr. Burks. Mr. Johnson had already discovered the trick. “As soon as they look the other way, you put on another move,” he says.
He executed that to perfection. After bobbing his head every which way, he turned back to the quarterback. Mr. Burks’s head swiveled around. That’s when Mr. Johnson marched up field. He didn’t really feel like he was open. But even a small bit of separation turns out to be a lot when a defender can only walk to catch up. The players at the school in Wisconsin feted Mr. Johnson after his catch like he had just invented beer and cheese curds.
Because there isn’t a National Walk Ball League, or even any rules scribbled down in a drawer somewhere, some of the smaller regulations vary across the country. At Maryland, they limit how much defenders can use their hands—there isn’t any jamming the receiver at the line of scrimmage. At Southern Nazarene University, they say the ball has to be thrown within about 10 seconds. Lakeland has a less formal time limit: if it takes too long, you get booed off the field.
The only rule that exists everywhere: no running. This can also become a lightning rod, especially after clips become the hottest things on the internet and viewers conclude that the game’s only rule was broken.
“The first thing I said was, if you watch the end,” Mr. Ritchie says, “he ran.”
The Southern Nazarene football players were stuck in a lightning delay before practice when this particular game of Walk Ball struck. There was game after game until Mr. Ritchie, the defensive lineman, called out Mr. Winters, an offensive lineman. They go up against each other every day in practice. They were about to go full tilt walking.
Mr. Winters had carefully watched as so many of his teammates tried to get open by walking out routes to the side. That’s why he turned his head in that direction. That’s also why Mr. Ritchie bit on the fake.
But what happened next is still the subject of a simmering controversy. Social media commenters say Mr. Ritchie got roasted. Mr. Ritchie says Mr. Winters ran.
“In all fairness,” Mr. Ritchie adds, “he did get me with that move—regardless of if he had to run.”
