Golden Child

How To Play Golden Child

This is a great game for encouraging kids to learn the basic skills of basketball and netball. It is best played in a gym or on a basketball court.

Divide the group into two teams. One team will start as the shooters. They line up at the foul line (or at an appropriate shooting distance). The other team will be the running team. They line up at the corner of the court baseline.

When the time starts, the shooting team take it in turns to shoot the ball and try to score a goal. As they are doing this, the first player from the running team starts running around the court boundaries. If a running player makes it all the way around the court and back to where they started, they have scored a run.

If a player scores a goal, the running player must freeze where they are. As soon as this happens, the next running player must start running. Repeat this every time a goal is scored.

The final runner for the running team is the "golden child" and as they run around the court, they can unfreeze the frozen players by tagging them. The defrosted players can continue running around with the golden child. Obviously, if a goal is scored while they are all running around, then the whole team is out. However if the runners all make it back, then that's a win for them!

A twist on this standard method could be to make it so the golden child needs to do something more than just tag a player to unfreeze them. Maybe they need to crawl under their legs, run a circle around them or do a secret handshake with them. I guess if it's something like this that takes a bit of time, they may choose to limit how many people they free so they can make it back around before they get out.

Added by
Joel
on 29 May 2020