Jennifer Narcomey, Lawrence, jumps away from a ball thrown at her during a game of dodge ball in 2009 at the Community Building.

From left, Zach McDermott, Nick Stidhamm, Jeffrey Miller and Madison Piper, all fourth-graders, play dodge ball at Langston Hughes School, 1101 George Williams Way.

When Reenie Stogsdill, Langston Hughes School teacher, asks her students if they are ready to play their favorite game, there is little doubt about what she is referring to.

It’s prison ball — a modified version of dodge ball — and a game that is met with shouts of joy when Stogsdill tells the group of fourth-graders that they will play it for the rest of gym class.

“Every day they will ask me, ‘Can we play prison ball?'” Stogsdill says.

For the next 20 minutes, these youngsters throw brightly colored foam balls, taking aim at either their classmates or the basketball goal on the opposite end of the gym.

Fourth-grader Madison Piper doesn’t mince words as she explains the game’s appeal.

“You get to hit people with a ball,” she says.

A day later, a much more serious version of dodge ball was under way at the Lawrence Community Building.

There, two adult teams spent 50 suspense-filled minutes battling it out for first-place honors in the Lawrence Parks & Recreation winter dodge ball league.

Unlike the noisy, music-accompanied game at Langston Hughes, at the community building all one heard was the squeaking of sneakers, thudding of balls and the occasional cheers.

“This is a lot more intense than I thought it would be,” one newcomer says.

The sting of getting slammed in the face with a hard rubber ball may have long since faded, but for many adults the memory of how much joy this playground game brought to their childhood lives hasn’t died.

For eighth-grade English teacher James Bender, dodge ball is what came at the end of the week during his school years.

“You looked forward to it all week,” Bender says. “All of the energy builds up, and all you wanted was to get out of school, but you got to play dodge ball instead. And that was almost as good.”

On Friday, Bender was captaining the first-place ranked Instigators, a team composed of teachers from Clark Middle School in Bonner Springs and their friends. And the end-of-the-week enthusiasm remained.

“It’s great to see this age group doing something like this,” Bender says.

Despite its agelessness and nostalgia, the popularity of dodge ball has ebbed and flowed over the years.

“We had a whole group of kids that played it religiously in the ’80s and early ’90s,” Lawrence High School physical education teacher Dirk Wedd says. “At the high school level, it was rather cutthroat. We used deflated volleyballs, and they would sting.”

For a while, dodge ball wasn’t allowed at LHS, partly because of the injuries that could go with it. About two years ago a proposal was made to play with softer, Nerf-type balls, and the administration approved the game.

“If the weather is bad and kids are tired of the activity we’re doing, we throw it in for the day,” Wedd says. “The kids enjoy the heck out of it.”

While always popular among the school-aged group, the game saw a revival among adults with the 2004 movie release of “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” with Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn.

It was shortly after the movie that Lawrence Parks & Recreation launched a dodge ball league. For the first year or so it surged in popularity with enough interest to fill a co-ed and men’s league. It has since dwindled to just the four co-ed teams that play on Friday night.

Along with a kickball league, adult sports supervisor Bob Stanclift says dodge ball brought new people into the city’s sports leagues. The alternative sport wasn’t quite as competitive, and it didn’t require as much skill as more traditional sports such as softball or basketball.

“I think it breaks down barriers,” Stanclift says.

Back at Langston Hughes School, by the end of the game, the fourth-graders were red-faced, sweaty and out of breath.

Stogsdill, the PE teacher, says that while the students might love to play dodge ball, she has another motive for playing it in gym class. It’s a great form of exercise.

“In exercise, the first thing is, it has to be fun or they are not going to do it,” she says. “And we want it to be fun so kids will want to do it, and that way they will continue to do it throughout their life.”