Category: real sports (Page 1 of 2)

Here I am, with your answers!

You don’t need to spend a lot or go very far to enjoy sports around Olympia. Not the best, but still pretty good competition isn’t very far off.

1. Your first stop is the Capital Stage Race. Or, just the most exciting stage, the Capital Criterium, a time trial like bike race around the capitol campus. This is a lightly attended event, but includes the best pro and semi-pro road racers in the region.

I specifically enjoy the criterium race. There’s a kids  race before the very best of the racers get going. Plus, the light crowds mean there are plenty of great places on the campus to watch.

2. Did you know Olympia has its own semi-pro baseball league? Well, they play out in Lacey, but the Puget Sound Collegiate League collects some of the best community and four year college players from across the west coast.

If you want to  catch the best of the best of this league, try to catch the Thurston County Senators. This team is a league all star team. They travel to tournaments after the bulk of league play, but they also are also taking on some other regional semi-pro teams, like the Kitsap Blue Jackets.

3. I can’t personally suggest the Thurston County Mayhem, but they’re a semi-pro football team and they’re kicking off at the end of this week.

4. Now, of an organization I wish was closer, but they really aren’t all that far away, South Sound FC is putting a team in the new Evergreen Premier League. They’re playing just outside of Thurston County in Lakewood, but at one point their indoor team played in Tumwater. So, they have some Olympia-area roots.

There’s no Olympia semi-pro soccer to speak of, so if you did support one team, South Sound FC would be the one.

I’ve spilled more than a few pixels in the last few weeks whining about how Olympia doesn’t have a real baseball or soccer stadium. I’ve presented options for $4 million stadiums.

But, you know, in the end, what I really want is one small $600,000 stadium to call my own.

I was down in the Portland area in the last few days, and I was able to take in a few innings of a Northwest Independent Baseball League (which I wrote about earlier here) game between the Portland Titans and Royals at Schavone Stadium. Schavone is a nice little park.

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Built in the early 1990s for what would today be $600,000, Sckavone sits on the site of an 1940s era wooden stadium with the same name.

Walking to the stadium through the park setting.

The joke of this is that if Portland had a baseball team…

Well no, that’s not the joke. The joke is that urbane Portlanders’ understanding of sport in general (and baseball in this case) is closer to that of theater or the arts than of actual baseball or sports.

Its also a slight nod in the direction of the off again, on again fascination some have had in Portland to bring a MLB team to Portland. Horrible idea, by the way, if you’re a Mariners fan. It might also be a nod to the city losing its minor league baseball team, in effect because the city went all in for soccer.

That said, it isn’t like there isn’t baseball already in Portland. Baseball in there in the form of not one, but two independent wood bat adult baseball leagues.

• The Northwest Independent Baseball League (awesome name, by the way) plays in two divisions across greater Portland and will be starting its fourth season this summer.
• The West Coast Collegiate League also has an outpost in Portland, with the WCL Portland. This is a similar set up to our own Puget Sound Collegiate League where a collection of teams play in one or two locations.

Now that it seems that Seattle will make a nice big push for the return of the NBA, I might as well put out under what conditions I will support the league coming back.

But, first, where I stand now. I’m fine with the NBA never coming back, ever.

What was exposed about the league after the Oklahoma City owners came in — how massive arenas need to be and how the league will work in concert against a community — tainted the entire organization for me. I like the sport, but I can watch the Huskies.

And, the NHL, well, I’d always liked the idea of the NHL in Seattle.

Anyway, that said, I would support a new Seattle Sonics if they followed in the spirit of the MLS Sounders and created a mechanism for fan involvement. The Alliance is no Supporters Trust, FC United of Manchester or Barcelona. But, it is also no Green Bay Packers, which get all the glory for being fan owned, but whose investors have no say at all in how the team is run, but do fork over cash to the ownership.

Secondly, I would support whoever ended up owning a the new NBA franchise if they sold stock in the team. Unlike the NFL, most of the other major leagues in North America allow for some sort of stock scheme, but NBA prevents any meaningful participation in the club by stockholders. So, while granted it would be no Bundesliga model towards real community and fan ownership.

Coupled with the first mechanism, fan stockholders (and a friendly team owner) in Seattle could lobby for a liberalization of stockholder involvement in professional team sports.

The facts for this piece mostly come from the very good article from the Northern Illinois Law School Review: “Considerations for Professional Sports Teams Contemplating Going Public.“