Indiana's Ball Tapping Problem

By Marcus Gilmer in Miscellaneous on Nov 26, 2009 4:30PM

There's a plague sweeping Indiana and it has parents across the state terrified: ball-tapping. What is ball-tapping? According to WTHR in Indianapolis, "the act of intentionally hitting or kicking a male in the genitals." According to every male staffer at Chicagoist, it's a dumb game dudes play that's as old balls themselves. It took a few minutes for us to realize that this was a real investigative report and not a story ripped from The Onion.

WTHR took the investigation even further with a survey of school nurses.

School nurses from 163 Indiana schools participated in the anonymous survey, and 33% of those nurses said they're aware of ball tapping happening at their school within the past twelve months. But a closer look at the statistics shows the problem is much more serious in some schools than in others.

23% of school nurses who work at the elementary level say they've seen or heard of ball tapping at their school. That number nearly doubles in high schools, where 43% of school nurses say they've seen it.

And in middle schools, 62% of school nurses said they're aware of students engaged in ball tapping.

Of course, there has to be a reason for such an investigative reports because no news day is so slow that you can't find a video of a water-skiing squirrel instead of reporting on adolescent male stupidity. Indeed, it seems one student - Jake Arend - was ball-tapped a tad too hard and wound up having to undergo emergency surgery.

In late October, Jake was rushed to Hendricks Regional Hospital in Danville where doctors performed an emergency operation. Years of enduring ball tapping had finally taken its toll. Undetected scar tissue had completely sealed off Jake's urinary tract, resulting in horrifying pain...Doctors placed a catheter in Jake's urethra and told him he will need another operation to fix all the damage caused by repeated blows to the groin.

That makes me hurt just thinking about it. Okay, so we won't make light of Jake because that is serious. But it's a rare worst-case scenario. Not that we condone such painful tomfoolery, but are these Jackass-inspired shenanigans really worthy of such in-depth reporting? How many man-hours were spent delving into the dark world of adolescent ball-tapping? As much as news stations have spent investigating the terrifying underbelly of "emo"? Hell, let's get Kurtis & Jacobson back together (one more time) and see what kind of job they can do as they really dig into this story. [via Fark]