WILDWOOD – One of the city’s hidden gems is the National Marbles Tournament, held annually at Ringer Stadium since 1960. This year, Vincent Ruiz of Standing Stone, Tennessee, and Elise Peterson of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, were crowned the 2025 National Marble King and Queen, winning a shiny crown, trophy and a $2,000 college scholarship.
To get there, Ruiz and Peterson had to get through four days of intense marble dueling, from June 16 to 19, playing 55 games each and beating out 50 other players between 7 and 14 years of age for the top spots in the boys and girls divisions. There were 16 semifinalists, eight boys and eight girls, playing on the last day of the tournament.
Ruiz, in his finals match, beat out Nate Garcia of Philadelphia in a clean 8-0 sweep. Peterson, in her finals, defeated Annika Goyal, also of Allegheny County.
“Being a first-timer, it’s awesome to have won,” Ruiz said after his victory. “I’m just really happy to be champion now. Something to remember.”
This was Ruiz’s first year of competition. According to discussion at the tournament, Ruiz is entirely self-taught, having created his own Youtube channel last year named Vince Marbles, where he makes videos teaching viewers how to do trick shots and play the game, and where he presents his own innovative strategies.
When asked what he has to say to his viewers, Ruiz said, “Keep practicing, and they can win like me.” He also won awards for placing first in the preliminary boys division competition and for playing the most “sticks” in the competition. A “stick” is a term in marbles where the player wins the match by knocking the seven marbles needed to win out of the ring on the first turn.
According to Beri J. Fox, CEO of Marble King, the country’s last marbles production company, who had been watching each of the games closely, Ruiz was always the first to pick up his opponent’s shooting marble and hand it to them.
“Initiative, drive, determination. All the things it takes to win,” Fox said about Ruiz.
Peterson, after her win, told the Herald that she was excited during the match, although she knew “that there was a chance that she [Annika] could still win.”
She and Goyal had an intense match, going back and and forth. Peterson said she was excited to hang out with Goyal and her friends after everything was over.
Although Goyal was runner-up, to her parents her being in the finals was a very touching and emotional moment. Abhishek Goyal, her father, said that he and his wife used to play marbles as children in India.
“This game was very close to us,” he said. “It’s not like rugby or soccer or cricket … This is a convenience game. You can just get together a couple of people, and you’ll just play it, right? I grew up playing this game a totally different way, but now when I saw my daughter playing that game, that really makes a difference.”
Goyal is right; marbles is not like other sports. But the general decrease in popularity of the game does not invalidate the hard work and effort the young competitors devote to honing their skills.
The tournament is set against a shrinking marbles world.
Deborah Stanley-Lapic, national champion of 1973 and mother to the 2009 national champion, Whitney Lapic, attributed the lack in popularity of marbles to the rise of organized sports and kids playing multiple sports.
She said, “We train just like any other athlete. We do strengthening exercises, we do coordination with your eye and, trust me, it may not be the most vigorous, but getting up and down 150, 175 times a day? That’s tough.”
With only Marble King left to produce marbles, the sport is not nearly as popular as it used to be. Fox said that in the past decade, her other four competitors shut down, leaving her the only one remaining.
Ed Ricci, marble coach for Allegheny County, who inherited the marble spirit from his marble legend grandfather Walt Lease, said, “You can’t force a kid to play. But once they get a taste of this, they always want to come back. They’ll put the work in – put down the video games and the TikToks and actually practice.”
Leah Lee, a noted marble coach and author of “Pudgy Knuckles, A Mibster’s Story,” a book about her experience coaching marbles, said, “The fact that they even come here is going to change their life. It’s life-changing to be at the National Marbles Tournament, and they don’t know it until they’re your age or older what they got to experience.”
“As a coach, I have encouraged sportsmanship before winning, because I realized that coming out here took more sportsmanship than it did skill,” Lee added. “The kids that have the good attitudes and the sportsmanship play better. And they inspire others, and they’re the ones that can continue on in life learning a skill that is something they can use forever.”
The tournament is scheduled to be held next year from June 15 to 18.
