Basketball

 

    Basketball has been my favorite sport ever since I was a kid. I love watching professional games as well as playing it myself. For me it just seems that everything about it is great. First off, it can be played indoors, which prevents weather conditions from affecting ability to play or outcomes of the game. Second of all its prolific and anywhere where there is a gym you will almost always find good people to play with or against. Another advantage is the fact that it is easy to practice alone if you cannot find someone to do it with. Playing it regularly means that I can stay conditioned without having to run, which is one of my least favorite activities. Finally the game is scalable to many amounts of players, you can run one v. one, all the way up to five v. five, this gives both the game and the players more flexibility than in other sports. The relatively few amounts of players means that you can have a massive impact on the game provided you are good enough. That combined with basketball's limitless skill ceiling and it creates a strong drive to improve yourself . That last point is not unique to basketball however.

   It makes me happy to see basketball becoming more popular on an international level as more people playing the game means that professional basketball can only get better and better as more talented prospects begin playing. This increase in popularity can be see in this last Summer's Olympic games. The USA has historically been incredibly dominant in the basketball event, to the point it is a joke. That was until this year. Teams which the USA had bested by over sixty points just last Olympics had given the USA a run for its money and even though America still won gold it was a harder fight than in many years.