Thank goodness for variety in sports because right now as a fan who focuses on favoured teams and loses interest when they are not active I would be in a definite sporting lull if I relied on the mainstream.
Apparently pro basketball is ongoing, although I tuned out on the playoffs after the Toronto Raptors stumbled badly.
And while it is good to see a team never having won the Stanley Cup will hoist it this year, with Winnipeg now on summer holidays my interest past seeking out the scores is near zero.
Yes the Toronto Blue Jays are playing baseball, but as we approach June they are not playing very well.
The Jays are struggling to find .500, and to be honest you needed the rosiest of rose coloured glasses to have expected much more from what is at best a hodgepodge line-up.
You can’t start a season with Curtis Granderson, Randal Grichuk and Steve Pearce pencilled into prominent roles in your outfield and think you will be winning anything come season end.
That said I was anticipating a Jay team that would have stayed in the mix a bit longer based on starting pitching. But the one anticipated strength for the team has been an anchor on success. J.A. Happ continues to play better than I dreamed when they first signed him, but Marcus Stroman and Aaron Sanchez, who need to combined for 25-plus wins this season for the team to flirt with anything beyond being also-rans, having a whopping two wins, which is the end of this story.
The Jays are not a very good team, and that will sadly not change the rest of the season. They are still watchable as a diversion, but there is no sense of hope in the roster as it stands.
Thankfully we are only a couple of weeks away from the regular season kick-off for the Canadian Football League, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders should be in the hunt to win it all.
And an off the beaten path many sports fans take the Saskatchewan Rush are up one-game-to-none in the best of three championship final with Rochester winning 16-9 Saturday. Game two goes thus Saturday, and a subscription to NLLTV, or having SaskTel Max allows you to watch as they hopefully win their second title in three years for Saskatchewan fans.
But when I go off the beaten path I like going a long way off it, and in the current Internet-connected world that is a far easier trek.
Almost every sport you can think of has credible online platforms to watch games live, and better yet on-demand, so you can tune in after the better half has trundled off to bed.
Some of the options do cost money. Access to NLLTV and the Lax Sports Network to watch indoor and outdoor pro lacrosse cost about $50 a year, but give full access to all teams and games, which means tuning in ends up at about a cup of coffee per game.
And just recently I plopped down a few cyber bucks for www.volleyballworld.tv so that I can watch Team Canada in the new Volleyball Nations League. It’s only the men involved, the Canuck ladies not in the mix this year, but it was too good a chance to miss out on, and not a mass commitment as the league only plays from now through July. Again I don’t have to watch a lot to be cheaply entertained.
Not every pay service is low cost. I checked out one for freestyle wrestling on a lark, but retreated rather quickly at $150/year and that was in US dollars. That is devout fan only territory in my mind.
Other sports, arena soccer and football coming to mind have free online streaming of league games. The Major Arena Soccer League is supposed to have a TO team in the loop for this fall so that is must viewing for me.
If you want to wander off the path a bit further, then I can certainly recommend www.ehftv.com.
The online platforms has a catalogue of past team handball matches from Europe, and do live broadcasts to boot, which is great since it’s a very entertaining sport. Sadly, with no real presence in North America it’s almost unknown, and with no ‘horse in the race’ in a sense it doesn’t rate quite so highly for me. That said if there was a pro league here it would have an instant fan in me.
Other examples of quality sport TV that you can find on line are BadmintonWorld.tv and the official International Table Tennis Federation channel, both on YouTube.
So you can find just about any sport you can imagine online these days, many, free to boot.
And then finally I did a bit of web surfing late one night took me to www.casinodaniabeach.com where you can tune in Wednesday to Sunday for live jai alai. I was aware of the sport, but when I tuned in to watch I was totally intrigued. The stream is not high resolution, but is not bad, and while not a sport I will watch daily, it has my attention for the slow days of summer.
