Sports
This week, footbaggers—better known as hackey sack players—gather in Oakland for the 31st Annual World Footbag Championship.
“What you’ll need for a day of suffering” read the top of the invitation for this year’s Rad Massaker alleycat bicycle race, which instructed bikers to bring water, spare tubes, energy gel and helmets. Sunday afternoon, hordes of cyclists showed up at Mosswood Park prepared to brave the pain.
Big bikes, small bikes, kid’s bikes and tall bikes — they were all out in force on Sunday. It was Oakland’s first Oaklavía—an event that closed down the Broadway corridor, from Grand Avenue to Jack London Square, to all cars. Bikes, pedestrians, unicyclists and rollerbladers cruised up and down the street checking out the booths and activities on the sidewalks.
The Oakland City Council voted Thursday night to lay off 80 police officers to help close the city’s $30.5 million budget gap. Various city government departments—including the City Administrator’s office, City Council, the Fire Department, and Information Technology Department also had their budgets cut, by a total of $18.7 million, as part of the fix.
It’s hard to catch Steve Sparkes these days between World Cup games, building a tasting room at Linden Street Brewery in West Oakland, and organizing a week-long free soccer camp for over sixty kids. Now in its third year, the “My Yute” soccer camp offers skills training to young players, while exposing them to the cultural diversity of the game and spreading, Sparkes hopes, his passion for the sport.
The Oakland lawn bowling club has been rolling on the greens at Lakeside Park for nearly a century. The game dates from 13th century England, and was played by the likes of Sir Francis Drake and Henry VIII.
At the cafes, pubs and bars of North Oakland, the World Cup debates have begun, and are sure to escalate throughout the month-long tournament — although the nine-hour time difference between California and South Africa means coffee may gain on beer as the favorite game-watching beverage.
In Oakland, 76,000 people—that’s 19 percent of the city’s population—live at or below the federal poverty level. This is a statistic that the City of Oakland wants to lower.
If you’ve ever walked through the parking lot at Oakland’s Rockridge BART late on a Thursday night, you may have seen a group of raucous twenty- and thirtysomethings yelling and drinking beer. But they’re not a bunch of hooligans — they are out there playing a friendly game of four square.