Sports
During World War II, the South Bend Blue Sox All-American Girls Professional Baseball League team was formed in the city. The team participated in all the league's seasons from 1943 to 1954. High School Sports are also a big draw in South Bend.
The Notre Dame Fighting Irish provide much of the sports action for the South Bend locale. Football Saturdays have become a major event for the city, attracting fans who come to watch the game and have tailgate parties. Notre Dame basketball games are also popular, along with the other university sports. The College Football Hall of Fame was moved from Kings Mill, Ohio, to downtown South Bend in 1995.
The city has the South Bend Silver Hawks, a Class A Minor League Baseball team, who plays at Coveleski Stadium in downtown South Bend. In 2005 the franchise nearly moved to Marion, Illinois, but a group of investors, led by former Indiana Governor and South Bend Mayor Joe Kernan, bought the Silver Hawks in order to ensure the team stayed in South Bend.
The city also hosts the South Bend Roller Girls, the city's non-profit flat track roller derby league. Founded in March 2010, the league has worked to support fundraising for local charities, such as the Salvation Army's Adopt-A-Family program, the American Cancer Society's Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, and the St. Joe County Humane Society. The South Bend Roller Girls traveling/competitive team, The Studebreakers, is named after the historic Studebaker Corporation. The team is a Women's Flat Track Derby Association Apprentice.
Read more about this topic: South Bend, Indiana
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“In the end, I think you really only get as far as you’re allowed to get.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“I looked so much like a guy you couldn’t tell if I was a boy or a girl. I had no hair, I wore guys’ clothes, I walked like a guy ... [ellipsis in source] I didn’t do anything right except sports. I was a social dropout, but sports was a way I could be acceptable to other kids and to my family.”
—Karen Logan (b. 1949)