Why no handball?

[Sport]

On 6/17/2017 at 6:08 PM, Chromatic said:

I like Lacrosse, but a big problem with watching it is it becomes very difficult to keep track of where the ball is. Some people complain about that in hockey, well Lacrosse is a hundred times worse.

 

You also have the issue in that the niche it fills is already taken up by two other sports. Field Lacrosse is a lot like soccer, as far as the dynamics of the game go, and soccer is the more popular sport. Box Lacrosse is like hockey, and hockey is the more popular sport there.

 

So I'd say the biggest issue is that its under the shadow of two different sports. I'm not sure if this is a factor as well, but Lacrosse also has something of a reputation in big parts of the US as being the sport for rich trust fund kiddies. I'm not saying thats a valid view, but I could see it putting some people off.

 

Yeah lacrosse is bad on TV because the ball literally disappears and if you're not trained on what to look for then it's hard to follow. That and you can only see half the players on the field at any one time, and the shots are so quick.

 

But my question was more rhetorical than anything else. Lacrosse is cheaper to play than hockey and it wouldn't surprise me if it's cheaper than baseball at this point, but you never hear about it if you don't know some high school kid or aren't paying attention that one weekend they play the NCAA final four on ESPN 2. It's like it's not a big deal because it's not a big deal. 

 

12 hours ago, 4_tattoos said:

I'm convinced there's an alternate universe where volleyball is part of the Big 5 North American major sports. I been wondering for years why that sport never became bigger than it is.

 

Every summer olympics I watch the hell out of the indoor men's volleyball and question why there isn't a huge professional league in the US. I even made concepts for an 8 team league after Rio that I never finished. It's much more exciting to me than Beach Volleyball, which seems to get more attention. There's goofy uncoordinated tall guys in the NBA that would absolutely be better suited for the straight up and down play of volleyball than they would for basketball, but there's no money in that sport. Not here anyways. 

[Jer15]

50 minutes ago, McCarthy said:

 

Yeah lacrosse is bad on TV because the ball literally disappears and if you're not trained on what to look for then it's hard to follow. That and you can only see half the players on the field at any one time, and the shots are so quick.

 

But my question was more rhetorical than anything else. Lacrosse is cheaper to play than hockey and it wouldn't surprise me if it's cheaper than baseball at this point, but you never hear about it if you don't know some high school kid or aren't paying attention that one weekend they play the NCAA final four on ESPN 2. It's like it's not a big deal because it's not a big deal. 

I assume you are speaking to field lacrosse? I can't really speak to field, I'm a huge box lacrosse fan but I never got into field.

 

Box lacrosse is not cheaper to play than basketball though, I play both (recreational) and lacrosse costs are comparable to hockey. 

[Sport]

Just now, mr.negative15 said:

I assume you are speaking to field lacrosse? I can't really speak to field, I'm a huge box lacrosse fan but I never got into field.

 

Box lacrosse is not cheaper to play than basketball though, I play both (recreational) and lacrosse costs are comparable to hockey. 

I was talking field lacrosse because to me that most closely resembles the origins of the sport and because that's what's played at high schools and universities here. Box lacrosse is cool, and it's basically its own sport, and I know it's been around a long time, but it feels like a watered down version of the real thing. I like watching the guys winging the ball all around a giant outdoor space. Just my preference. *shrug*
 

But my original reason for bringing it up was just to say ask why isn't it as popular as other professional sports? It has all the ingredients - cool uniforms, cool equipment, exciting games, good athletes etc etc. I think it just came too late after the others have already been long established and it's tough to break into this crowded on demand entertainment landscape. 

[Gothamite]

2 minutes ago, McCarthy said:

But my original reason for bringing it up was just to say ask why isn't it as popular as other professional sports? It has all the ingredients - cool uniforms, cool equipment, exciting games, good athletes etc etc. I think it just came too late after the others have already been long established and it's tough to break into this crowded on demand entertainment landscape. 

 

I think you're absolutely right there.  It's really hard for a new sport to break through into this crowded marketplace.  We've seen that with soccer, and that sport has the weight of the entire world behind it.

[Jer15]

8 minutes ago, McCarthy said:

I was talking field lacrosse because to me that most closely resembles the origins of the sport and because that's what's played at high schools and universities here. Box lacrosse is cool, and it's basically its own sport, and I know it's been around a long time, but it feels like a watered down version of the real thing. I like watching the guys winging the ball all around a giant outdoor space. Just my preference. *shrug*
 

But my original reason for bringing it up was just to say ask why isn't it as popular as other professional sports? It has all the ingredients - cool uniforms, cool equipment, exciting games, good athletes etc etc. I think it just came too late after the others have already been long established and it's tough to break into this crowded on demand entertainment landscape. 

 

Gotcha! Yeah man, I get it. To be honest I don't even know why I never took to field lacrosse. I tried, when Toronto had an MLL team I went and I just couldn't get into. 

 

I agree though it is tough to break in, especially in a city like Toronto (sticking to the Nationals as an example) when there are so many entertainment options and not just sport. 

[Sport]

5 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

 

I think you're absolutely right there.  It's really hard for a new sport to break through into this crowded marketplace.  We've seen that with soccer, and that sport has the weight of the entire world behind it.

 

1 minute ago, mr.negative15 said:

 

Gotcha! Yeah man, I get it. To be honest I don't even know why I never took to field lacrosse. I tried, when Toronto had an MLL team I went and I just couldn't get into. 

 

I agree though it is tough to break in, especially in a city like Toronto (sticking to the Nationals as an example) when there are so many entertainment options and not just sport. 

 

Staying on MLL I think what they should do is niche themselves in middle-sized lacrosse heavy markets that don't have as much going on as larger markets. LA and San Francisco and Chicago were failures for the league because there's so much for people to do there and lacrosse is entertainment option number 1,043. The Denver Outlaws feel successful to this point and DU's rise to NCAA powerhouse has had a lot to do with that I'm sure, but otherwise I'd stick to the northeast and avoid the Atlanta and Florida markets they've expanded to. Basically keep the league small so talent isn't spread too thin, keep travel costs low, and keep it where the sport is played for now. When the time is right then you can increase the league's footprint. 

 

I don't know why MLL didn't work in Toronto or Hamilton. Maybe it's because Box Lacrosse is the more popular form there? Maybe it's because Toronto just has so much else going on? Who knows. 

[Jer15]

15 minutes ago, McCarthy said:

Staying on MLL I think what they should do is niche themselves in middle-sized lacrosse heavy markets that don't have as much going on as larger markets. LA and San Francisco and Chicago were failures for the league because there's so much for people to do there and lacrosse is entertainment option number 1,043. The Denver Outlaws feel successful to this point and DU's rise to NCAA powerhouse has had a lot to do with that I'm sure, but otherwise I'd stick to the northeast and avoid the Atlanta and Florida markets they've expanded to. Basically keep the league small so talent isn't spread too thin, keep travel costs low, and keep it where the sport is played for now. When the time is right then you can increase the league's footprint. 

 

I don't know why MLL didn't work in Toronto or Hamilton. Maybe it's because Box Lacrosse is the more popular form there? Maybe it's because Toronto just has so much else going on? Who knows. 

 

I agree, MLL needs to keep keep it small and focus on those "traditional markets" for the sport.

 

Honestly Toronto/Hamilton games were scarcely populated no matter where they played (like I said, I went to a few games) but they certainly didn't add to the game day experience. In a nutshell it was; walk into an almost empty stadium and just watch. Granted the teams were talented but it felt like going to see a rec league. 

[raysox]

3 hours ago, Gothamite said:

 

I think you're absolutely right there.  It's really hard for a new sport to break through into this crowded marketplace.  We've seen that with soccer, and that sport has the weight of the entire world behind it.

Yeah that's why Yakball died out

[Sport]

On 6/17/2017 at 11:10 PM, the admiral said:

You know what's a weird sport? Real tennis. I cannot figure that one out for the life of me.

I'd never heard of this before. Bizarre. It's like racquetball, but they're on opposite sides of a net and there's a roof you can play the ball off of.  Who invented this? Me? 

 

 

[The_Admiral]

If anyone else has Jethro Tull's landmark album Thick as a Brick, there's a section in the "newspaper" about a game called fennel. To my chagrin, it turns out not to exist, but real tennis terms like "hazard chase" and "One Yard Worse Than Last" are just as convolutedly Anglo-Norman as fennel was.

[4_tattoos]

7 hours ago, McCarthy said:

Every summer olympics I watch the hell out of the indoor men's volleyball and question why there isn't a huge professional league in the US. I even made concepts for an 8 team league after Rio that I never finished. It's much more exciting to me than Beach Volleyball, which seems to get more attention. There's goofy uncoordinated tall guys in the NBA that would absolutely be better suited for the straight up and down play of volleyball than they would for basketball, but there's no money in that sport. Not here anyways. 

I'll watch men's volleyball if nothing else is on but I'm a bigger fan of women's volleyball. One day after football practice in high school I needed to kill time until the after school activity bus arrived. Figured I might as well watch the girls on the volleyball team jump around for a while (9th grade self thinking). To my surprise I was actually drawn to the game. In a weird way it was like a combination of basketball and tennis to me. Ended up going to most of the home volleyball games throughout my high school years. Would pretty much just be me and the volleyball player's parents in the stands. Honestly didn't know men's volleyball existed until I randomly tuned in to the 2004 Olympics one day. Due to the little knowledge I had at the time, I thought volleyball was a "women's/girls' sport" Nonetheless women's volleyball is one of my legit favorite things to watch.

 

I actually had an 18 team women's pro volleyball league concept about 10 years ago. All I remember about my little fantasy league now was that it had 3 geographic divisions and I named one of the team the Minnesota Hammers.

[Needschat]

A good supposition novella would be "What If Naismith created Handball, not basketball?"  

[smzimbabwe]

After watching this, and seeing a prior comment, it suddenly occurred to me that we did play this on rainy days during gym in 6th-8th grade. The teacher insisted he made it up and called it "Wallyball" (his name was Wally), but now that I think of it, it was basically the same, and played indoors on rainy days. When I got to high school, the sport played inside was volleyball, which I hate playing with a passion.

[sc49erfan15]

8 hours ago, the admiral said:

 real tennis terms like "hazard chase" and "One Yard Worse Than Last" are just as convolutedly Anglo-Norman as fennel was.

 

Duuuuude, I found "real tennis" on a Wikipedia train once too, pretty much had the same reaction you did.

 

This is real-life Calvinball. The court diagram makes about as much sense as the pre-decimal pound sterling. British AF.

[The_Admiral]

I love to lay a hazard chase from the door to the dedans penthouse. Mind the tambour!

[sc49erfan15]

2 minutes ago, the admiral said:

I love to lay a hazard chase from the door to the dedans penthouse. Mind the tambour!

 

Hit the grille and win a cheeky Nando's!

[The_Admiral]

Who else had a "multi-purpose room" in their school? Ours was a gym that had been carpeted. It was the kind of room where you'd find tennis balls and racquets and more or less "invent" this game, complete with a byzantine scoring system based on stuff stuck to the walls, and then when the teacher asks what the hell you're doing and where you found that stuff, you say "we're playing room tennis" and then you whack a ball against the wall and it takes a funny bounce and hits some kid in the head and then you get yelled at and miss recess.

[sc49erfan15]

Our high school had 3 gyms - the "old gym," the "new gym," and the "mini gym." The "mini gym" was the one only used for wrestling practice and when the other 2 gyms were occupied - that one's where the shenanigans went down. It hadn't been renovated since 'Nam and smelled like pre-MRSA scare wrestling practice mats. The basketball goals had those pre-snapback rims (don't know how the backboards survived, the few dudes that could dunk would actively try to go all Darryl Dawkins on 'em) made out of that thick-ass iron that made shooting more impossible than those "One In Wins!" carnival games.

 

When gym class didn't consist of "go play basketball and don't kill anyone" (which was only like 5% of the time), stuff like floor hockey happened - and when you're one of two sophomores in a class full of seniors, you have to be the floor hockey goalie when it's played with a hard rubber ball and no helmets. How did we not die?

Also, why am I reminiscing about high school gym class at 1:15 am?

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Is this the thread where we talk about Jai-alai?

[sc49erfan15]

1 minute ago, DG_Now said:

Is this the thread where we talk about Jai-alai?

 

Ha, I had to explain jai-alai to confused fellow groomsmen at a wedding I was in 2 weeks ago. Part of the best man speech was to poke fun at the groom, who works in sports information and always has some random sporting event streaming (he's somehow gotten really into watching darts?). The best man was to say how hard it was to actually get the groom to commit to plans, and each groomsman would chime in with "I dunno man, the (insert obscure sport) is on!"  ...I wanted to say jai-alai, but only 2 of the groomsmen knew what it was ("the one where they wear the banana-looking gloves on their hands" only got more confused looks) and I didn't want the joke to fall flat. I went with "South American badminton championships" or something.

 

Anyway, I'm sure you've seen this, but I thought it was pretty good: