More than 1,200 students, staff and faculty dipped, dodged and ducked at the University of Alberta Feb. 5 to break a Guinness World Record and make dodge ball history.

The event broke the record for the largest number of players in a dodge ball game.

The record was previously held by San Diego State University with 420 players in a game.

Resembling a scene from Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, participants gathered in the university’s Butterdome Universiade Pavilion to hurl red foam balls at their opponents. 

The players were divided into gold and green, the university’s colours, with matching T-shirts and headbands.

“I was really excited going into it. I knew we were either going to fail at the record attempt completely, or we were completely going to blow it out of the water,” said Brennan Murphy, external administrator of the Lister Dodge Ball League.

Murphy helped organize the event, which took approximately 100 volunteers and two months of planning.

The planning process included the co-ordination of the event’s contributors: the Lister Hall Student Association, the Students' Union, Lister Dodge ball League, dean of students and the Alumni Association.

According to Murphy, Lister, one of U of A’s student residences, has the biggest dodge ball team in North America. They came up with the idea for a world record attempt during a team meeting.

For Students' Union president Zach Fentiman who helped plan the event, the whole point was to bring the community together.

“We were really happy to connect with people and [with] a bunch of different community groups on campus. And that was really the whole point of the event . . . to connect,” he said.

Fentiman, a member of the winning gold team, described his favourite part of the battle.

“For me, it was essentially the one part where it was a wall of dodge balls coming right at us,” he said, explaining the fear of having close to 600 balls flying at you.

The event was a kickoff for a weekend fundraiser tournament. Money raised will go to KidSport, a national organization helping more children play organized sports by removing financial barriers.

Murphy said he thinks the tournament brought in roughly $20,000 for the organization.

Guinness World Records will officially recognize the new record once they examine the registration lists for participants at the event.