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Comment by Qem | Hacker News Reader

> The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).

It appears the sports industry in US skewed local preferences toward hardware-intensive sports, that sell lots of gear. Poor children can start playing soccer stuffing crumpled paper in plastic bags to create a makeshift ball, and using spaced sandals as makeshift goalposts. Minimal hardware requirements. It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera. Basketball comes closer to soccer in this regard.

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>It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera

In practice, casual football isn't any more resource heavy than soccer. Most non-league games of football are going to be "touch football", which only requires a ball, a field, and some sort of end marker (as a kid, it was usually just "from that tree to that other tree").

Obviously, organized league play has a ton more equipment, but the sort of informal casual games that kids or young adults play requires much less. It's one of those things that doesn't really get talked about a ton compared to league play, so it's easy to miss for those who didn't grow up with it.

This is way off. You only need a ball to play American football. Or a ball and bat to play baseball. Yes, the organized competitive versions have more gear involved, but so does organized soccer/football.

A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat if you're hitting a light enough ball. It you can scrounge up a tennis ball, they work pretty well for street baseball. Don't need gloves, bases can be whatever you can agree on. Of course, it you have something vaguely soccerball shaped, you can play kickball with improvised bases rather than playing soccer.

>A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat

Right around the 80’s and 90’s the idea of zero-tolerance youth crime policies swept the US. Right around the same time the popularity of baseball began a decline in the US. It went from being a universally played ‘pickup culture’ sport, to a sparsely played ‘pay to play’ sport.

Now I’m not gonna say the need for 8 or 9 boys to roam around a neighborhood with a giant stick looking for a place to play was the reason the ‘pickup culture’ games died. But I will say that it was probably a lot safer for those boys to just go to a basketball court and wait their turn in a ‘pickup culture’ game that did not require a giant stick or bat.

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