Sports

To break up some of the more serious posts I’ve decided to intersperse some lighter, lifestyle ones. This one is about sports :)

My dad was never into watching sports on TV so I wasn’t in the habit of constantly watching games and checking scores apart from what I discovered on my own.

The first sport I fell in love with was soccer. I was 8 during the 1994 World Cup in the US and watched it obsessively all summer. Alexi Lalas was my hero. Like me, he had red hair and played guitar. The only difference being that he played for the New England Revolution and the USA National Team and I did not. I actually got to meet him during a soccer camp a few years after the ‘94 World Cup and he commented that he “liked my red hair.” I now play in a competitive men’s soccer league on the Lower East Side in NYC with 8 guys that grew up in Ithaca with me. We all happen to live in the city and call ourselves the Ithaca Lightning, our childhood team name from 15+ years ago.

The second sport I fell in love with was baseball. The New York Yankees are my team and I fell asleep listening to games on the radio almost every night. I’d rush down to check the box scores in the morning. I played on a team called the Belle Sherman Yankees in elementary and middle school and remember seeing the world champion team in 1996 at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade the one year we went to see it live. After our Series A funding announcement and move to NYC we were bombarded by vendors of all stripes selling us black car services, short term housing rentals, and anything-else-you-can-think-of. The only good vendor call to come out of that period was the Yankees trying to sell us a box. Of course we had to sample it out so we got sweet seats and a tour each of the next few years as we considered buying a box for a season.  

The next sport I got into was football in college. My high school football team literally did not win a single game when I was there and Cornell and Ithaca College weren’t much more fun to watch. Growing up in Ithaca people are usually fans of Buffalo, the Giants, or the Jets. I never watched the NFL too closely until college when my friends and I would go to Northwestern games every weekend and I still watch regularly. Now that I live in NYC and can watch football on most Sundays (instead of going into the NBS office) I’m all about the Jets. Caroline grew up outside Philadelphia and is all about the Eagles. We got to go to Jets vs Eagles last season and bought jerseys.

To recap my allegiances:

• New England Revolution and now switching to the new NYCFC team. We went to the NYCFC team opener at Yankee Stadium but they finished at the bottom of the league their first season (they are doing MUCH better now).

• NY Yankees

• Northwestern

• The Jets