Via Priceonomics, How Dodgeball Became America’s Most Demonized Sport:
…the game was brought to the United States by an observant (but non-participating) missionary in the late 1800s. Rocks were supposedly substituted for “broken house-bricks,” and the game became known as “deathbrick.” During the game’s “golden age” from 1910 to the late 1920s, it was adapted as a sport at Princeton and Yale, and a “National Deathbrick League” was instituted. According to the questionable source, deathbrick is “alive and well today:”
BRB; selling my worldly possessions to journey across the country, apprentice myself to a master deathbrick player, and rise through the ranks to become the best ‘bricker the world has ever seen.