Is the ball going THROUGH your character, and not stopping?
If so, you must make the character and active body, instead of passive.
Also, in your solver settings, in order to get it to solve very quickly, you can scroll down to the "Stand-in" setting, and choose: CUBE.
This just makes for faster testing, and viewport previews to adjust your timing.
...not sure how it will work on an animated character, but it works for all of my dynamic explosion stuff
Israel "Izzy" Long
Motion and Title Design for Broadcast-Film-DS
izzylong.com