One of the best things to have when out of doors is a ball. There is no end to the uses one can make of it.
Ball Games
The simplest thing to do with a ball is to catch it; and the quicker one is in learning to catch well the better baseball player one will become. Ordinary catching in a ring is good, but the practice is better if you try to throw the ball each time so that the player to whom you throw it shall not need to move his feet in order to catch it. This teaches straight throwing too. Long and high throwing and catching, and hard throwing and catching (standing as close together as you dare), are important. There is also dodge-catching, where you pretend to throw to one player and really throw to another and thus take him unawares. All these games can be varied and made more difficult by using only one hand, right or left, for catching.
Ball Games Alone
A boy with a ball need never be very lonely. When tired of catching it in the ordinary way he can practice throwing the ball straight into the air until, without his moving from his place, it falls absolutely on him each time. He can throw it up and catch it behind him, and if he has two others (or stones will do) he can strive for the juggler's accomplishment of keeping three things in the air at once. Every boy should practice throwing with his left hand (or, if he is already left-handed, with his right): a very useful accomplishment. If it is a solid india-rubber ball and there is a blank wall, he can make it rebound at different angles, one good way being, in throwing it, to let it first hit the ground close to the wall's foot. He may also pledge himself to catch it first with the right hand and then with the left for a hundred times; or to bat it up a hundred times with a tennis racket or a flat bit of board. An interesting game for one is to mark out a golf course round the garden, making a little hole at intervals of half a dozen yards or so, and see how many strokes are needed in going round and getting into each hole on the way.
Races
All kinds of races are easy to arrange and these can be repeated from day to day as your proficiency increases. Here are a few.
The Spanish race, sometimes called the Wheelbarrow race, is played by forming the boys into two lines, one standing back of the other, and the front row on their hands and knees. At a signal to begin, each boy on the back row takes hold of the ankles of the boy is front of him and lifts his knees off the ground. The boy in front walking on his hands, and the boy behind trundling him along, make the greatest haste possible. The pair who first reach the goal are the winners.
Races may be run, hopping on the right foot, or on the left, or with both together, or with first a hop and then a jump. It is well to appoint one of the boys umpire during these odd races, to see that they are run fairly and none of the rules agreed upon are broken.
A sack race is fun. Each boy is tied into a gunny sack and shuffles his way to the goal. A substitute for this is the three-legged race, run by two boys. They stand side by side, and the right leg of one is tied to the left leg of the other and so with three legs between them they must somehow get to the goal.