Support your local sport

I've been thinking about local sporting teams lately.

Following on from my fritterings in November about being more locally connected, my latent desire to support the sporting teams in my neighbourhood by occasionally watching them play has been growing.

I have this strange, half-formed concept of team-based sport as a sort of social glue.  A bit like the role being in a parish is supposed to play.  In theory everyone in a neighbourhood goes to the same church/chapel/rectory/what have you and, in doing so, we build a sense of "belonging to each other".  By coming together to regularly devote time and attention to the same thing, you build a sense of community and shared lives.

I think sporting clubs should, traditionally, do something similar for a community.  They provide this focal point that we can gather around in order to share something in common with the other people in our radius.  Some people might play for the team, others will be involved in various ways (coaches, volunteers, drivers), but there's also a role for people to just show up and watch.

To sit there, with other members of your community, and cheer on "the team" must do something for your connection to the people around you.  You might not know a soul on the team... at first.  I expect, after a while, you'll know a lot of people by name or sight.

You may actually get to know your neighbours, and form a network of people who might notice if someone dies - thus alleviating the growing problem of people's bodies being discovered some time after death (it's a thing:   Community groups call for system which prevents unnoticed deaths, a-lively-city-where-death-is-unnoticed).

It would probably make the people on the team feel pretty good, too.  You know, having people care about they're doing...

I don't know about you, but I'm not doing any of this.  I barely know what sporting teams are even in my neighbourhood, let alone go watch them play.

I'm not going to take the blame for this entirely, though.  If you're not actually playing sport (or related to someone who is), it's nigh impossible to find out when a game is on in time to go watch it.  The clubs themselves don't bother advertising at all.  Heck, nine times out of ten you can't even get that kind of information from their websites (if they have one).

I'm a librarian - I find information for a living.  If I have difficulty finding information about when and where a game is going to be held, then how likely is it that the other ordinary souls in the community will turn up to watch?

Ideally, the local newspapers would come to the rescue.  Once a week they would have a column somewhere between the classifieds and the sports section telling us what games are coming up on the weekend.  Then, anyone who has a "maybe I'll wander down to the park and watch that" moment would have the opportunity to do so.

As it is, my "local" newspaper barely even reports on the local competitions after the fact.  They devote most of the sports pages to what's happening at a national level.  I wonder if part of that is because my city has a few teams in those national competitions?  We have "local" teams competing at the national level, so maybe we can't be bothered lowering our gaze to follow what's happening in less lofty circles?

Many people in my city support those teams competing at the national level, and there is a sense in which the "big" teams bind us all together...  But I'm not convinced we're doing ourselves any favours by ignoring the grass-roots teams just because we have the "big boys" playing in town.

And, besides, my sucky newspaper can't even tell us when the big teams are playing half the time.  The other day they ran a story on a WNBL basketball match that was happening later in the week, and didn't feel the need to tell us when and where the game was going to be played (as previously noted, News Ltd journalists are bad at their jobs).

Maybe the local newspapers in smaller towns are more engaged in their local sporting teams?  I'd like to think so.

I'd also like to watch stuff, occasionally.  Surely it can't be that hard to find out when a game is going to be played in a park near me...?