I'm pretty sure that at most professional sports venues there is a secret luxury box filled with billionaires making large payments to decide the winners! kidding!
Not much of a golf fan, I occasionally have to play for work and can just about get around a course without humiliating myself (and never without a hip flask of Scotch), but I do love the Ryder Cup.
After Europe smashed it the first two days, USA threatened an upset today but in the end couldn't overcome the insurmountable challenge they set themselves through being so behind after Friday and Saturday.
On more grassroots level, my daughter's Basketball team kicked off her under 14s girls national league season with a 68-16 victory. It was a game they were expected to win, with tougher challenges to come, but they showed a lot of tenacity against a spirited opposition.
Last year they finished third in their conference and made it to the playoffs (not expected) but lost in the first round. They have a better team this year and I think they've got a good chance to finish top two and maybe go a game or two further in the postseason. They won't win it, they are a little community club and some teams in the competition are academy setups and train 2-3 times a week with paid coaches.
My boy started his U12 regional campaign yesterday, beating a brand new team 80-12. It was a total mismatch as the score suggests, but the new guys have to start somewhere.
I'm not a golf guy either. I may tune in to the occasional celebrity match or something like that, but otherwise its just something I watch for 20 minutes when it goes long on TV and I'm waiting for the channel to switch over to racing or something else.
Congrats to your kids! Always glad to hear about active children.
My youngest nephew is the only family still in school. He's a hell of a swimmer. His parents also took custody of one of his friends who was neglected by his own mother. He's since joined the diving team.
We've always insisted our kids play at least one sport. My eldest only plays Basketball, but she trains four times a week and has a match most weekends.
My son and younger daughter both play Football (soccer) and Basketball. I suspect as he gets older, my boy will focus more on his basketball as he's better at that. Not sure which way my youngest daughter will go, as she is very inspired by watching the recent success of the England Women's soccer team, so she might go more that way.
I'm a qualified Football (soccer) coach, I run my boy's team and may end up running my daughter's team too.
I was asked to coach Cross Country at local high schools on more than one occasion because I was already managing the local running club. I turned them down. I was training hard for ultra marathons at the time and it would have been a conflict.
You get paid for that stuff over there don't you? I was chatting to an American couple at Disney World last month and they were saying how expensive it was to play sports (they were Florida based) as everything was a professional setup. Over here, the vast majority of grassroots stuff is volunteer-run and in schools the PE teachers are expected to run the sports teams alongside their normal teaching roles.
The one things work in the USA can be quite different from place to place. We're pretty low income, rural out here. As far as school teams go, for youth sports its by and large volunteer. At the high school level head coaches often get limited pay from the school districts, but certainly not enough to make coaching a fulltime job, so in many cases the coaches are also teachers. When I was in school it was also always free to participate, though increasingly schools are resorting to fees in order to fill budget gaps. Its quite sad that its come to this in my opinion.
For some sports at certain levels there are also non-school affiliated or private leagues that support themselves with fees.
