The NASA Stickball Tournament kicks off with the first game at 9 a.m. Saturday and will culminate in the championship game at 6:30 p.m. at the University Recreation fields.

Indigenous peoples have been playing stickball for hundreds of years, and every summer since 1975, teams have competed in Mississippi to become champion of perhaps the oldest game in North America.

The study, published in the journal, Antiquity, confirms that the inscriptions document a ceremonial stickball game played in April 1828. Stickball, often labeled as the Cherokee version of ...