With an NIT appearance short enough that we might one day be able to forget it ever happened, Georgetown’s biggest campus-wide, sports-related activity is over for the year.

Sure, we all could, and maybe even should, rally behind the baseball or lacrosse teams. But the unfortunate truth is that we won’t, and sports gatherings on campus will be pretty limited until the optimism and promise of Midnight Madness rolls around next fall.

If only dunking in warm-ups and center-court dancing somehow correlated with conference wins and team chemistry.

Sadly, with another Georgetown basketball season over, sleeveless student section shirts and body paint will be tossed into closets, and Jack the Bulldog will have to find some cardboard supplement to endure the long, hard summer.

However, depressing as this may be for many students, the rebirth that is spring is right around the corner, and while the 40-degree weather and cloudy skies may say otherwise, it’s time for us all to move athletic endeavors from the Verizon Center to the front lawns and backyards of Georgetown.

With Georgetown Day on the way and hopefully countless afternoons of warm and sunny weather ahead of us, Georgetown students can put the cold, sad basketball season behind us, and finish the year by adopting the newest lawn game to sweep the nation: Kan-Jam.

How this sensational sport is not already a worldwide sensation, I do not know. Kan-Jam is an easy-to-learn lawn game that combines the muscle-memory focused, nerd-accessible ease of Frisbee throwing with the testosterone and violence of the slam dunk.

Basically, teams of two face off with one member of each team standing at each of the two short, open-faced “Kans” made of plastic that sit about 30 feet apart. The game goes in rounds, with each player getting one chance to throw a Frisbee from behind one Kan to the other well enough for his or her partner to “Jam” it into the top of the Kan with a powerful slap of the hand.

If your partner is able to hit your toss into the side of his Kan, it’s worth one point. A direct hit by the throw is worth two points, and the much-coveted Kan-Jam through the top is worth three big ones. The first to 21 wins, and the team who went second has the chance for a rebuttal.

The most exciting part of Kan-Jam is the small slot cut in the front of the Kan that serves as the “Instant Win” slot. No matter how much you are losing by, a seemingly impossible toss into this slot guarantees automatic victory. There is nothing worse than getting “instant-winned” by the other team, but hitting one is close to the top of the list of athletic accomplishments available to us lesser athletes incapable of massive dunks or home runs.

If you must incorporate drinking, it doesn’t take a whole lot of creativity to make the link, but easily the best part about Kan-Jam is just how easy it is to learn and play. It takes little or no previous skills, and the games move relatively quickly so a winner-stays format can get even large numbers of people playing pretty frequently in an afternoon of fun.

Easy instructions and a better fleshing out of the rules can be found online, but I would recommend the $40 investment of buying pre-made Kans and a disk at www.KanJam.com.

It’s quite possibly the best lawn game I have ever played, and after three summers of killing time working at a summer camp, I know my yard sports.

So learn the rules and get the equipment. This game is going to take the college world by storm and you can’t blame me when you’re the only guy or girl on Healy Lawn without a partner. For you alumni readers out there, Kan-Jam is safe for older people too, and I’d suggest taking a break from playing squash with the boss to learn the game all the kids will be talking about.

Sure it’s disappointing that we won’t get to see Greg Monroe throwing one down in front of millions in April, but the Kan-Jam World Championships are only four months away. If we get people to spend enough time practicing, then maybe Georgetown can take home a 2009 championship after all. It’s certainly no Final Four victory, but at this point, I’ll take anything we can get.

Jamie Leader is a senior in the College and can be reached at leaderthehoya.com. He hosts the sports radio show “Tournament Edition” on Georgetown Radio every Monday from noon to 2 p.m. FOLLOW THE LEADER appears in every other Friday issue of HOYA SPORTS.

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