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Having a Ball

I don’t know who invented baseball, basketball, or football. I’m sure the information is out there; I just don’t know it. But I do know who invented Trangleball—New Yorker Mark Miller.

Mark says he doesn’t care about his own fame and fortune. He just wants the name Trangleball to become known throughout the land. By that, he means he wants kids to play his game on the streets, at summer camp, and in gym classes, plus on beaches and places where people get together for fun. “Trangleball provides a lot of exercise in a little space and it’s fun like you wouldn’t believe.”

Mark owned a music studio. One morning, waiting for a band to finish rehearsing, he picked up a ball and threw it at the corner of the room where two walls meet the ceiling. After throwing it at what seemed like the same spot, he noticed that the ball rebounded in a different direction each time. Sometimes it went left, sometimes right, sometimes high or low. Mark thought that the unpredictable rebound was fun and could be used to improve ball players’ reflexes.

Deciding to make a portable corner, he cut a 4-foot square of plywood into triangles, from corner to corner “the way my mom used to cut my sandwiches.” He then nailed three of the four triangles together to create a corner. Mark had his portable corner, and it worked just fine.

Soon after he created it, he flipped it over and realized that his corner was a three-sided pyramid. He began to throw the ball at one of the panels, but the ball rebounded right back to him. Boring. Then Mark had an “aha” moment. “If I ran five steps to the right of the panel that I was throwing the ball at, an opponent would have to take five steps to the left to catch it.” The random rebound was back in the concept, but now it had turned into a competitive game.

After a few hours of playing this corner game with his employees, Mark realized that the other two sides of the pyramid weren’t being used, so he had them play three games at once: one against each panel, for a total of three balls and six players. As time went on, he eliminated two balls and created a passing game between the players. That’s how his inverted corner became Trangleball.

Mark’s advice to other inventors: “Prototype it. It’s difficult to build on an idea without something to physically touch and play with. A prototype will build fresh new ideas. Without my first proto, I’d still be throwing the ball at the inside corners instead of flipping it on the pyramid side.”

Today, Trangleball has a circular court (portable), a yard-high pyramid in the center of the court, and a squishy ball the size of a baseball. “I even created the Trangleball logo in the shape of the court itself.”

If you go to Fire Island’s Ocean Beach and walk along the shore, you will see six players bouncing a ball off one of the three faces of the pyramid in the center of a court. Mark lives nearby and sets up the Trangleball court every morning with the permission of the community. A player throws the ball to a teammate and, within three throws, one of them has to aim for a face on the pyramid to score a point. A game is complete when one team reaches eleven points; that is, like volleyball, the serving team scores a point when one of its players throws the ball into the pyramid and the opponents don’t catch it.

So far, about 275 Trangleball kits have been sold to YMCAs, summer camps, even prisons. Recently, Mark has shipped some as far away as Australia and New Zealand.

Mark pushes Trangleball every chance he gets. “I’m the pied piper for it, and I’d like to recruit more pied pipers to make this game grow.” At least one pied piper is influencing an entire nation. “A few years ago, a recreation student from the Czech Republic did his entire thesis on Trangleball, he loved playing it so much on Fire Island. At first, his professors wouldn’t accept it as a serious idea, but he was so persuasive, he earned his doctorate based on this thesis. In 2001, he invited me to his university, where I helped him introduce the game to recreational educators.

“I’m really a shy person. I had to make a speech in front of 1,000 people in the University’s gym with the governor and the mayor present. I had stage fright. Now, I’m making speeches all the time to promote this game.”

Working this angle full-time for the past four years, Mark is on fire about promoting Trangleball. “This game has given me a reason to live. Before, I was directionless. Now, there’s a sense of destiny for me. The journey I’ve been on has made the whole thing worthwhile.”

He’s aiming in a clear direction to raise the profile of Trangleball and sell the licensing rights to it. “If it takes off, I know I’ll always have security teaching and coaching it. I’d like to see a big company manufacture, market, and distribute it so more people can play.”

Right now, Mark is having a ball promoting his game. But he knows he’ll have scored big when Trangleball becomes a household name and a game played on every corner.