February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Apart from the running track, which borders the main high school pitch in a little stadium that seats about 500, I counted a dozen tennis courts, a dozen basketball courts, about 20 fields alternatively used for lacrosse, soccer, football and field hockey, one handball court, and way too many baseball diamonds for me to even try to put a figure on. There are also running and bicycling trails that snake through the woods, four playgrounds, and the public golf course where locals can play at a reduced fee.
Most of the fields and courts (shockingly enough the tennis nets and basketball hoops are rarely vandalized) are located on church or school properties, and in my experience are accessible to all outside classroom hours. The most important thing to point out here is that Rocky Point is an average American town. There are richer towns with better facilities. There are poorer towns with worse.
From what I can gather, this is about the norm. It’s rare to find a public high school anywhere that doesn’t have a track and seating for a few hundred at its main outdoor pitch. These are regarded as standard issue, not a luxury.
So, here’s my point. A Long Island town with 10,000 people living in it has one running track, yet Cork, a city with 20 times that number of residents, has just two comparable facilities, UCC’s at The Mardyke and the CIT’s in Bishopstown. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the U.S. is at the top of the Olympic medals table for reasons other than the country having a large population to draw from. It also happens to invest hugely in the provision of basic recreational facilities that are genuinely public and in most cases free to use.
Ireland, by contrast, has allowed politicians to repeatedly carve up the national lottery funds earmarked for revamping the sporting infrastructure on a biased basis. Again and again this past fortnight, people have mentioned the