It’s like dodgeball plus baseball – sort of. And there are ambushes.

Imagine taking dodgeball and mixing in the strategy of baseball and the ambush element of paintball.

What you get is a new game called Rageball 5, co-invented by Wichita entrepreneur Ralph Lagergren.

It will be making its next appearance as a league aimed at college students at the Sports Forum in east Wichita in 2017.

Rageball is like an adult version of dodgeball, the old playground game, with the aggression of hurling balls at people. But it has more options and more strategy.

The ball is 6 inches in diameter, small enough to be held in the hand. The ball compresses, but it still hits hard enough to sting.

It has five people to a team and five balls. The sides of the playing area are divided by a zig-zagging waist-high barrier to allow people to hide and ambush.

And it has five ways to score points, including by hurling the ball through a target or by hitting an opponent. It’s played in a small court on sand.

Brian Hargrove, general manager of Sports Forum, lauded the success of a trial 16-team tournament last month.

“It went great,” he said. “They loved it, and participants gave great feedback and lots of comments.”

He expects to set up a court for six to 12 months and recruit players for leagues.

“It’s a form of dodgeball, but there is a lot of strategy involved, and that’s what makes people really like it,” he said. “You need to think and use your brain to win.

“Every time you participate, you learn something new.”

Lagergren makes his living by developing and licensing inventions. Past inventions range from a pen that sits on your finger to a new kind of farm combine technology.

Most recently, he helped an entrepreneur in Kingman develop and license a machine called Chemblade, which quickly cuts open and rinses jugs of farm chemicals.

Lagergren and Gary Griffin of Fort Worth invented the game a decade ago. They worked out the bugs during spring break at Panama City, Fla., and South Padre Island, Texas.

It made a big splash, Lagergren said, but sponsors lost interest when the recession hit.

Now they’re trying to rebuild interest in the game.

They hope to start with the Rageball leagues in Wichita at the Sports Forum and then in the spring push it out through intramural leagues at colleges and universities in the region. He hopes to go national later this year.

It won’t take the place of football, Lagergren said, but it might eventually become as popular as volleyball. He sees high school, college and, eventually, pro teams and television coverage.

“The reason it will go national is because of the love the kids have for the game,” he said. “I have never seen kids fall for a game as fast and as deeply.”

This story was originally published December 7, 2016 at 6:27 PM with the headline "It’s like dodgeball plus baseball – sort of. And there are ambushes.."