Their sneakers squeaked as they moved across the wooden floor hurling rubber balls at sweaty targets. There was shouting and cheering, whistles blowing and music blaring.

The chaotic scene that unfolded last week inside a stuffy gymnasium marked the start of the World Dodgeball Society’s new coed adult league in Westchester – a program that organizers hope will fill a void in the South Bay since other leagues in Manhattan Beach and Torrance folded after losing playing space.

The league’s opening night attracted a crowd of about 50 people to the Westchester Recreation Center’s old gym, some turning out with friends, and others hoping to make new ones over the course of the next several Tuesdays. | See photo gallery.

“We have lawyers, college students, bankers, filmmakers, screenwriters,” said attorney Howard Han, 32, who serves as the World Dodgeball Society’s regional manager and when needed, a referee. “I think the appeal of it is, anyone can kind of come out for an hour and let their inner child out.”

And when the whistles started bleating inside the Manchester Avenue rec center, these players did just that, pummeling each other with “no sting” balls that bounced and rolled across the gym floor. Those unable to dodge out of the way in time lined up along the sidelines, laughing, wiping their brows and waiting for the next chance to hit their targets.

“This is our more recreational, fun-time league,” said Alieh Zamany of Redondo Beach, one of the league’s co-managers who met her boyfriend playing dodgeball. “It’s very social.”

For Zamany and others, playing also evokes a certain nostalgia for a game they learned while growing up and left behind for organized sports.

“I remember playing in elementary school,” said Zamany, 28, a former soccer goalie.

As someone who moved around after graduating from the University of California, Irvine, she wanted to meet more people while settling into life in the South Bay, Zamany said. Dodgeball became her thing.

“I started playing,” she said, “and I got addicted.”

The World Dodgeball Society, formerly the Los Angeles Dodgeball Society, was born in 2003 at the Hollywood Rec Center – “yes, before the movie,” the group’s website explains – referring to the popular 2004 dodgeball flick featuring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn.

Today, the society has grown to more than 20 leagues, mostly in California, with three in New York, Illinois and Maryland.

“We have had a few dodgeball marriages, babies (mostly planned), BFFs, misadventures and the like throughout our history,” the site says. “Our main objective from Day One is to have fun on and off the court and that will never change.”

The society’s expansion into Westchester seemed a good fit, Zamany said, given the interest in leagues formed within the past few years in Manhattan Beach and Torrance.

Zamany joined and later ran the Manhattan league, which met for a year and a half to two years at the Adventureplex on Marine Avenue. But it fizzled after the space became unavailable, she said, and a league that started at Torrance’s Soccer City eventually met the same fate after a six-month run.

Organizers of the Westchester group hope the location will be a draw for South Bay dodgeball lovers, as it gives them a place to play that’s in between West Los Angeles and Long Beach, where other World Dodgeball Society leagues meet.

Players in all of them are encouraged to dress up in costume, and they’ve adopt local bars to visit after games. (Heads up: Playa del Rey’s Prince O’ Whales is probably going to get more crowded on Tuesday nights, as that’s the home bar for the Westchester group.)

Han, a Culver City resident, plays dodgeball with the team The Knights who say Ni – a named adopted from the comedy film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” – and members sometimes don cardboard armor.

Creativity and comedy are welcome for team monikers and costumes alike, although there are some guidelines, like the fact that shirts are required. That mandate came because members of a West Hollywood team called the John Cougar Mellencamps were playing shirtless (except for jean vests) and “it was very sweaty when the ball hit them,” Han said.

During open play last week in Westchester, no one was wearing costumes because the league was still forming its teams – which will likely number six to eight with about 12 players apiece, depending on participation.

The players had gathered on the gym floor to hear Zamany run through the rules of the game before she put down her paperwork and blew her whistle. And then the balls began flying.

“It’s just fun,” said 26-year-old Lance Williams of Santa Monica, an attorney who’d turned out at a friend’s suggestion. “He’s always been asking us to come to these things … It’s just kind of like being a kid again.”

kristin.agostoni@dailybreeze.com

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