Voices: How Friendships Coalesce Over Air Hockey at Boxcar Raleigh

At one bar in downtown Raleigh, people get really into geometry. But not in the way you would think.

Show up at Boxcar Raleigh on a Monday night, and you’ll see a lively crowd amidst the beeping lights and beers on tap. People mill around and there’s a general pull of focus towards the center. Look closer and you’ll see that everyone is crowded around the two air hockey tables.

Sign-ups end at 8 p.m. for the weekly air hockey tournament, and often the ‘Beginners’ bracket is maxed out at 20 participants. People bring customized mallets in bright colors, decorated with novelty stickers. Some are wearing fingerless gloves. Going up to bat at each match, they bounce on their toes and hype themselves up. 

Watching two people play against each other, you see their focus flit around so fast it’s hard to keep up. It’s not an impulsive or reactionary guessing game. There are tactics to the angling of their shots and the way they retrieve the puck. Often you’ll see players bouncing the puck perpendicular against the wall to still it, cornering the puck away from the goal when an opponent misfires, or drawing a square around the puck with their mallet in order to center and aim it.

You might think, “Wow, I guess people here are just really into air hockey.” But little would you know that Raleigh actually hosts the largest air hockey community in the world. It is so remarkable that a two-time world champion actually moved from Ireland to Raleigh after visiting for an air hockey tournament.

Raleigh’s success owes a lot to the weekly organizers, Cam and his partner, Kaye.  A friend introduced the two to air hockey in 2019 and they kept playing until the competitive fervor really started surfacing in 2022. Cam soon started working for Raleigh’s Boxcar Bar + Arcade with the goal of eventually facilitating tournaments. Formerly just an add-on task to a bartender’s list of responsibilities, when Cam went to work full-time as an engineer, the opportunity came to take on the tournament responsibilities as a weekly nighttime gig. Boxcar has supported the air hockey tournaments by providing tokens for free use of the air hockey tables and paying Cam to organize the event.

Before Cam and Kaye came onto the scene, Kurt Zehnder, the godfather of air hockey in North Carolina, was a cultural mainstay. Kurt went to the World Championships in Houston, Texas and brought back what he learned. He started by ranking around 22 players, and the scene in Raleigh has grown to around 80 ranked players. Cam and Kurt both sit on the U.S. Air Hockey Association, the sport’s national governing body. The Boxcar Raleigh tournaments are split into three different levels: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. Once you win your level, you have to win again with a one-point handicap—then, you can advance to the next level. In charge of getting three different concurrent competitions running efficiently, Cam and Kaye enter everyone who signs up into a bracketing system. By now, they estimate to know around 200 people by face and name just from the tournaments.

The rankings are serious. Everyone claims a spot on the roster each year by competing at a championship. From there, people can challenge each other for their rankings. In order to oust a fellow player, you have to win four of seven sets. To win a set, you have to win four out of seven games. So, that’s 49 chances to win at least 16 times. If the lower ranked player wins the challenge, they take the higher rank and everyone else in between moves down a rank.

Last year, Cam was director for the North Carolina State Tournament, hosted in Durham. A bunch of Boxcar weekly regulars rented an Airbnb and made a retreat out of it. There were 91 participants playing over the course of three days, comparable to the World’s Tournament, with about 100-110 players that come from as far away as Ireland, Argentina, and Russia.

Within Raleigh’s crowd, we have the No. 3 ranked player in the world. This year, Raleigh sent 20 players to Houston for World’s, and 10 finished in the top 64 out of 128, with three players finishing in the Top 30. Overall, Raleigh boasts 12 of the top 60 players in the world. And all of these top ranked players were built from Boxcar’s simple Monday nights.

Kaye says she came into the scene with a desire to create a space that felt more like a community. She wanted there to be an atmosphere where it wasn’t weird to talk about air hockey technique and strategy, where it was okay to get really into an arcade game. Cam says air hockey offers an outlet for anyone who might have played a sport in the past, now looking for that familiar competitive rush without risk of injury. Additionally, the playing field is equal among different ages and genders and physicalities; it’s a game of quick wit and coordination. People in the community have started leading training sessions. One player who owns his own gym has bought a few tables for common use. Soon to come is a schedule where a top 15-ranked player routinely offers lessons on trick shots and good defense.

I ask Cam and Kaye why Raleigh’s space has grown so much more than everywhere else. They think it’s the combination of college town and yuppie transplants that Raleigh is home to, so people are open to trying anything new as long as it’s something to do, especially on a Monday night. The players who show up every week comprise a diverse crowd with every race, gender, sexuality, and walk of life represented. There’s a successful architect, an owner of multiple gyms, strippers, hair stylists, chefs, engineers, and students. You have players in their 50s and players who are completely broke.

Air hockey also offers a low barrier to entry. You can practice for free at the Boxcar tournaments, or you can buy a used table off of Facebook Marketplace for $200 to have more time to practice. Around 20 of the regulars in Raleigh have their own tables at home, and almost nobody has paid more than a thousand dollars for theirs.

The game of air hockey isn’t about who gets the most points. It’s a race. Anyone hitting a puck will inevitably score seven points at some point. The trick is to stall your opponent and beat them to it. “You might think there can’t be tension in air hockey,” Cam says, “but when you get to 6-6, it’s truly anyone’s game.”

That’s why more than 20 players have a tattoo of “7-6” in the digital air hockey scoring font, Kurt Zehnder’s own design. Cam and Kaye got theirs together in 2022 when they went to their first World Championship.

The day of their tournament just so happened to be their seven-year anniversary.

Correction: An earlier version of this web story misspelled Kurt Zehnder’s last name. It has been corrected.

Elim Lee is a Georgia peach who took a detour in New England and came back to her roots in the South this past year. Her least-in-progress, most-finished project is her children’s book Needle and the Too Big World. Follow her on Twitter at
@wellwhatgives and Instagram at
@elimscribbles.

Comment on this story at [email protected].

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