I'm with you. Everything is too "safe" nowadays. Kids need to be roughed up

Schools are way too "sensitive" now.  I remember back in middle school they made it so that there was no winner to our talent show.  Everyone got a participation trophy.  It was lame.

When I was in school, we played dodgeball with light, relatively squishy balls. There wasn't much "getting hurt" to it. But there were cliques, even in elementary school, and they would target the kids that weren't as high up on the food chain, so to speak... Perhaps that's the true agenda behind it? Otherwise it doesn't make a lick of sense; you stand a better chance of getting hurt playing football, basketball or a laundry list of other activities that aren't being banned. Granted, I don't think that's a good reason to ban it either... *sigh* We're sheltering our kids from the truth of the world: not everyone is going to be your friend. You will not want to be everyone's friend. You will not like everyone and they will not all like you. Life goes on.

I don't consider dodgeball to be a particularly good PE activity.  After all, just think about it --PE class is supposed to help get kids moving.  In dodgeball, all that happens is that those kids who *aren't* so agile (and thus would probably benefit most from physical activity) get tagged out the earliest, and then spend the rest of the class sitting on the sidelines doing NOTHING.  Hardly sounds like a good PE class to me.

I also loved playing dodge ball when I was growing up. I recently substituted for a gym teacher. The kids played dodge ball, but it was nothing like the way I remembered playing. The kids lined the balls in a row in the middle of the floor, then the members of the two teams ran in the middle to pick up the balls. They then began to fire away at each other. At my sons school they can no longer play tag, I understand why. Some kids just do not know how to play, and to not have to deal with accidents they have just eliminated it all together.

Oh, okay. I told one of the students that it reminded me of a firing squad. Because inevitably one team would end up with the majority of ball, and while the other team stood in front of the bleachers trying hard not to get hit, the other team members would fire the ball as hard as they could hitting them.

What we need, first off, is tort reform.  States need to enact legislation that bans lawsuits against public institutions that allow kids to do what kids should be reasonably expected to do.  It has nothing to do with being civilized. 
We lived, for the first eleven years of our son's life, in places where it could be reasonably expected that a child could run around, play physically active games and learn to take at least moderate risks.  It's called learning to manage life, rather than be managed by it.
In my own childhood, we left home at 8 A.M., either for school, or to play outside during vacations.
When it rained, I stayed "down cellar" and played board games with my siblings, cousins and/or friends.  There were no play dates; we just played.  At school, kickball, dodge ball and basketball were norms during recess.  Rock fights were off the table, but we plenty of those between neighborhoods.  One of them triggered my autism.  I can't say I would have sued the kid who hit me.  Years later, for other reasons, he took his own life.
Still and all, I've had a good life so far, and would never have wanted it sanitized.

I keep changing my mind about this whole dodgeball debate.  I DO believe we should keep score in children's sports.  I DO believe in healthy competition.

My finals thoughts on dodgeball is that it shouldn't be "banned".  The decision should be up to the school.  However, I can remember a few gym classes where dodgeball was the chosen activity of the day and if you chose to sit out, as with any class, you lost some credit points.  At the time I was very small and the balls were not as soft as I would have liked.  It hurt.  Over the years I got a few bloody noses, bruises, ball burn on my arm but I sucked it up.

Then dodgeball was banned and I didn't think much of it until my senior year of high school.  As a special "treat" they allowed us to play...Seniors vs. everyone else.  I remember huddled in the corner with my friends screaming because we were getting pelted so hard by angry underclassmen.  They would sprint to the line using the momentum to hurl the ball at us.  One girl, the best pitcher on our softball team, was throwing the balls like she was at Nationals or something.  The game continued for a full half an hour.  It was miserable.  It was as close to war as I hope I'll ever get.

If my teachers had any common sense they would have stopped the game because it was no longer fun, constructive, or safe.

That's the problem.  It's much easier to ban something then find a way to enforce common sense. 

Well...I was a wimpy kid who hated--with a capital 'H'--dodgeball, LOL. I lived in a suburb in New Jersey where most everybodies's Dad took the train to work in New York City. Back then I remember that Dodgeball had one purpose:  to beat the kids you hated as hard as you could with the ball. Even with a Gym teacher screaming that you'd get pulled from the game for throwing at someone's head, some kids still felt it was worth sitting out to bean the object of their current hatred as hard as they could. I guess it didn't kill anybody, but aren't there about eleventy hundred other games involving a ball that have some other (read BETTER) constructive and competitive goal? Like getting the ball into a goal (or net, or end zone, or away from the other team)? The nostalgia nuts that love dodgeball are usually the ones that bullied everybody on the playground when they were kids, so they have fond memories of the game. Just my take on it.