Jim Foyle doesn’t recall 2013 as a good one, but it was a year he decided to make a difference.
After making the decision to move into retirement living at Cornubia, his wife Caroline was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and later in the year discovered she also had breast cancer.
Keen to rock ‘n roll, the couple attended the resort’s new year’s eve dance, where Mr Foyle noticed a man with two walking sticks trying to dance.
Mr Foyle realised those with restricted mobility could not participate in many mainstream activities, so he resolved to create a mobile game that most residents could play.
He calls the game ‘Stymie’ and it’s a game of skill and concentration where the aim is to hit a coloured puck onto a white puck, then eventually hit the white puck into your team’s goal posts.
It took Mr Foyle several months to come to fruition, but ‘Stymie’ was first played at their resort in June 2014 and Infinite Care Cornubia is the only other place in the world who has had the privilege of playing.
Stymie is originally a golfing term, denoting a situation on the green where a ball obstructs the shot of another player. He used it to name the game as it was a, “reasonable descriptor for part of a player’s strategy of preventing the opposition scoring a goal.”
Mr Foyle says he would be happy to see it more widely played and be the mentor for anyone wishing to produce a set of equipment. He also has an outdoor version called Skewball and as the name suggests, it uses balls instead of plastic discs.
Unlike Stymie, Skewball needs nothing more than a patch of short grass as the playing surface and can even be played in the local park.
