Around 3,600 years ago the Olmec people of Southern Mexico -- the mother civilization of the Americas -- gathered some of the sticky sap oozing from the many natural rubber trees growing along the gulf coast.

They mixed this gummy raw latex with other plant materials and created the first ever rubber ball.  Soon they invented a spectacular team ballsport well known to today’s youngsters from the DreamWorks Road to ElDorado movie.

During the following 150 generations a variety of games were played on some 1,300 different ballcourts by the Mayas, Aztecs and others, primarily by royalty, ranging from northern Arizona to Nicaragua.  Considered heretical, they were banned and suppressed by the Spanish Conquistadores in the 16^th Century.

We know of no unifying league that determined official rules, ballcourts and procedures for the various games.  It is likely that each locale and each generation’s kings or chieftains devised and played by their own set of rules.

Although cultural re-creations of some of these games are presented today in parts of Mexico, the great difficulties of those games and the hazards of playing on a stone-surface court makes serious competition too dangerous.

Now, we have respectfully derived two new games from this tradition as modern, safe, highly competitive and transformational athletic events, suitable for play by youths and adults, men and women and easily scalable to scholastic, collegiate, recreational, Olympic and professional club play:

Our ballcourt is designed as a completely modular and portable indoor/outdoor self-contained unit built of structural steel and fiberglass able to be transported on a single flat-bed truck and assembled in a day or so on any available flat level square acre, including a beach. 

Significantly, it will be the first truly competitive ballcourt to be built and played on anywhere in the world in the modern era and feature regular mixed-gender teams.

Pokatok^TM [POCK-uh-TOCK] is our portable ballsport field activity that allows up to 60 mixed-gender players at a time practice many of the ball-handling techniques that will be required to play Tlachbol.  The name is derived from a 19^th Century linguistic misreading of the Yucatec Maya name pok’ol’[ta] pok.