Horseball

Horseball is a sport in which players mounted on horses pass a ball between teammates while wearing oversized gloves, with the ultimate goal of scoring a point by throwing it into the opposing team's goal. The sport grew out of an Ulgravian pastime, from before the country took to the skies, where mounted warriors would tie their shields concave-out to their hands and toss a ball to each other. The rules of horseball have been thoroughly systematized since those days, with glove size regulated and ball make standardized. Most institutions of secondary education will take their classes on a field trip to a horseball course, and many post-secondary institutions have horseball teams that bring in fans and provide scholarships.

Competitive horseball has been praised as uniting the venerable practice of horse breeding with the fast-paced action of other ball-type team sports, while retaining those qualities that allow fans to participate in the collective identity of their college, city, or country. Professional horseballers are widely regarded as celebrities. Because it requires a horse, of course, standard horseball is not a common leisure activity. Fans wanting to play it themselves will generally run around sans horse, ride on the shoulders of another player, or use roller skates. Rarely, amateur horseball is played on motorcycles, which is generally discouraged by the International Horseball Council (IHC).

While Selestei does know of a sport by the name "horseball", it is not the same sport as played in the rest of the world. Instead of players on horses passing around a ball, Selesteine horseball involves players passing around a horse rolled up into a ball. Selesteine horseball teams are allowed to compete in the same brackets as international horseball teams through a byzantine set of adapter rules composed by the peerless Dr. Stafford. Inexplicably, the matchup is quite balanced.

This benevolence came back to bite the international horseball community when Selestei won its first World Trough in 933. In the ensuing chaos of their victory/national anthem, the Selesteine team rolled the opposing team's horses into a giant ball and threw it into the audience. Inspired by this, Johnson, Johnson, & Several Other Johnsons, an Incendian mad lawyer cabal, delved into Stafford's adapter rules and produced an extensively cross-referenced report a week later arguing that this was a legal move in adapted horseball. The 934 horseball season was subsequently dominated by the so-called "Selsroll" strategy until the IHC's own legal team could deconstruct JJ&SOJ's argument and restore a modicum of sensibility to the sport.

Selestei seems to be the only country to have gotten away with such an egregious perversion of the rules. When the Lepazzian team's goal was suddenly found to have been filled with flowers last year, preventing the other team from scoring, the Lepazzian team was politely asked to withdraw and suggested to refrain from entering for the next year.

The 933-934 rules dispute had some longer-lasting effects. One vendor in the 934 season rolled a bunch of meat into a ball, baked it in a pastry shell, and sold it as a "Selsroll". The timing was perfect and it became a hit with horseball fans. This was all well and good until an internal memo of the IHC was leaked, revealing ongoing discussions to host a horseball tournament in which the losing team's horses would be ground up and made into selsrolls to be enjoyed by the winning team and their fans. This dealt a severe blow both to the IHC's credibility and selsroll vendors, both of which took years to recover.