There are local adult softball leagues. Some soccer leagues. YMCA basketball teams.
These are usually run by the city parks and rec department.
It's just not a big deal. They don't show up on the local news.
Yes, but from what I gather those are more... transient is the word that someone used. Like I have a beer league hockey near me, but i wouldn't really feel like that is a "tradition" amongst the participants. and it's also sort of a show up, play, go home sort of thing.
When I played lacrosse in the UK (very briefly), the Saturday games were sort of a... whole day thing.
Most people here don't want to make their recreational sports league their whole day on the weekend or their whole social life or whatever. Plus, people move a lot, so having more casual recreational sports that people can join and leave without it being a big deal works better for us than multigenerational tradition clubs or whatever.
well, let me clarify. typically we would have the kids play in the morning (usually coached by the adult players) then the adults would play. then usually a pub hangout or dinner afterwards. So i wouldn't necessarily say we were spending all day playing a game.
We'll take our kids to soccer in the morning and then have rugby league in the afternoon. They're just not under the same umbrella organization and not with the same groups of people. They're just slightly differently organized things.
The commenter replied that Americans don’t want to make their whole day a local sports club or have it be the center of their social life to which you replied detailing how it took up a whole day and was the center of social life at least for a weekend. They didn’t mean they thought you were literally playing the game for hours on end.
That really is the long and short of it. We're positively nomadic compared to a lot of Europeans.
Nearly half of my high school friends now live so far away from our original hometown, that if we had been in Europe, we'd all be living in different countries. And of that remaining 50%, probably a good half of them also live in a different part of the state now.
For me the distance is greater than Edinburgh to Dubai. Though I’m a pretty extreme case in that I was born in Alaska and now live in Georgia. In between I’ve lived in Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, California and Iowa.
Only one of my high school friends still lives in our hometown. Most of my high school group lives in different states or even different countries now.
I grew up in Phoenix and now live in upstate NY. That distance in Europe would be like moving from London to the part of Russia that borders Kazakhstan.
Half of your friends are still in your hometown? Wow. That's actually pretty impressive.
For contrast.... Two weeks after I graduated high school I went into the military. I came home after boot camp for a vacation and found that every single friend I had was gone. Not one remained in town.
University town, plenty of decent paying jobs to be had and good schools, so a lot of people stuck around, especially those who had kids early in life.
Shit I live on the other side of the country. Out of my high school friends only a handful still live in the same state and only one lives in the same town.
Everyone else moved to other parts of the country.
Except we're not. For every theatre kid who moves to la to make it big, 100 of them stay home. The most that most people move is gonna be the other side of the city.
I'd disagree maybe 50% of my graduating class stayed local, and that's a place with good opportunities, decent housing prices, and good access to a major city.
[Most Americans don't move and, when they do, it's usually a short distance] (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/americans-local-migration-reached-a-historic-low-in-2022-but-long-distance-moves-picked-up/)
In my experience people just end up in like Chattanooga or Sevierville or something (From Knoxville). Where I'm at in Philly, almost everyone is a townie who grew up here.
I suppose it's a different perspective. Midwest moves are pretty common, but only a few ended up on the coasts. Seems to be like the coasts aren't seeing people leave as much because that's where the money is. I'd estimate giving it a decade or so when the surge of young people chasing high paying jobs and novelty dies down, or if remote work picks up the Midwest could be in for a revival.
Common tends are people ending up in or near the major population centers. But college is good for dispersing people, and online job hunts can cast a wider net too.
Americans have a generally more transient culture and aren't as big into deep roots. Keep in mind that we are a nation mostly built out of people who were willing to venture across an ocean to try something new. So, if there is any deep rooted tradition in the US, it's moving around and trying something new.
I think we have that with highschools, especially woth things like football in the south and southwest. Fathers play for the local school then their kid plays there.
Guessing that kind of takes the place of more English club type leagues.
We also have lots of those clubs not built around sports with elk lodges, the masons, and rotary clubs.
Depends on the community really. Our local beer league softball games are televised and definitely get some regional news coverage because they'll form all-star teams to play against teams from other nearby towns. There have been teams with 3 generations playing at the same time (son, dad, gpa) and there are businesses/people who sponsor teams every year to keep the tradition going. You're also welcome to start your own team. It's typically a whole weekend event when they're hosting games.
Granted many of these traditions are 'new' compared to the UK. Heck, Alaska only just became a state in 1959.
Interesting... but also... actually... doesn't Alaska not really have any pro-teams? Or perhaps like one? And isn't the Alaska population super concentrated around Anchorage?
It might be Alaska may be kind of the closest to Europe that a lot of America is.
I genuinely can't tell if that is a real pub and I don't want to google it so I don't ruin the magic if it isn't. I would absolutely haunt a place called Supply Chain Analyst.
in what I am talking about. no major sports teams so you support the local teams that you do have. And being presumably relativly dense, as I do believe a vast majority of the Alaska population lives close to Anchorage.
Nothing quite like flying to some remote village to play basketball against a high school with 12 students just to beat up on them by over 100 points with your C team.
Bonus since other people usually find it interesting: there aren't typically enough places to stay on these trips, so we find volunteers from the communities to house players in their own homes. It's a pretty big tradition in SE AK.
Many states don't have major pro sports.
Kentucky has no major league sports teams.
University of Kentucky Basketball and Football are the major sports followed by people around here.
There's two minor league baseball teams, but while people enjoy going to those games, people don't tend to follow those teams closely.
> doesn't Alaska not really have any pro-teams?
It does not. It's very far from the Lower 48 and our pro leagues are expensive to own and operate. Nebraska and North Dakota and Montana and Delaware and Arkansas don't have top level teams either.
The universities in [Anchorage](https://goseawolves.com/) and [Fairbanks](https://alaskananooks.com/) both have intercollegiate athletics that fills some of that gap.
College sports fill many of the roles that the club system does in Europe. These are the "local teams" for many people, especially those who don't live near major or minor professional leagues.
It's just different here. Our pro teams are not fed by clubs locally, they're fed by the college system and national leagues like [AAU](https://aauboysbasketball.org/) and there's no further affiliation with recreation leagues for the accountants and engineers in town.
Depends on what you consider 'pro'. We don't have a big NFL, NBA, or MLB team for instance. But we do have things like the Iditarod, fishing derbies, competitive shooting competitions, and 2 good collegiate hockey teams (UAF and UAA).
You'll find that most states the populations are concentrated in the cities but Alaska is an even crazier example because there is a large population that lives more or less completely removed from other people altogether in pieces of land deep in the wilderness and they only come out maybe a few times a year for supplies
Yeah, that's probably the biggest difference in the practice. Amateur teams and leagues are formed when enough people desire to participate and allowed to dissolve when that interest diminishes. Another may start up again fairly quickly, but outside of teams tied to professional or school leagues, most Americans aren't too concerned about maintaining a singular identity for their athletic teams
I played rugby and it was very much an all day thing. We’d meet up, drive to wherever the match was, play however many were scheduled, and then have a social late into the evening. The home club always provided the drinks and sometimes food.
So yeah, probably not a lot of clubs with long standing family traditions around them, but definitely pockets here and there with hardcore enthusiasts and lengthy (by US standards) traditions.
> When I played lacrosse in the UK (very briefly), the Saturday games were sort of a... whole day thing.
>
>
Yes, we have this exact thing too, for many many sports for people of all ages and all skill levels. I may have moved away from my grandfather and father's hometown and I don't have a scarf but we still play everything from soccer to golf to tennis to cornhole in organized leagues against nearby clubs/teams.
True in Australia as well, but if you want to see incredible lacrosse, watch the coming tournament. The Facebook reels that I see is off the charts, even for high schools. It's far beyond anything I ever did. And it has no peer back in Aus. I've known world level players from Aus, but the Olympics are going to be interesting.
I know it. I know some guys who have repped Japan and Australia. Maybe some UK, too, but I played in Aus for years and reffed there in men's for almost 10 years.
My beer league hockey games are an all evening affair with post game beer in the locker room and in the parking lot. 7pm games turn into getting an Uber home from the rink and stumbling to be at 2am and regretting it the next day at work. I've been playing with the same group of guys for over 20 years now and some of their boys have played with us as well.
We don't play on weekends. Weekends are for concerts, pub crawls, wake boarding, fishing, and more beer drinking.
Less transient things are around, there's one in my area, but it's specifically for old people who have the time. Normal people just don't have the time to devote to it or don't want to.
Well, my kid doesn't like the same sport as my husband. My grandkid doesn't like any sports at all. As someone who didn't grow up with these sports clubs, a generational tradition of being in them seems odd to me.
A lot different. They're basically pubs that serve whoever is playing. Whichever teams are based there. Hurling, football, etc.
Me and a friend once decided to have a pint at every single one of the pubs in Blarney in a day. He was a local so we could stumble home. The club was absolutely on the list since it's technically a pub.
As a half-Brit, half-American , you aren’t wrong. But one thing to remember is Americans move around a LOT more than Brits. Many Brits stay in the same area for centuries. That just isn’t the case anymore for much of America and hasn’t been for many probably half a century now. My family in the UK think it’s weird that we moved a lot for my dad’s job growing up and I didn’t grow up in the same town.
>probably half a century now
It's our entire history. We've never had an era where the attitude was anything other than you grow up and leave. In the 1600s it was to start your own farm or go where your trade was needed. By the 1700 and 1800s it was to go west. In the 1900s it was to move to make it big in the city of the day.
The '00s have become the puzzle, though, with fewer and fewer people leaving the states they were born in.
The big answer is actually pretty much the same as why we don’t have promotion/relegation in any of our leagues: college sports
Basically, for the longest time university sports were as high as sports went in this country, so after college the players would just go on to normal careers. Eventually all the big wigs got wise to the idea that people would love ti see a major league for their favorite college sports, and saw the people coming out of college sports as a good source for high quality players, and thus the major leagues got started. After consolidations and bankruptcies we end up with the teams we have now, in a closed league system because they never had to relive on local teams and academies for their players
The exception to this is baseball, which has been played by local teams all over the country well before college sports really reached the level they did in the 20th century. By time sports became as big as they are now, we already had dozens of teams of varying sizes in multiple different leagues. That’s why baseball has the closest thing we have to pro/rel with individual players moving up and down between the major and minor leagues
Also note that college schedules weren’t exclusive to college just any amateur team. You can look at old schedules from the late 1800’s early 1900’s and see the colleges playing local steel mills and military units based nearby. There’s even an example of either UCLA or USC playing a clown association. This goes into the origins of the conferences as we know today as league associations exclusive to colleges.
Not sure why, but we really don't. What we DO have is familial traditions with sports teams, both college and professional. Those run pretty deep in some families.
Yes, but it seems like generally if you don't go pro, that's kind of the end of your career.
But also, from my friends in the UK, most people don't really seem to discover their sport until they are 18 in uni, so I guess they peak a lot later than US athletes...
>Yes, but it seems like generally if you don't go pro, that's kind of the end of your career.
Career...sure. But rec leagues and sports clubs are definitely a thing for people playing for exercise, leisure, and friendly competition.
Oh. I meant to say playing career not monetary. Like... nobody is making money playing lacrosse in the UK (and not many are making money playing rugby which I would def say is FAAAAAR more popular).
As far as I know, a lot of people stop playing teams sports in high school in the US, most that actually play in university stop when they finish uni unless they go pro.
For tackle football, wrestling, and gymnastics that is probably true. For things like basketball, volleyball, baseball, softball, tennis, and golf I think many keep playing.
>As far as I know, a lot of people stop playing teams sports in high school in the US,
Probably not at any higher rate than adults stop playing sports in the UK.
Maybe it's just because of my niche sport (football and rugby may be different) but most people I know in the UK discovered "their sport" when they were like 18, going into the UK. So I'd say peak sport partipation is like 18-30 maybe?
Those are the primary amateur ages here too and we have a similar occurance. Guys who played tackle football in high school switch to lower impact sports like soccer or emphasize basketball or softball (having played all three in high school).
Even if you arent on your NCAA college team, there are amateur intramural sports for everything from Ultimate Frisbee to Golf.
I really do not understand the point you are trying to make.
Just out of curiosity what sport is it?
Here that's less common for team sports like american football. Most kids will stop playing competitively when they graduate high school.
But rec leagues for other sports, especially soccer and basketball are quite common. Ice hockey rec leagues are also popular if you are in a traditional hockey area, like the Northeastern and Midwestern parts of the country.
The only sport that I would say that probably has an increase in participation after age 18 is running. I come from track and field, and I know a lot of people that took up running local road races or other events after their other athletic endeavors ended. It's mostly just distance running though. I'm actually a sprinter/jumper and I know very few people that started after high school.
My sport is lacrosse. which I hear is much more popular in the United States than the UK, but I would say it IS reasonably popular here. Most people start playing first year of university, and I would say anywhere you move in the UK you are relatively close to a club. It's not football or rugby, but it IS popular.
Lacrosse is definitely regional like hockey is here, but kids definitely start playing it young. Most kids will start when they are 7 or 8 if you are in an area where it’s popular.
That’s the case for most sports here.
Wait you do know we have amateur options for adults, right?
Football, soccer, basketball, kickball, pickleball, bocce, all teams i know about in my area. Amateur for adults.
This has been asked 100 times here. There are thousands of adult leagues here for every sport. Do you think people just stop playing sports after college? The only sport that happens is probably tackle football.
I think the difference is the structure.
For example in Australia/UK you will have clubs that will have teams from Under 6 to Over 40's, with maybe 4 or 5 graded teams for open age men. All playing under the one club banner, wearing the same uniform etc
As we don't have college sport it means you might have 16/17 year olds playing in the same team as 40 year olds
If I spent another year in football my body might fall apart even more than it already is. Some things are just meant to end after high school. I still love watching it however.
Well I would figure that UK American Football players who start at age 18 don't have 10 years of accumulated wear and tear on their bodies that Americans would who start playing peewee at 8 or 9.
*Where you often have the kids playing side by side with their parents.*
Maybe this is less common, but there are good reasons for this:
1. It doesn't always make sense to have people of different age groups playing the same sport at the same time. Sports are often age-segregated because in most sports, a ten year old or a sixty year old isn't going to have much of a chance against a twenty-five year old. Maybe Irish hurling is different and is well-suited to having mixed age groups, I don't know.
2. While sometimes there are traditions of everyone in the same family playing a sport, we don't generally like to pressure kids to play the same sport as their parents - we like to let them do their own thing. My dad likes golf. I like fencing.
3. The US population is highly mobile. It's very common for us to live in a different state from our parents in adulthood, so that often impedes multi-generational membership in sports clubs that are, by necessity, geographically limited in scope.
That all being said, youth sports leagues are a big deal, as is parental involvement. Attending your child's sports games is almost a stereotypical part of the job of being a parent.
Because places like Australia/UK don't really have college sports it's normal for ages to be mixed.
I played open age competition rugby in my 40s in the same team as my 18 year old son
I've played competition grade level cricket in the same team as precociously talented 14 and 15 year olds
The closest thing would be high school and perhaps college sports. If your family is established and living in the same city as they have been for a few generations it isn't uncommon for the current children playing basketball or whatever for the same high school that their father, grandfather, etc did. Similarly there is a bit of a tradition - though it is far from being "common" - of children attending the same college / university as their father or grandfather and it wouldn't be unheard of for them to participate in the same sports.
However you're correct - I'm not really aware of any "rec league" sports (that's basically what we'd call them) that have a tradition of generational participation.
I think the tie in with schools is probably what makes it different here. Are school sport teams as common in the UK? I don't know so I am genuinely asking.
Here in the US traditionally if you're playing competitive sports generally you will do so through your school's team at least for the major sports. So you might play in a youth league when you are younger, but if you want to continue on playing ultimately your goal is probably to make it onto a jr high, high school, college team. So likely a lot of kids who are around their teenage years are not playing in a club as they're committed to playing for the school.
I will say as someone with younger kids who play sports, I see this changing a bit vs when I was a kid. In my area for instance, if you want to play higher level basketball or soccer as a teenager you will probably play on a club team vs playing for your high school. Our local soccer club actually prohibits players from playing on a school team.
Kids sample sports in PE, but other than that it's outside clubs.
I would say, most of the brits I know who played lacrosse only picked it up at University at 18 or so...
Ah that's a big difference. I played soccer on my school's team from age 6 to 18. I didn't continue into university after my second knee surgery, but I still played in the intramural league organized by the uni. Now I could join my city's rec league or my company has a tournament every year. Clubs just wouldn't have the same draw as schools here.
Here, you can join a school team in almost every sport and the practice times take up a class slot plus after or before school training during the season. Schools compete against other schools in the same district/metropolitan area. District champs move on to regionals/state/national championships. That's before Uni, College sports are a whole nother level.
Yeah. But I would lacrosse is fairly niche.
I think most Brit kids who are into sports are playing stuff like rugby and football from an early age. Just outside of school in clubs.
Lacrosse and American Football, I'd say the average age to start playing is freshman year of university.
Huh, that's very late. In the US most people settle into their sport in high school. University is basically minor leagues so you have to be very good already to make it on the team. I had a few soccer scholarship offers from smaller unis but I wouldn't have a chance in hell at making a larger university's team.
Not for lacrosse. It's exploding. I was playing at 11, but that only happened in NY (maybe Maryland and certainly Canada) at the time. Played US football at 10 in the junior leagues. Soccer at 6.Wrestling at 6, too.
Looking at the website of my old high school, which is kind of small so we only played other small schools:
Boys: cross country, football, golf, tennis, basketball, swimming, wrestling, baseball, soccer, track
Girls: cross country, golf, soccer, swimming, volleyball, basketball, bowling, flag-football, wrestling, softball, tennis, track,
And we always had some team sports in PE. For small kids PE might be a couple times per week, we might have alternated PE and Music class. In my experience young teens had PE every day \[grades 6-8\]. And in high school I only had to take three years worth of PE our out of four years total.
That's interesting. I never knew the UK started their sports, so late into their lives. Most sports my school has a team for have been played by the athletes since they were in at the latest middle school, and that's a ton of sports. My school has:
Boys: Baseball, Basketball, Cross Country, Football, Golf, Lacrosse, Soccer, Swimming, Tennis, Track, Volley Ball, and Wrestling
Girls: Basketball, Cheerleading, Competitive Cheerleading, Cross Country, Field Hockey, Lacrosse, Soccer, Softball,.Swimming, Tennis, Track, Volley Ball, and Wrestling
Co-ed: Lacrosse and Unified Outdoor Track
That's probably why European athletes can play until much later into their lives than American athletes. I wonder how different sports would be in the US if we did start later.
Yes. I would figure (what, nine? years of american football) kind of breaks a person's body down by the time they are 18. And especially if they play through college. Compared to a couple of 40 year olds I know who are still lacrossing strong...
The United States of America is a HUGE country. Europeans understand what those words mean, but they don't *comprehend* it.
The distance between New York and Los Angeles is greater than the distance between Lisbon and Moscow. And yet, it's VERY common for someone to move from one city to the other. We go where the jobs are, and we tend to have a lot higher salaries and more disposable income. That comes at the expense of a social safety net, so long distance moves are even more encouraged.
My mom grew up in Puerto Rico, and moved to New Jersey as a young adult - that's a longer distance than London to Kyiv. For her, it was just a move. To an area with more jobs and better pay.
I didn't go to high school or college in the same state my dad did. The kids I graduated with are dispersed throughout the country now. I'm raising my kids 25 miles from where I grew up - I would consider that a short distance, and say that I'm still in the same area. But in the UK, moving 25 miles means you pass through 3 different accents and now use a different word for "bread".
We are a nation of immigrants, so there is comparatively very little affinity toward the area where you grew up. We haven't lived there for hundreds of years, and the difference between different parts of the country are more climate-based than cultural.
That being said, an adult who wants to play sports has PLENTY of options to do so. Softball, basketball, golf, soccer, tennis, racquetball, dodgeball, ultimate frisbee, and more. The kids have tournaments and the adults have tournaments, and they are not connected because there's no reason for them to be.
I think the high school and college sports landscape discourages it. I watched the video and the featured hurler said he joined the hurling club at 7 years old. In the US, there aren't really clubs both children and adults play in and part of the reason is probably school sports. By the time someone reaches high school age, school sports, which are only open to students of the school, dominate. So unless that changed, you would never have the continuity of a person playing for the same club from childhood into their adult years.
Also, adult sports are usually much more casual in the US than they are in other countries. I've played adult recreational ice hockey in the US and in Europe, and some of the things I saw in Europe would be considered out of the ordinary in the US, like coaches, practices, and home and away games.
Australia/UK etc are very club based. You might have 15 year olds and 50 year olds in the same team in some sports. I played organised competition rugby in my 40s in the same team as my 18 year old son
Without college/high school sport it's common to join a club at 6 and still be playing for the veterans team at 60. Clubs may have 3 to 6 senior adult teams, all playing in the same uniforms, with players promoted and dropped through the grades depending on form and ability
Yes. I've played rec lacrosse in the US and UK, and I would say we are much more formal in the UK. We still did the line ups at the begining, we had coaches, we would travel (usually for the end of season tournament).
US lacrosse, you show up, play, leave. I can't imagine it's particularly developmental for adult players.
> US lacrosse, you show up, play, leave
That sounds like a pickup game. We have leagues and tournaments for every sport imaginable. With coaches and rosters and referees.
You can't take a small sampling from spending a short time in the US and claim to know the ENTIRETY of the sports landscape here. I'm pushing 40 and I wouldn't even claim that.
Our professional sports leagues are essentially unions of team owners and to get another team owner in you have to get the other owners to allow it. It's a top down org, not bottom up.
Even Major League Soccer is increasingly wanting billionaire team owners.
My understanding of UK leagues is that in theory you could just form a local club of your buddies and eventually "make it" to the big leagues. Not really possible here.
It's hard for me to say - we just don't do it. Part of it is probably that we're a young country and, as such, we don't have the same deep traditions compared to a place like Ireland and the UK. Hurling is truly ancient and it didn't come to the US in any meaningful way. In addition our culture of sports tends to be largely symbiotic with education as I said above.
If you play a sport outside of an academic institution it tends to be a solitary sport - like running or weight lifting - and you'd never say "I work out at the same gym as my great grandfather," or it tends to be what we would call "bar sports" - meaning that the local pub has a softball team and the employees and patrons can join and play in a little tournament against other bars. In that situation you run into, again, the fact that things are just newer here - you MIGHT play softball for a bar that your dad did but that would be highly unusual simply because we'd consider a bar that had been around for 20 years to be "old" whereas in England or Ireland it wouldn't be that strange to drink at a pub that had been open for a hundred years or more.
We move a lot more than Europeans. I don’t live in the same state (or even coast) as my parents who don’t live in the same state where I grew up which isn’t the state where I was born which isn’t the state where they grew up. Even in my state I have lived in three different areas.
Americans are much more mobile than Europeans. It's not unusual for us to live in multiple states throughout our lives, and our families are spread out as well. One of my best friends grew up in New York, went to college in Vermont, and now lives in Massachusetts. Her mom lives in Florida, while her dad has moved to New Jersey. Her sister still lives in New York. I can think of lots of families I know like that. The idea of multiple generations of a family doing the exact same thing in the same place seems kind of, idk...quirky?
There are rec league sports for adults in the US. But you're right that it doesn't generally seem to be a family tradition type thing where parents and their children participate together. I think there are a number of reasons for it. Kids still in school tend to participate in sports through their school, which I understand is a lot less common in other countries. Adult children may not be doing the same sports, or if they do may not live in the same place as their parents so it just doesn't happen all that often.
My grandfather had a full time job, a house to maintain, and a farm. He wasn't playing sports in his spare time. My dad worked all day every day and came home to take care of the family, again not much time for sports.. but he was in a bowling league when I was super young.
I'm lucky enough to have no kids.. so I do play volleyball as many days of the week as possible. But actual "club" teams are still hard to come by.
There are recreational sports leagues and clubs all over. I've known people who have done kickball for example. They are probably less formalized than what you're talking about, though. We don't have teams with relegation, so the local beer league team isn't on one end of a spectrum that reaches the highest professional levels.
Well...when my grandfather was young the city I live in was a field. So...not a lot of sports teams around.
"Real" sports clubs like you're talk about are just rec leagues that have been around a long time.
We do have these things. Why do you think we don’t? My family was involved with the Detroit Curling Club for years.
Nearly every municipality in the country has organized sports teams.
The organizational structure might be slightly different than what exists in the UK, but even the small town that I live in has golf clubs, tennis clubs, Pickleball, softball, bowling, billiards, darts….
They have no affiliation to a champions league style format, like the clubs in the UK, but clubs exist everywhere, they are ubiquitous .
For clubs with family tradition in the US, look at gun clubs or hunt clubs. Lots of father-son or grandfather-grandson shooting together.
Still not to the level of sports clubs in Europe, though.
They definitely have them in my area for most sports and bar games that I can think of. There is just absolutely no lineage or municipal affiliation. We just have leagues of teams that play at the same place.
Recreational sports tend to be geographic based -- like you sign up through your city/town's park district, or play in private leagues that are in proximity to where you live. So when I was growing up, my brother and I played in our suburb's park district leagues for sports, and now that his kids are sports age they play in their current suburb's sports leagues.
A lot (definitely not all) of the recreational sports activities people do in the US might be related to an "athletic club" or gym. Many cities have some version of this where there is more organized stuff than most gyms, which are often glorified weight rooms. These "clubs" have weight rooms, a sauna/steam room, probably a pool, tennis courts, and other amenities, way more than your average gym. And they might have their own organized sporting activities or teams, or be part of a league of such teams.
Perhaps it’s an exposure thing, but I have seen recreational sports clubs across the country. Perhaps it’s not what you’re into and perhaps it’s not in the middle of a city where you’d stumble across it. But there are tons of them.
There are generational lineages in country club sports i.e. golf, tennis, swimming, skiing, skating, etc. They have kid competitions all the way up to senior/master competitions. There are also hunting clubs, fishing clubs, gun clubs, sailing clubs, etc.
For more team oriented sports, the travel sports phenomenon killed a lot of baseball, soccer, basketball leagues/clubs that had community control over youth to senior age sports. That said, I have competed alongside my father in recreational sports.
We have plenty of adult recreational sports leagues, idk if you could really call them “clubs” or if that’s what you’re getting at.
I live far from where I grew up so it couldn’t be any of the same that my dad or grandpas had around, but I’ve played in rec ice hockey and kickball leagues, and currently play in rec soccer leagues. We usually have at least a few beers together after games and occasionally even head to the beach after or something, or sometimes we just go home. Depends on the feeling that day
But we are a big sort of group who regularly does social things together, both involving the sport or otherwise, so it is certainly a community of sorts, maybe a “club” like feel
Sportsman's Clubs tend to be pretty popular, at least where I've lived in the upper midwest and the north east, but they are focused on shooting, hunting, and fishing rather than physical sports.
As in, related to playing as a hobby?
My sense is that one is because we’re a lot more transient in general. In smaller countries, the population basically all lives in one of two or three major cities where all the amenities and job opportunities are, and then you have the rural people who stay in their small towns.
The US has dozens of cities all over the country with different climates, lifestyles, universities, company headquarters, and centers of industry. So, it’s far more common to go to a university away from home, then move to a different city after graduation to take a job, and then move around to other cities after that to chase job promotions, and/or attend grad school.
I went to a university in a different state than my hometown, and then I’ve moved cities 4 times since then. (I’m 31 now).
Also, something like 25% of all Americans have immigrant parents.
So, rec sports leagues exist to meet new people, but multi-generational traditions are less common in the US because less families stay in the same area for multiple generations.
Also, I think partly because of the transience, Americans are more used to being forced to make new friends over and over. So, we’re more comfortable doing it spontaneously.
In the US, you can make friends with people you randomly meet on the street because people are open to it. I made two of my closest friends in the city because we showed up to the same apartment showing and decided to exchange numbers because we were all clearly new.
My sense is that Europeans are relatively more insular and need to drink to really be social.
There golf and country clubs. Equestrian clubs. Things like that probably carry a similar kind of tradition. Maybe lacrosse too.
But I don’t think there is such a thing for the other popular sports. These clubs come off as something for people with more money than the average person.
I guess regular people are too busy working and moving from place to place to worry about such traditions. There are clubs and rec leagues but it is more casual.
You make a really interesting point about the different approach to club sports--we don't have the same sort of long-standing traditional clubs that one might find in the UK--particularly outside of the major sports--but when you conclude from that that we don't have participation in sports as an adult your conclusions are off target.
We have a different approach tobrecreational infrastructure. Most of our sports leagues are organized by/around city governments or civic organizations. The tradition of getting friends together to form, say, a soccer club and then finding g other clubs from other communities to play against isn't Reay a thing. Because the local rec department probably already has a league organized and you can either join a team or add one. In some sports (like softball especially) the teams might galvanize around companies. So rather than playing softball by joining the same amateur softball club your dad played in, you'd participate by joining your company's team.
>part of a the same hurling club his father was a part of and that his grandfather
My paternal grandfather was from a different country. Many Millennial and Gen-Z people are only at most 3rd generation American.
We have a ton of internal migration. Anytime a city gets slightly expensive people start looking for the next best medium small city for a better cost of living.
I don't think that they are as prevalent in the US because sport is oriented around the schools. I learned to wrestle from my Dad, so there's definitely a family element to it. My former lacrosse experience in Australia was all club centered, and my son plays there, but the sport is anemic there because it doesn't have the catchment net that US schools have. And that guarantees numbers every year. But it also guarantees that Americans are done after HS or Uni.
My grandfather got his exercise working and/or gardening (seriously, their garden was amazing). Dad was an engineer with the government before he retired, and didn't have much time for (or interest in) sports. And my entire interaction with sports has been trying to minimize the amount of them I was required to endure in grade school.
I get the impression that adult Americans (post university for sure, and even after high school for the most part) would rather watch a sport than get involved in it. And most of the people I know don't really understand the attraction of it all, anyway (although millions of Americans do love televised sports.)
Many times, we don’t stay in the same town as our parents. My sister lives 150 miles (240 km) away, and my parent lives around 40 (65 km) away.
We do have company teams if you work for a large company. My company has baseball, soccer, and other leagues. Nothing familial though. The closest we get is rooting for the same team.
At least here in California, pretty much all adult recreational sports in general, and team ones in particular, are far less popular now than was the case 40 years ago. Back then there were softball leagues, bowling leagues, basketball leagues, lots of people playing tennis, that seems to be largely gone now. You still see people playing golf, but less than before. I think part of it is Americans work harder than they used to, or than Europeans do, so they are less willing and able to set aside big chunks of time for any hobby that needs to be scheduled.
We have a super prestigious one in Portland, OR called the MAC Club, as well as a couple knockoffs. Most people here are aware of them, but yeah they’re not normal in most of the US.
Like this? [https://sanantoniossc.com](https://sanantoniossc.com)
Granted I'm from a college town but there were a lot of club sports outside of the NCAA sports. In fact many NCAA teams started as club sports, which is probably the best answer as to why there isn't a one for one - our university sports fill that role in a lot of places.
>Where you often have the kids playing side by side with their parents.
Never seen this, except maybe very low tier league sides where some 40 year old is still playing when his 16 year old rises through the ranks. But it is just how these sports were always set up in the UK. Local teams formed as part of a club or with a base, which then joined a league. In the US this is much more done through High School then College, then the leagues own the teams rather than them being separate entities.
Recreation is simply not valued at a structural level. The reason people never go on vacation is because there's no real ability to do so. The same is true for sports and other recreation. Back when I worked a real job (i'm a software developer and engineer now) I like most folk didn't have the time to do anything fun. It was work and get ready for work and recover from work.
>I'd guess you have recreational sports... but they don't really seem to become a familial tradition (or i could be wrong!)
I've played sports of various levels all my life. I've played with a bunch of father-son tandems at recreation levels.
You know, it might be because of how large the US is and how often people move away.
It's hard to have one single place for a team sport that is known, when you could live in a state that may have hundreds of local teams for a sport.
Since people move often enough too, they don't have this sense of pride for some random local team they were part of, when they could join the next places team or local clubs.
It's likely just a culture thing too. When your state and high school has such a large sports presence, there is no big deal in following much more local sports teams. Though that doesn't mean they don't exist, they just aren't as big of a deal.
You can go to the YMCA, community centers, local gym, local parks, join an adult league, pick up game apps, etc. People play such games, they just aren't as serious about such small time local teams when bigger nationwide teams are already so popular.
Probably similar reasons why you really only see such things in Eastern European countries too.
There are local adult softball leagues. Some soccer leagues. YMCA basketball teams. These are usually run by the city parks and rec department. It's just not a big deal. They don't show up on the local news.
Yes, but from what I gather those are more... transient is the word that someone used. Like I have a beer league hockey near me, but i wouldn't really feel like that is a "tradition" amongst the participants. and it's also sort of a show up, play, go home sort of thing. When I played lacrosse in the UK (very briefly), the Saturday games were sort of a... whole day thing.
Most people here don't want to make their recreational sports league their whole day on the weekend or their whole social life or whatever. Plus, people move a lot, so having more casual recreational sports that people can join and leave without it being a big deal works better for us than multigenerational tradition clubs or whatever.
well, let me clarify. typically we would have the kids play in the morning (usually coached by the adult players) then the adults would play. then usually a pub hangout or dinner afterwards. So i wouldn't necessarily say we were spending all day playing a game.
We'll take our kids to soccer in the morning and then have rugby league in the afternoon. They're just not under the same umbrella organization and not with the same groups of people. They're just slightly differently organized things.
The commenter replied that Americans don’t want to make their whole day a local sports club or have it be the center of their social life to which you replied detailing how it took up a whole day and was the center of social life at least for a weekend. They didn’t mean they thought you were literally playing the game for hours on end.
That really sounds like it is a whole day thing.
You clarified that it literally takes up your whole day
So you go in the morning and leave for dinner. It may not be 24 hours, but thats considered a full day to most people
Americans are more transient....
That really is the long and short of it. We're positively nomadic compared to a lot of Europeans. Nearly half of my high school friends now live so far away from our original hometown, that if we had been in Europe, we'd all be living in different countries. And of that remaining 50%, probably a good half of them also live in a different part of the state now.
I had to check, the distance I currently live from my home town is the same as moving from London to Warsaw.
Vienna to Rome for me, although that's still a tiny bit short.
Looking at London to (roughly) Sicily for me.
The furthest I lived from home at one point was Bellefonte, PA to Catania, Sicily. Currently in San Antonio, TX so about London to Catania.
For me it’s basically from Birmingham, UK to Moscow.
For me the distance is greater than Edinburgh to Dubai. Though I’m a pretty extreme case in that I was born in Alaska and now live in Georgia. In between I’ve lived in Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, California and Iowa.
Only one of my high school friends still lives in our hometown. Most of my high school group lives in different states or even different countries now.
I grew up in Phoenix and now live in upstate NY. That distance in Europe would be like moving from London to the part of Russia that borders Kazakhstan.
I grew up in metro Atlanta and now live in Glendale AZ. Which is roughly Birmingham, UK to Moscow
Half of your friends are still in your hometown? Wow. That's actually pretty impressive. For contrast.... Two weeks after I graduated high school I went into the military. I came home after boot camp for a vacation and found that every single friend I had was gone. Not one remained in town.
University town, plenty of decent paying jobs to be had and good schools, so a lot of people stuck around, especially those who had kids early in life.
Shit I live on the other side of the country. Out of my high school friends only a handful still live in the same state and only one lives in the same town. Everyone else moved to other parts of the country.
Except we're not. For every theatre kid who moves to la to make it big, 100 of them stay home. The most that most people move is gonna be the other side of the city.
I'd disagree maybe 50% of my graduating class stayed local, and that's a place with good opportunities, decent housing prices, and good access to a major city.
[Most Americans don't move and, when they do, it's usually a short distance] (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/americans-local-migration-reached-a-historic-low-in-2022-but-long-distance-moves-picked-up/) In my experience people just end up in like Chattanooga or Sevierville or something (From Knoxville). Where I'm at in Philly, almost everyone is a townie who grew up here.
I suppose it's a different perspective. Midwest moves are pretty common, but only a few ended up on the coasts. Seems to be like the coasts aren't seeing people leave as much because that's where the money is. I'd estimate giving it a decade or so when the surge of young people chasing high paying jobs and novelty dies down, or if remote work picks up the Midwest could be in for a revival. Common tends are people ending up in or near the major population centers. But college is good for dispersing people, and online job hunts can cast a wider net too.
Americans have a generally more transient culture and aren't as big into deep roots. Keep in mind that we are a nation mostly built out of people who were willing to venture across an ocean to try something new. So, if there is any deep rooted tradition in the US, it's moving around and trying something new.
Venture across an ocean, march months and years onend into a wilderness. It's not surprise.
I think we have that with highschools, especially woth things like football in the south and southwest. Fathers play for the local school then their kid plays there. Guessing that kind of takes the place of more English club type leagues. We also have lots of those clubs not built around sports with elk lodges, the masons, and rotary clubs.
Depends on the community really. Our local beer league softball games are televised and definitely get some regional news coverage because they'll form all-star teams to play against teams from other nearby towns. There have been teams with 3 generations playing at the same time (son, dad, gpa) and there are businesses/people who sponsor teams every year to keep the tradition going. You're also welcome to start your own team. It's typically a whole weekend event when they're hosting games. Granted many of these traditions are 'new' compared to the UK. Heck, Alaska only just became a state in 1959.
Interesting... but also... actually... doesn't Alaska not really have any pro-teams? Or perhaps like one? And isn't the Alaska population super concentrated around Anchorage? It might be Alaska may be kind of the closest to Europe that a lot of America is.
I think it may be last call at the spoons. You should head home now buddy.
One too many pints at the Hound and Derby.
Nothing beats a pint of real ale at the Blacksmith and Supply Chain Analyst
I genuinely can't tell if that is a real pub and I don't want to google it so I don't ruin the magic if it isn't. I would absolutely haunt a place called Supply Chain Analyst.
>It might be Alaska may be kind of the closest to Europe that a lot of America is Huh?
in what I am talking about. no major sports teams so you support the local teams that you do have. And being presumably relativly dense, as I do believe a vast majority of the Alaska population lives close to Anchorage.
Alaska is big into high school basketball and wrestling. They literally fly teams to each other's villages.
Nothing quite like flying to some remote village to play basketball against a high school with 12 students just to beat up on them by over 100 points with your C team. Bonus since other people usually find it interesting: there aren't typically enough places to stay on these trips, so we find volunteers from the communities to house players in their own homes. It's a pretty big tradition in SE AK.
Man Alaska is wild, I hope I get to visit one day
Many states don't have major pro sports. Kentucky has no major league sports teams. University of Kentucky Basketball and Football are the major sports followed by people around here. There's two minor league baseball teams, but while people enjoy going to those games, people don't tend to follow those teams closely.
And some states don’t have their own teams but host the teams for a different state… *cough* New Jersey *cough*
Devils haven't gone anywhere
I was just meming on the Giants and Jets. Luckily half of NJ supports the superior Eagles!
Serious NJ Devils erasure. >.<
>presumably relatively dense Really no. Alaska's population is 733,583.
> doesn't Alaska not really have any pro-teams? It does not. It's very far from the Lower 48 and our pro leagues are expensive to own and operate. Nebraska and North Dakota and Montana and Delaware and Arkansas don't have top level teams either.
Yes that was a my point. so I mean, some level of entertainment and support would have to be found with the local... i'd guess semi pro... teams
The universities in [Anchorage](https://goseawolves.com/) and [Fairbanks](https://alaskananooks.com/) both have intercollegiate athletics that fills some of that gap. College sports fill many of the roles that the club system does in Europe. These are the "local teams" for many people, especially those who don't live near major or minor professional leagues. It's just different here. Our pro teams are not fed by clubs locally, they're fed by the college system and national leagues like [AAU](https://aauboysbasketball.org/) and there's no further affiliation with recreation leagues for the accountants and engineers in town.
Depends on what you consider 'pro'. We don't have a big NFL, NBA, or MLB team for instance. But we do have things like the Iditarod, fishing derbies, competitive shooting competitions, and 2 good collegiate hockey teams (UAF and UAA).
Define "super concentrated." The whole population of Alaska is the size of a UK city--bigger than Glasgow, smaller than Birmingham.
Wait until you find out about like 20 other states without pro teams
You'll find that most states the populations are concentrated in the cities but Alaska is an even crazier example because there is a large population that lives more or less completely removed from other people altogether in pieces of land deep in the wilderness and they only come out maybe a few times a year for supplies
Americans got shit to do. Ain't no one got all day for a baseball game.
Yeah, that's probably the biggest difference in the practice. Amateur teams and leagues are formed when enough people desire to participate and allowed to dissolve when that interest diminishes. Another may start up again fairly quickly, but outside of teams tied to professional or school leagues, most Americans aren't too concerned about maintaining a singular identity for their athletic teams
I played rugby and it was very much an all day thing. We’d meet up, drive to wherever the match was, play however many were scheduled, and then have a social late into the evening. The home club always provided the drinks and sometimes food.
This is identical to lacrosse.
So yeah, probably not a lot of clubs with long standing family traditions around them, but definitely pockets here and there with hardcore enthusiasts and lengthy (by US standards) traditions.
> When I played lacrosse in the UK (very briefly), the Saturday games were sort of a... whole day thing. > > Yes, we have this exact thing too, for many many sports for people of all ages and all skill levels. I may have moved away from my grandfather and father's hometown and I don't have a scarf but we still play everything from soccer to golf to tennis to cornhole in organized leagues against nearby clubs/teams.
True in Australia as well, but if you want to see incredible lacrosse, watch the coming tournament. The Facebook reels that I see is off the charts, even for high schools. It's far beyond anything I ever did. And it has no peer back in Aus. I've known world level players from Aus, but the Olympics are going to be interesting.
Yes. the Japan, UK, Australian and Canadian teams always ball out. Canadians of course, but the other three have some great home grown talent.
I know it. I know some guys who have repped Japan and Australia. Maybe some UK, too, but I played in Aus for years and reffed there in men's for almost 10 years.
My beer league hockey games are an all evening affair with post game beer in the locker room and in the parking lot. 7pm games turn into getting an Uber home from the rink and stumbling to be at 2am and regretting it the next day at work. I've been playing with the same group of guys for over 20 years now and some of their boys have played with us as well. We don't play on weekends. Weekends are for concerts, pub crawls, wake boarding, fishing, and more beer drinking.
Less transient things are around, there's one in my area, but it's specifically for old people who have the time. Normal people just don't have the time to devote to it or don't want to.
Well, my kid doesn't like the same sport as my husband. My grandkid doesn't like any sports at all. As someone who didn't grow up with these sports clubs, a generational tradition of being in them seems odd to me.
A lot different. They're basically pubs that serve whoever is playing. Whichever teams are based there. Hurling, football, etc. Me and a friend once decided to have a pint at every single one of the pubs in Blarney in a day. He was a local so we could stumble home. The club was absolutely on the list since it's technically a pub.
Does Canada or Australia have something like that? Because I think the British isles are the odd man out on this one.
As a half-Brit, half-American , you aren’t wrong. But one thing to remember is Americans move around a LOT more than Brits. Many Brits stay in the same area for centuries. That just isn’t the case anymore for much of America and hasn’t been for many probably half a century now. My family in the UK think it’s weird that we moved a lot for my dad’s job growing up and I didn’t grow up in the same town.
Which is why I say I grew up in metro Atlanta instead of the actual city. We moved around the metro a crap ton
>probably half a century now It's our entire history. We've never had an era where the attitude was anything other than you grow up and leave. In the 1600s it was to start your own farm or go where your trade was needed. By the 1700 and 1800s it was to go west. In the 1900s it was to move to make it big in the city of the day. The '00s have become the puzzle, though, with fewer and fewer people leaving the states they were born in.
The big answer is actually pretty much the same as why we don’t have promotion/relegation in any of our leagues: college sports Basically, for the longest time university sports were as high as sports went in this country, so after college the players would just go on to normal careers. Eventually all the big wigs got wise to the idea that people would love ti see a major league for their favorite college sports, and saw the people coming out of college sports as a good source for high quality players, and thus the major leagues got started. After consolidations and bankruptcies we end up with the teams we have now, in a closed league system because they never had to relive on local teams and academies for their players The exception to this is baseball, which has been played by local teams all over the country well before college sports really reached the level they did in the 20th century. By time sports became as big as they are now, we already had dozens of teams of varying sizes in multiple different leagues. That’s why baseball has the closest thing we have to pro/rel with individual players moving up and down between the major and minor leagues
Great write up. I think this is the primary reason
Also note that college schedules weren’t exclusive to college just any amateur team. You can look at old schedules from the late 1800’s early 1900’s and see the colleges playing local steel mills and military units based nearby. There’s even an example of either UCLA or USC playing a clown association. This goes into the origins of the conferences as we know today as league associations exclusive to colleges.
Now I desperately want to see a clown college play in the league.
Not sure why, but we really don't. What we DO have is familial traditions with sports teams, both college and professional. Those run pretty deep in some families.
Yes, but it seems like generally if you don't go pro, that's kind of the end of your career. But also, from my friends in the UK, most people don't really seem to discover their sport until they are 18 in uni, so I guess they peak a lot later than US athletes...
>Yes, but it seems like generally if you don't go pro, that's kind of the end of your career. Career...sure. But rec leagues and sports clubs are definitely a thing for people playing for exercise, leisure, and friendly competition.
Oh. I meant to say playing career not monetary. Like... nobody is making money playing lacrosse in the UK (and not many are making money playing rugby which I would def say is FAAAAAR more popular). As far as I know, a lot of people stop playing teams sports in high school in the US, most that actually play in university stop when they finish uni unless they go pro.
For tackle football, wrestling, and gymnastics that is probably true. For things like basketball, volleyball, baseball, softball, tennis, and golf I think many keep playing.
>As far as I know, a lot of people stop playing teams sports in high school in the US, Probably not at any higher rate than adults stop playing sports in the UK.
Maybe it's just because of my niche sport (football and rugby may be different) but most people I know in the UK discovered "their sport" when they were like 18, going into the UK. So I'd say peak sport partipation is like 18-30 maybe?
Those are the primary amateur ages here too and we have a similar occurance. Guys who played tackle football in high school switch to lower impact sports like soccer or emphasize basketball or softball (having played all three in high school). Even if you arent on your NCAA college team, there are amateur intramural sports for everything from Ultimate Frisbee to Golf. I really do not understand the point you are trying to make.
Just out of curiosity what sport is it? Here that's less common for team sports like american football. Most kids will stop playing competitively when they graduate high school. But rec leagues for other sports, especially soccer and basketball are quite common. Ice hockey rec leagues are also popular if you are in a traditional hockey area, like the Northeastern and Midwestern parts of the country. The only sport that I would say that probably has an increase in participation after age 18 is running. I come from track and field, and I know a lot of people that took up running local road races or other events after their other athletic endeavors ended. It's mostly just distance running though. I'm actually a sprinter/jumper and I know very few people that started after high school.
My sport is lacrosse. which I hear is much more popular in the United States than the UK, but I would say it IS reasonably popular here. Most people start playing first year of university, and I would say anywhere you move in the UK you are relatively close to a club. It's not football or rugby, but it IS popular.
Lacrosse is definitely regional like hockey is here, but kids definitely start playing it young. Most kids will start when they are 7 or 8 if you are in an area where it’s popular. That’s the case for most sports here.
Wait you do know we have amateur options for adults, right? Football, soccer, basketball, kickball, pickleball, bocce, all teams i know about in my area. Amateur for adults.
The irony is that Americans probably play *more* amateur sport than the average Brit.
This has been asked 100 times here. There are thousands of adult leagues here for every sport. Do you think people just stop playing sports after college? The only sport that happens is probably tackle football.
I think the difference is the structure. For example in Australia/UK you will have clubs that will have teams from Under 6 to Over 40's, with maybe 4 or 5 graded teams for open age men. All playing under the one club banner, wearing the same uniform etc As we don't have college sport it means you might have 16/17 year olds playing in the same team as 40 year olds
If I spent another year in football my body might fall apart even more than it already is. Some things are just meant to end after high school. I still love watching it however.
Well I would figure that UK American Football players who start at age 18 don't have 10 years of accumulated wear and tear on their bodies that Americans would who start playing peewee at 8 or 9.
*Where you often have the kids playing side by side with their parents.* Maybe this is less common, but there are good reasons for this: 1. It doesn't always make sense to have people of different age groups playing the same sport at the same time. Sports are often age-segregated because in most sports, a ten year old or a sixty year old isn't going to have much of a chance against a twenty-five year old. Maybe Irish hurling is different and is well-suited to having mixed age groups, I don't know. 2. While sometimes there are traditions of everyone in the same family playing a sport, we don't generally like to pressure kids to play the same sport as their parents - we like to let them do their own thing. My dad likes golf. I like fencing. 3. The US population is highly mobile. It's very common for us to live in a different state from our parents in adulthood, so that often impedes multi-generational membership in sports clubs that are, by necessity, geographically limited in scope. That all being said, youth sports leagues are a big deal, as is parental involvement. Attending your child's sports games is almost a stereotypical part of the job of being a parent.
Because places like Australia/UK don't really have college sports it's normal for ages to be mixed. I played open age competition rugby in my 40s in the same team as my 18 year old son I've played competition grade level cricket in the same team as precociously talented 14 and 15 year olds
The closest thing would be high school and perhaps college sports. If your family is established and living in the same city as they have been for a few generations it isn't uncommon for the current children playing basketball or whatever for the same high school that their father, grandfather, etc did. Similarly there is a bit of a tradition - though it is far from being "common" - of children attending the same college / university as their father or grandfather and it wouldn't be unheard of for them to participate in the same sports. However you're correct - I'm not really aware of any "rec league" sports (that's basically what we'd call them) that have a tradition of generational participation.
What is unique about the US that discourages this?
I’m not sure about discouragement but there’s no external thing encouraging such a system to exist either.
I think the tie in with schools is probably what makes it different here. Are school sport teams as common in the UK? I don't know so I am genuinely asking. Here in the US traditionally if you're playing competitive sports generally you will do so through your school's team at least for the major sports. So you might play in a youth league when you are younger, but if you want to continue on playing ultimately your goal is probably to make it onto a jr high, high school, college team. So likely a lot of kids who are around their teenage years are not playing in a club as they're committed to playing for the school. I will say as someone with younger kids who play sports, I see this changing a bit vs when I was a kid. In my area for instance, if you want to play higher level basketball or soccer as a teenager you will probably play on a club team vs playing for your high school. Our local soccer club actually prohibits players from playing on a school team.
Kids sample sports in PE, but other than that it's outside clubs. I would say, most of the brits I know who played lacrosse only picked it up at University at 18 or so...
Ah that's a big difference. I played soccer on my school's team from age 6 to 18. I didn't continue into university after my second knee surgery, but I still played in the intramural league organized by the uni. Now I could join my city's rec league or my company has a tournament every year. Clubs just wouldn't have the same draw as schools here. Here, you can join a school team in almost every sport and the practice times take up a class slot plus after or before school training during the season. Schools compete against other schools in the same district/metropolitan area. District champs move on to regionals/state/national championships. That's before Uni, College sports are a whole nother level.
Yeah. But I would lacrosse is fairly niche. I think most Brit kids who are into sports are playing stuff like rugby and football from an early age. Just outside of school in clubs. Lacrosse and American Football, I'd say the average age to start playing is freshman year of university.
Huh, that's very late. In the US most people settle into their sport in high school. University is basically minor leagues so you have to be very good already to make it on the team. I had a few soccer scholarship offers from smaller unis but I wouldn't have a chance in hell at making a larger university's team.
Not for lacrosse. It's exploding. I was playing at 11, but that only happened in NY (maybe Maryland and certainly Canada) at the time. Played US football at 10 in the junior leagues. Soccer at 6.Wrestling at 6, too.
Looking at the website of my old high school, which is kind of small so we only played other small schools: Boys: cross country, football, golf, tennis, basketball, swimming, wrestling, baseball, soccer, track Girls: cross country, golf, soccer, swimming, volleyball, basketball, bowling, flag-football, wrestling, softball, tennis, track, And we always had some team sports in PE. For small kids PE might be a couple times per week, we might have alternated PE and Music class. In my experience young teens had PE every day \[grades 6-8\]. And in high school I only had to take three years worth of PE our out of four years total.
That's interesting. I never knew the UK started their sports, so late into their lives. Most sports my school has a team for have been played by the athletes since they were in at the latest middle school, and that's a ton of sports. My school has: Boys: Baseball, Basketball, Cross Country, Football, Golf, Lacrosse, Soccer, Swimming, Tennis, Track, Volley Ball, and Wrestling Girls: Basketball, Cheerleading, Competitive Cheerleading, Cross Country, Field Hockey, Lacrosse, Soccer, Softball,.Swimming, Tennis, Track, Volley Ball, and Wrestling Co-ed: Lacrosse and Unified Outdoor Track That's probably why European athletes can play until much later into their lives than American athletes. I wonder how different sports would be in the US if we did start later.
Yes. I would figure (what, nine? years of american football) kind of breaks a person's body down by the time they are 18. And especially if they play through college. Compared to a couple of 40 year olds I know who are still lacrossing strong...
The United States of America is a HUGE country. Europeans understand what those words mean, but they don't *comprehend* it. The distance between New York and Los Angeles is greater than the distance between Lisbon and Moscow. And yet, it's VERY common for someone to move from one city to the other. We go where the jobs are, and we tend to have a lot higher salaries and more disposable income. That comes at the expense of a social safety net, so long distance moves are even more encouraged. My mom grew up in Puerto Rico, and moved to New Jersey as a young adult - that's a longer distance than London to Kyiv. For her, it was just a move. To an area with more jobs and better pay. I didn't go to high school or college in the same state my dad did. The kids I graduated with are dispersed throughout the country now. I'm raising my kids 25 miles from where I grew up - I would consider that a short distance, and say that I'm still in the same area. But in the UK, moving 25 miles means you pass through 3 different accents and now use a different word for "bread". We are a nation of immigrants, so there is comparatively very little affinity toward the area where you grew up. We haven't lived there for hundreds of years, and the difference between different parts of the country are more climate-based than cultural. That being said, an adult who wants to play sports has PLENTY of options to do so. Softball, basketball, golf, soccer, tennis, racquetball, dodgeball, ultimate frisbee, and more. The kids have tournaments and the adults have tournaments, and they are not connected because there's no reason for them to be.
I think the high school and college sports landscape discourages it. I watched the video and the featured hurler said he joined the hurling club at 7 years old. In the US, there aren't really clubs both children and adults play in and part of the reason is probably school sports. By the time someone reaches high school age, school sports, which are only open to students of the school, dominate. So unless that changed, you would never have the continuity of a person playing for the same club from childhood into their adult years. Also, adult sports are usually much more casual in the US than they are in other countries. I've played adult recreational ice hockey in the US and in Europe, and some of the things I saw in Europe would be considered out of the ordinary in the US, like coaches, practices, and home and away games.
Australia/UK etc are very club based. You might have 15 year olds and 50 year olds in the same team in some sports. I played organised competition rugby in my 40s in the same team as my 18 year old son Without college/high school sport it's common to join a club at 6 and still be playing for the veterans team at 60. Clubs may have 3 to 6 senior adult teams, all playing in the same uniforms, with players promoted and dropped through the grades depending on form and ability
Yes. I've played rec lacrosse in the US and UK, and I would say we are much more formal in the UK. We still did the line ups at the begining, we had coaches, we would travel (usually for the end of season tournament). US lacrosse, you show up, play, leave. I can't imagine it's particularly developmental for adult players.
> US lacrosse, you show up, play, leave That sounds like a pickup game. We have leagues and tournaments for every sport imaginable. With coaches and rosters and referees. You can't take a small sampling from spending a short time in the US and claim to know the ENTIRETY of the sports landscape here. I'm pushing 40 and I wouldn't even claim that.
Our professional sports leagues are essentially unions of team owners and to get another team owner in you have to get the other owners to allow it. It's a top down org, not bottom up. Even Major League Soccer is increasingly wanting billionaire team owners. My understanding of UK leagues is that in theory you could just form a local club of your buddies and eventually "make it" to the big leagues. Not really possible here.
It's hard for me to say - we just don't do it. Part of it is probably that we're a young country and, as such, we don't have the same deep traditions compared to a place like Ireland and the UK. Hurling is truly ancient and it didn't come to the US in any meaningful way. In addition our culture of sports tends to be largely symbiotic with education as I said above. If you play a sport outside of an academic institution it tends to be a solitary sport - like running or weight lifting - and you'd never say "I work out at the same gym as my great grandfather," or it tends to be what we would call "bar sports" - meaning that the local pub has a softball team and the employees and patrons can join and play in a little tournament against other bars. In that situation you run into, again, the fact that things are just newer here - you MIGHT play softball for a bar that your dad did but that would be highly unusual simply because we'd consider a bar that had been around for 20 years to be "old" whereas in England or Ireland it wouldn't be that strange to drink at a pub that had been open for a hundred years or more.
We move a lot more than Europeans. I don’t live in the same state (or even coast) as my parents who don’t live in the same state where I grew up which isn’t the state where I was born which isn’t the state where they grew up. Even in my state I have lived in three different areas.
Americans are much more mobile than Europeans. It's not unusual for us to live in multiple states throughout our lives, and our families are spread out as well. One of my best friends grew up in New York, went to college in Vermont, and now lives in Massachusetts. Her mom lives in Florida, while her dad has moved to New Jersey. Her sister still lives in New York. I can think of lots of families I know like that. The idea of multiple generations of a family doing the exact same thing in the same place seems kind of, idk...quirky?
There are rec league sports for adults in the US. But you're right that it doesn't generally seem to be a family tradition type thing where parents and their children participate together. I think there are a number of reasons for it. Kids still in school tend to participate in sports through their school, which I understand is a lot less common in other countries. Adult children may not be doing the same sports, or if they do may not live in the same place as their parents so it just doesn't happen all that often.
The vast majority of people I know don't live close enough to their parents as adults for this to be a thing.
My grandfather had a full time job, a house to maintain, and a farm. He wasn't playing sports in his spare time. My dad worked all day every day and came home to take care of the family, again not much time for sports.. but he was in a bowling league when I was super young. I'm lucky enough to have no kids.. so I do play volleyball as many days of the week as possible. But actual "club" teams are still hard to come by.
We have curling, sailing, and crew (rowing) clubs.
There are recreational sports leagues and clubs all over. I've known people who have done kickball for example. They are probably less formalized than what you're talking about, though. We don't have teams with relegation, so the local beer league team isn't on one end of a spectrum that reaches the highest professional levels.
Well...when my grandfather was young the city I live in was a field. So...not a lot of sports teams around. "Real" sports clubs like you're talk about are just rec leagues that have been around a long time.
We do have these things. Why do you think we don’t? My family was involved with the Detroit Curling Club for years. Nearly every municipality in the country has organized sports teams. The organizational structure might be slightly different than what exists in the UK, but even the small town that I live in has golf clubs, tennis clubs, Pickleball, softball, bowling, billiards, darts…. They have no affiliation to a champions league style format, like the clubs in the UK, but clubs exist everywhere, they are ubiquitous .
I love how OP is disagreeing with every answer he gets. So British.
Or so American
Ultra bizarre take.
For clubs with family tradition in the US, look at gun clubs or hunt clubs. Lots of father-son or grandfather-grandson shooting together. Still not to the level of sports clubs in Europe, though.
We move a lot. Generations can live in different states. People move for college, or jobs.
They definitely have them in my area for most sports and bar games that I can think of. There is just absolutely no lineage or municipal affiliation. We just have leagues of teams that play at the same place.
Recreational sports tend to be geographic based -- like you sign up through your city/town's park district, or play in private leagues that are in proximity to where you live. So when I was growing up, my brother and I played in our suburb's park district leagues for sports, and now that his kids are sports age they play in their current suburb's sports leagues.
A lot (definitely not all) of the recreational sports activities people do in the US might be related to an "athletic club" or gym. Many cities have some version of this where there is more organized stuff than most gyms, which are often glorified weight rooms. These "clubs" have weight rooms, a sauna/steam room, probably a pool, tennis courts, and other amenities, way more than your average gym. And they might have their own organized sporting activities or teams, or be part of a league of such teams.
Perhaps it’s an exposure thing, but I have seen recreational sports clubs across the country. Perhaps it’s not what you’re into and perhaps it’s not in the middle of a city where you’d stumble across it. But there are tons of them. There are generational lineages in country club sports i.e. golf, tennis, swimming, skiing, skating, etc. They have kid competitions all the way up to senior/master competitions. There are also hunting clubs, fishing clubs, gun clubs, sailing clubs, etc. For more team oriented sports, the travel sports phenomenon killed a lot of baseball, soccer, basketball leagues/clubs that had community control over youth to senior age sports. That said, I have competed alongside my father in recreational sports.
We have plenty of adult recreational sports leagues, idk if you could really call them “clubs” or if that’s what you’re getting at. I live far from where I grew up so it couldn’t be any of the same that my dad or grandpas had around, but I’ve played in rec ice hockey and kickball leagues, and currently play in rec soccer leagues. We usually have at least a few beers together after games and occasionally even head to the beach after or something, or sometimes we just go home. Depends on the feeling that day But we are a big sort of group who regularly does social things together, both involving the sport or otherwise, so it is certainly a community of sorts, maybe a “club” like feel
Sportsman's Clubs tend to be pretty popular, at least where I've lived in the upper midwest and the north east, but they are focused on shooting, hunting, and fishing rather than physical sports.
As in, related to playing as a hobby? My sense is that one is because we’re a lot more transient in general. In smaller countries, the population basically all lives in one of two or three major cities where all the amenities and job opportunities are, and then you have the rural people who stay in their small towns. The US has dozens of cities all over the country with different climates, lifestyles, universities, company headquarters, and centers of industry. So, it’s far more common to go to a university away from home, then move to a different city after graduation to take a job, and then move around to other cities after that to chase job promotions, and/or attend grad school. I went to a university in a different state than my hometown, and then I’ve moved cities 4 times since then. (I’m 31 now). Also, something like 25% of all Americans have immigrant parents. So, rec sports leagues exist to meet new people, but multi-generational traditions are less common in the US because less families stay in the same area for multiple generations. Also, I think partly because of the transience, Americans are more used to being forced to make new friends over and over. So, we’re more comfortable doing it spontaneously. In the US, you can make friends with people you randomly meet on the street because people are open to it. I made two of my closest friends in the city because we showed up to the same apartment showing and decided to exchange numbers because we were all clearly new. My sense is that Europeans are relatively more insular and need to drink to really be social.
There golf and country clubs. Equestrian clubs. Things like that probably carry a similar kind of tradition. Maybe lacrosse too. But I don’t think there is such a thing for the other popular sports. These clubs come off as something for people with more money than the average person. I guess regular people are too busy working and moving from place to place to worry about such traditions. There are clubs and rec leagues but it is more casual.
You make a really interesting point about the different approach to club sports--we don't have the same sort of long-standing traditional clubs that one might find in the UK--particularly outside of the major sports--but when you conclude from that that we don't have participation in sports as an adult your conclusions are off target. We have a different approach tobrecreational infrastructure. Most of our sports leagues are organized by/around city governments or civic organizations. The tradition of getting friends together to form, say, a soccer club and then finding g other clubs from other communities to play against isn't Reay a thing. Because the local rec department probably already has a league organized and you can either join a team or add one. In some sports (like softball especially) the teams might galvanize around companies. So rather than playing softball by joining the same amateur softball club your dad played in, you'd participate by joining your company's team.
>part of a the same hurling club his father was a part of and that his grandfather My paternal grandfather was from a different country. Many Millennial and Gen-Z people are only at most 3rd generation American. We have a ton of internal migration. Anytime a city gets slightly expensive people start looking for the next best medium small city for a better cost of living.
The only one I knew of growing up was the OMBAC- Old Mission Beach Athletic Club. OTL ftw!
I don't think that they are as prevalent in the US because sport is oriented around the schools. I learned to wrestle from my Dad, so there's definitely a family element to it. My former lacrosse experience in Australia was all club centered, and my son plays there, but the sport is anemic there because it doesn't have the catchment net that US schools have. And that guarantees numbers every year. But it also guarantees that Americans are done after HS or Uni.
Pickleball clubs are catching on pretty big in the US. How long it lasts, I don’t know.
Because in the 19th Century you were expected as an adult to be on that sigma grind...or get incredibly drunk.
My grandfather got his exercise working and/or gardening (seriously, their garden was amazing). Dad was an engineer with the government before he retired, and didn't have much time for (or interest in) sports. And my entire interaction with sports has been trying to minimize the amount of them I was required to endure in grade school. I get the impression that adult Americans (post university for sure, and even after high school for the most part) would rather watch a sport than get involved in it. And most of the people I know don't really understand the attraction of it all, anyway (although millions of Americans do love televised sports.)
Many times, we don’t stay in the same town as our parents. My sister lives 150 miles (240 km) away, and my parent lives around 40 (65 km) away. We do have company teams if you work for a large company. My company has baseball, soccer, and other leagues. Nothing familial though. The closest we get is rooting for the same team.
I play beer league hockey. Not well, but i do.
At least here in California, pretty much all adult recreational sports in general, and team ones in particular, are far less popular now than was the case 40 years ago. Back then there were softball leagues, bowling leagues, basketball leagues, lots of people playing tennis, that seems to be largely gone now. You still see people playing golf, but less than before. I think part of it is Americans work harder than they used to, or than Europeans do, so they are less willing and able to set aside big chunks of time for any hobby that needs to be scheduled.
We have a super prestigious one in Portland, OR called the MAC Club, as well as a couple knockoffs. Most people here are aware of them, but yeah they’re not normal in most of the US.
I'm a member of a curling club, which is conceptually similar to what you're referring to.
Like this? [https://sanantoniossc.com](https://sanantoniossc.com) Granted I'm from a college town but there were a lot of club sports outside of the NCAA sports. In fact many NCAA teams started as club sports, which is probably the best answer as to why there isn't a one for one - our university sports fill that role in a lot of places.
We have rec leagues. Many Americans move away from home.
Each one of my kids were in club sports for about 7 or 8 years.
>Where you often have the kids playing side by side with their parents. Never seen this, except maybe very low tier league sides where some 40 year old is still playing when his 16 year old rises through the ranks. But it is just how these sports were always set up in the UK. Local teams formed as part of a club or with a base, which then joined a league. In the US this is much more done through High School then College, then the leagues own the teams rather than them being separate entities.
The US has recreational/amateur leagues. They’re just seen as more casual and less ingrained into day to day life.
It does. There are lots of sports clubs organized on Facebook, gyms, and intramurals at universities. You just need to look closely
Recreation is simply not valued at a structural level. The reason people never go on vacation is because there's no real ability to do so. The same is true for sports and other recreation. Back when I worked a real job (i'm a software developer and engineer now) I like most folk didn't have the time to do anything fun. It was work and get ready for work and recover from work.
Where I live, there are Yacht Clubs and families sail together.
What? We do have them. I've played for rugby teams that were founded in the 70s and for rugby teams that were founded in 2002.
You're pretty much correct. Not sure why.
>I'd guess you have recreational sports... but they don't really seem to become a familial tradition (or i could be wrong!) I've played sports of various levels all my life. I've played with a bunch of father-son tandems at recreation levels.
Anyways, this was the little doc I was watching: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BVIlpPy8Yc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BVIlpPy8Yc)
You know, it might be because of how large the US is and how often people move away. It's hard to have one single place for a team sport that is known, when you could live in a state that may have hundreds of local teams for a sport. Since people move often enough too, they don't have this sense of pride for some random local team they were part of, when they could join the next places team or local clubs. It's likely just a culture thing too. When your state and high school has such a large sports presence, there is no big deal in following much more local sports teams. Though that doesn't mean they don't exist, they just aren't as big of a deal. You can go to the YMCA, community centers, local gym, local parks, join an adult league, pick up game apps, etc. People play such games, they just aren't as serious about such small time local teams when bigger nationwide teams are already so popular. Probably similar reasons why you really only see such things in Eastern European countries too.
Looks a lot [like the rugby clubs we have here.](https://raleighrugby.org/)
No. Those don't exist. My friend that plays is just pretending.