Chris Ruder is the founder of the company Spikeball Inc., which popularized the game of spikeball. The game of spikeball was originally invented in 1989 by Jeff Knurek. Jeff Knurek was a toymaker from America, but  he did not patent spikeball, and it was not very popular. Spikeball is a game where a small net-covered trampoline is used by players to bounce the ball off the net towards their opponents. Spikeball is a really fun game and I have played it since middle school.

Chris Ruder bought a spikeball set and played it when he was growing up. In 2007, Ruder and five friends pooled $100,000 and decided to start Spikeball Inc. Ruder purchased the rights to the spikeball product and paid a manufacturer in China to produce the spikeball sets. Ruder was employed at Microsoft during the creation of Spikeball Inc., so he had to all the work on it in his spare time. However, in 2013, Spikeball Inc. had become so successful that Ruder left his job and worked on Spikeball Inc. full time. In 2013, Dick’s Sporting Goods contacted Ruder and asked him to let them sell Spikeball equipment at their stores. Big 5 and Modell’s Sporting Goods, two other sporting goods companies, followed suit and asked Ruder to allow them to sell Spikeball sets at their stores. In 2014, the government granted Spikeball Inc. a patent. In 2017, Spikeball Inc stated that they earned $15 million per year in sales of the spikeball sets.

I find Ruder’s story very cool because he did not invent the spikeball game himself, but took an idea that already existed and made improvements on it to make it successful. Spikeball could have remained a very niche game that a toymaker invented, but Ruder’s efforts absolutely exploded the popularity of Spikeball throughout America. I guarantee every college campus has at least one person with a spikeball set, and tons of families have sets.