One body, three codes, and the big ball

A line near the end of the rules in an archived copy of the United States Handball Association's four-wall book reads "Above rules amended June 20, l990," with a lowercase L where the year's first digit belongs. The copy is a page of cohandball.com that the Wayback Machine captured on 19 May 1998, and 20 June 1990 fell on a Wednesday. The line does not say who amended the rules. The page is the association's official book, which makes the USHA the likely amender, and its own site printed the line, typo and all, in 2001 and 2002. It is the earliest date on any USHA rules text I have transcribed. This chapter opens in 1978 only because a secondary web history says the USHA became the sole governing body in the United States that year; I have found no document for it. The association's magazine had printed a full set of four-wall rules as official in June 1972, with thanks to a Seattle drafter for the hours spent on its first official rules, so the 1990 text is the earliest one transcribed and not the earliest written.

The 1990 text has five parts of numbered rules, followed by numbered interpretations written by the association's rules and referees chairman. The 1999 text prints the same interpretations, and a word-level comparison made for this record finds the 1999 rules to be the 1990 rules revised. The heading of the 1990 page reads "Revised 1991" and adds one-wall and three-wall addendums, which may date the book and not the rules, since the four-wall rules inside it carry the June 1990 date. A library catalog record describes a 46-page USHA rulebook with interpretations and one-wall and three-wall addendums, printed in Tucson in 1991; I have not seen the book, and whether it is the printed form of this text is open. The one-wall rules had printings of their own. A questions-and-answers page on the USHA's site in 1997 says the one-wall book was republished in 1991 with a foot-fault word changed from EXTEND to TOUCH, to match the usual reading of the rule, and that the 1995 book put EXTEND back and dropped the permission to step on a line of the service zone, so that rules common to every form of handball would read alike. On the same page an unsigned answer says that the 1993 one-wall book lacked its rule on games postponed by weather, which must have been deleted by mistake from the latest printing.

The rules reached the web in pieces. The one-wall rules, headed 1995 and ending "Last amended 10/14/94," were on the USHA's site in a copy filed under 31 January 1997, with gloves compulsory and no exception for the big ball. The four-wall text amended on 31 January 1999 is read from a copy of 14 September 2000, and the text amended on 16 January 2005, published as of 15 April 2005, from copies made in 2006 and 2007. The 2005 text keeps the five parts and much of the wording of 1999 and moves the interpretations into the rules, so it reads as a revision, though no statement from the association says so. In what I hold, the three-wall rules appear only as an addendum of changes from the four-wall rules, in a PDF the USHA's site carried in January 2005 and in a web article of October 2007. A secondary page calls 2005 the year of the association's last complete rulebook; I hold no document that says so.

The present rulebooks are web pages. The four-wall and one-wall pages each call themselves the official published USHA rules as of 26 January 2025, say that changes are kept in the most recent board meeting minutes, and mark recent changes in green, a color that does not survive in the text I hold. The three-wall rules are an addendum on the four-wall page stating what it changes.

The association also kept a record of its championships, and the roll as now published shows what the 1980s add. On that roll no women's or girls' division appears before 1979; the junior nationals add girls' divisions in 1979, and 1980 brings a women's open title in the four-wall and three-wall sections and in the collegiates. Whether women played the earlier nationals unlisted the roll does not say. Four-wall lists a pro singles title from 1974, and three-wall from 1986 and one-wall from 1987 carry the same label in place of open singles, a change that may be the page editor's and not the association's. In 1997 the 47th national four-wall championships were held at the Michigan Athletic Club, and the roll lists East Lansing as the host in 1992 and 1997. In February 1998 a past president wrote to members, answering critics of the association's management, that income in 1997 had passed $1.1 million, $100,000 above 1996, and that the mortgage on the association's building would be paid off the next month after five years; the finances, he wrote, were "in the best condition of our 48 years of existence." The figures are the letter's own.

Avoidable hinder and dead-ball hinder are not new words. The four-wall rules amended in June 1990 and the one-wall rules last amended in October 1994 both use them: dead-ball hinders, which are replayed, in Rule 4.7, and avoidable hinders, which cost the offender a point or an out, in Rule 4.8. The avoidable call turns on whether reasonable effort would have prevented the hinder, and the 1990 text adds that the player's intent has no bearing. The A.A.U. code of 1931, as O'Connell printed it, had one hinder for unintentional interference, replayed, and a hinder done intentionally that decided the point against the offender; the code of 1920 had the same pair. The renaming therefore came between 1931 and 1990, and for the penalized hinder it changed the test as well as the name, from intent to avoidability, by the wording of the texts. No text from the years between is transcribed, so the transcriptions cannot date the change; the gap is measured and not inferred. The association's magazine of June 1972, which I read on its page images and have not transcribed, already prints both kinds in its four-wall rules, dead-ball hinders as Rule 4.10 and avoidable hinders as Rule 4.11, so the renaming looks older than 1972. One instruction did not change: the referee, in the words of 1990, "should be liberal" so as to discourage players from putting the ball where an opponent cannot see it in time, and the same instruction stands in the A.A.U. texts of 1920 and 1931 and in the USHA book of 2025.

The park game with the big blue ball has no source in this record before 1996. In that year, by its own site, the St. Albans Handball Association was formed as a not-for-profit volunteer group to bring recognition to handball through organized tournaments; a New York State registry lists a corporation of that name in Queens, incorporated in November 1999, though the match rests on the name and place. Its annual premier event is the King of the Courts tournament, whose champions list begins in 1998, while the association's Queen of the Courts list begins earlier, in 1996. The United States Wallball Association says on its site that it was founded in 2010, and federal tax records give a ruling date of July 2012. It put rules online in 2018: a page with a markup date of August 2018 and a code of conduct, with 24 numbered rules, and a second page, marked October 2018, with 25. The markup dates suggest the first is the older, which the association does not say. Both treat blocks, screens, keeping a short and downs, and neither states the court, the wall, the ball, scoring or game length, so they presuppose a game that players already know; their wording does not borrow from the USHA's one-wall book. One rule bars a disqualified player from tournaments of an N.Y.H.A., a body the text does not expand and that I have not identified; the 2026 revision drops the reference.

The USHA's own one-wall book admits the big ball. In the 2025 text gloves are optional exclusively in big-ball matches, though players must have gloves to hand and the referee may require them, and the ball rule lets white-label and big balls weigh less than the red-label standard. The one-wall text of 1994 has gloves compulsory and no such exception, so the exception arrived after 1994 and before 2025, and I cannot date it closer. The Confederación Internacional de Pelota a Mano, which its site says was founded in 1928, publishes wallball rules in English with a file date of March 2023. They give a court measuring 6.10 by 10.60 meters with a wall of 4.90, and matches of two sets of 21 with a tie set played to 11. The USHA one-wall court is 20 feet by 34 with a wall of 16, and the metric figures come to about 20 by 34.8 with a wall of 16.1; a wording comparison finds no derivation from earlier text, so the dimensions are the only link shown. A World Wallball Championships followed in New York City on 14 to 19 September 2026, hosted, by a USWA page that calls itself independent coverage, by the Inner City Handball Association with the World Handball Council and the USHA, whose roll lists the event with its 2026 nationals.

No American source written in the 1980s is in this record. The USHA's rulebooks for 1978 to 1989 are not captured, its magazine for 1973 to 2016 sits in a dark archive the project has not been able to read, and the American dated facts I use for the decade are labels on a championships roll read from a web page of 2026. The board minutes where the association says its rule changes are kept have not been captured either, so the changes between the dated texts of 1990, 1999 and 2005 cannot be itemized from the association's own record, and the printed book of 1991 is unseen. The big-ball game before 1996 has no source at all; the only accounts of its early years are the sites of the St. Albans and Wallball associations themselves. The Wallball association's rules for the years 2022 to 2026, and the event rules of King of the Courts from 1998 to 2025, are listed on those sites and not captured.

On Thursday, 22 October 2026, by the date under its rules heading, the United States Wallball Association revised its playing rules. The page, which I read five days later, lists 21 rules in place of 25 and gives each side three one-minute timeouts a game, where a text marked October 2018 allowed two. Its conduct principles close with a note that still leaves formats, officiating and penalties to each event's organizer, while the USHA's one-wall book fixes the court and lets the big ball in. The USHA's text has also traveled beyond its members: the Gaelic Athletic Association's one-wall rules of 2019 are USHA text, by a comparison the next chapter sets out.