Ok, time to get serious about these rules and the situation. We need some more details if we're ever going to figure out a DECENT estimate here.
Let's assume:
- You start in the middle of the basketball court area.
- The kids start randomly surrounding you.
- The kids have NORMAL 5-year-old intelligence, organization, and retention of information and training. The training they receive would give them broad tactical ability, like "swarm him" or "go for the legs", or "bite".
- The kids have ABNORMAL response to seeing you kick other kid asses. They simply don't fear you at all.
- The kids have an ABNORMAL threshhold for pain. I don't like "zombie kids" because I think that's giving them a little too much credit. I imagine a very determined 5-year-old, with NO super-strength or pain resistance - let's assume an adult-fighting-for-life pain threshhold.
Now to reiterate - everyone is wearing normal clothes. You get a cup. First, let's "know the enemy":
http://www.umext.maine.edu/onlinepub...Years/4251.htm
"By 5 years of age, an average child is 43 ½ inches tall and weighs about 41 pounds. At 5 years of age, height can range from 40 to 47 inches and weight can range from 34 to 52 pounds."
Now reading all these posts, I think 30 is low if you have a decent enough strategy. A basketball court is plenty big - think of little kids playing kickball indoors or dodgeball or something - they would be fairly spread out to start. You can probably take out 5 or so before they get tightly grouped, and run around plucking them off. The real limitation becomes the size of the room, followed by exhaustion, but seriously, in a life-or-death sort of situation, I think it'd be very hard to lose against 30 without making a big mistake. People that are thinking 10 or fewer are obviously thinking of wrestling with little kids which is always an unfair situation - you're not trying to keep your distance, and they're not necessary trying not to hurt you, so occasionally you take a hit to the face or get smooshed or something. Imagine ugly green aliens with the same strength, speed, height and intelligence of 5 year olds and it's easier to imagine mopping up.
I would predict 50-60 for me, limited by the size of the room (the grabbing the leg tactic would eventually let them tip me I think, and there wouldn't be enough room to run). I think exhaustion wouldn't be such an issue at this level - you'd be winded but how long would this really take? 10 minutes absolute tops? More like 5. It would go very quickly once the clock started.
BTW, found this from waxy.org. Great thread.