Hop Scotch Craze No Longer Sweeping the Nation

Bailey Elementary School (Bayonne, NJ)—The hop scotch phenomenon officially waned yesterday afternoon. People of all ages put down their chalk and walked off America’s playgrounds. A “lack of interest” is being cited as the number one cause of the pastime’s decline.

“It’s just not fun anymore,” a freckle-faced Timmy Buckles noted. “It used to be about getting to the last box, now it’s all about the money.”

Buckles, Bailey Elementary’s undisputed hop scotch champion, signaled the sport’s final deathknell when he refused to defend his title during recess last week.

Yesterday, he offered a farewell speech on the school grounds. The forlorn address hammered the final nail in the coffin. In the speech, Buckles thanked the countless fans and his family for the support and encouragement that made the sport “worth playing”, but not enough to outweigh the “negative influences” present in the sport’s highest levels.

The handwriting’s been on the wall for a while, experts say. The last engaging rivalry ended when Buckles forced a defeated, and subsequently devastated, Janie Pickins into retirement after last year’s thrilling “ Jumpster Near the Dumpster”.

Since then, no contender has posed a serious threat to the lukewarm, lackluster Buckles.

“Buckles, himself, was the last great Cinderella story,” 5 year-old color commentator Jimmy Ringles maintained.

When asked why such a fact matters, Ringles paused. He used his chubby forefinger to prop oversized glasses atop his oversized cheeks. “Hop Scotch, like any life metaphor, needs to offer hope, must promote the against-all-odds narrative. We sometimes forget that before Buckles was champion, he was a ‘nobody’, left-footed hopper from Bayonne’s impoverished East Side. He’s right to be upset about the game’s overcommercialization, but, in the process, he’s a Cinderella who’s turned into the pumpkin he rode in on.”

The prospects for a Buckle-like savior (for the sport) seem slim.

“The sport’s full of thugs now,” Gerry Cleese, a former fantasy hop scotch afficianado lamented. “Who wants to follow something that’s best left on the streets? I’m not interested in any of that.”

When reminded that hop scotch is, in fact, largely played “on the streets”, Cleese tearfully rebuked, “ Not the kind of streets I was used to.”