This study reports on four school-age boys' use of the specialized register of sportscasting as performed both spontaneously and when elicited by the researcher, and compares the boys' production of formal register-marking features to adult usage. Like the commentary of professional sportscasters, the boys' commentating is characterized by heavy use of simple-present action verbs, use of constructions lacking elements that are ordinarily grammatically required (the subject pronoun he, an auxiliary verb, or a main verb), and (in the elicited version) frequent occurrence of passives. The boys invest the most ‘ungram-matical’ utterance types (those lacking finite verbs) with a function that is not clearly present in adult sportscasting discourse, that of pointing forward in the discourse.