sports

The Oakland Roots soccer team are in the semifinals for the National Independent Soccer Association championship. Their home games are about much more than the sport. Fans come to celebrate Oakland. We hear sounds of Oakland Roots games — from the local cumbia bands to Eritrean pop and hip hop.

On Sunday, a group of Pac-12 football players threatened to opt-out of the season unless their concerns about competing during the COVID-19 pandemic along with other racial and economic issues in college sports are addressed.

On Monday, the Bay Area had its first major sporting event since the pandemic began. Yesterday the A’s played the Giants in their first spring training game at the Oakland Coliseum.

The sneaker industry is expected to be valued at $95.15 billion dollars by 2025. It’s been decades since sneakerheads could claim to be members of a small subculture. San Francisco high schooler Bryan Ng looks into the resilience of sneaker culture. 

Tom Meschery was the first player in Golden State Warriors franchise history to have his jersey number retired. He grew up in San Francisco and played for the Warriors when the team moved to the City from Philadelphia in 1962. But it was off the court that Meschery had a second career as an accomplished poet and writer.

This story won a San Francisco Press Club award for sports reporting. The next Big Game is Saturday, Nov. 23 at Stanford. 

On a fall evening at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto — better known as “The Farm” — college-football rivals UC Berkeley and Stanford meet for their annual showdown at the 120th “Big Game.”

For today's Audiograph, we're headed to a tucked away area in a popular park.

In this Audiograph, we head to the Golden Gate Park Angling and Casting Club. 

In East Oakland, the Raiders and A’s are planning to go in different directions, and the Dubs have bounced to the city. So, what’s next for the Oakland Arena? What happens when the big three teams in the town are reduced to only one?

Hey Area is where we find answers to questions you ask. Listener Nastassya Saad wanted to know: Is Marin County’s Dipsea Race really the oldest in the country? 

The Golden State Warriors’ off-season is underway. In one of their last moves in Oakland, the team introduced its three draft picks at its convention center practice facility. But while the new players posed for the media, the vets have other things going on. In the latest episode of Bounce: the Warriors’ last season in Oakland, KALW’s Ben Trefny has more.

The Golden State Warriors season ended last week with a dramatic loss to the Toronto Raptors. It’s not the send-off Oakland fans were hoping for as the team bids farewell to Oracle Arena. Now, a season of promise turns into an off-season of uncertainty. There are still signs of the team all over the Town and that’s not going to change any time soon. In fact, the logo for this podcast is the iconic Warriors’ bridge image dripping off a brick wall, and that’s from a mural in Oakland by Illuminaries. In this edition of Bounce, we catch up with Illuminaries co-founder Tim Hon whose crew are painting for the Dubs. 

We're only two games into the playoffs and there's already a lot of drama. In this episode of Bounce, we'll cover a heartbreaking injury, a gutwrenching defeat, and we'll meet some of the people who show up outside every game to make a living.

The new series Bounce begins by looking back...

Everybody loves a winner when it comes to professional sports, and with recent success, it seems like there are new Golden State Warriors fans popping up every day. But long before the big names of today’s super team came along or there was ever such thing as “Dub Nation,” there was a franchise that didn’t begin in the Bay Area.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll explore the true costs of sports stadiums to the communities where they’re built.

From Audiograph, signature sounds of the Bay Area:

The Bay Area has a rich pro sports scene with distinctive voices who bring us all the action.

Are sports a way to cultivate virtues like loyalty, collaboration, and discipline, or to indulge feelings of rivalry, tribalism, and obsession?

On a recent Friday, Michael Uy (pronounced We) showed me his dog Abbie’s custom board. It’s got a unique fin alignment — he says it helps her steer better — a notch to hold a camera in place and a leash to keep it from getting lost in the waves.

It’s the final game of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department's Junior Warriors 8th grade girls basketball league. The SOMA Stars and the Lady Hurricanes take their positions on the court. A tall, wiry man – the referee – steps to the center. He looks at all the girls, smiles, and tosses the ball straight up in the air. Two girls jump for it, and the game is on.

If things go the way Bay Area sports fans hope, by the time voters head to the ballot box on June 5, the Warriors may be in the middle of the NBA finals at Oracle Arena in Oakland.

But if the Warriors make the finals next June, they’ll be playing in San Francisco, in their brand-new stadium in Mission Bay.

Proposition I wants to discourage moves like this one. If it passes, San Francisco would have a quote “official policy” discouraging owners of professional sports teams from relocating to the city.

Our specialist this week is Richard Rocha, Director of Operations for the San Jose Sharks’ practice rink — otherwise know as the “ice guy” for the Bay Area’s only professional hockey team.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll speak with a sports journalist and athletes about how the #metoo movement has rocked the sports world.

Gymnasts, swimmers, basketball players – athletes across the sports world – have come forward with revelations about sexual assault and abuse they have suffered over the course of their careers. What institutions and practices in the sports world protect perpetrators? And how can those power structures be dismantled?

Guests:

This weekend, the Bay waters will be filled with dragons. Well … dragon boats, anyway. The Northern California International Dragon Boat Festival takes place at Lake Merritt Saturday and Sunday. So, what’s Dragon Boat racing about?

This story has been updated since it originally aired in November of 2016.

For many people, this is a time to reflect on what it means to live in the United States. The election season revealed a divided nation, and many folks are saying they feel like strangers in their own country. Clearly, many already did.

Manipur’s court records talk about a game back in the 1st century AD and what’s different about polo in Manipur is that this not just a game for posh country clubs. Even ordinary villagers played it.

John and Ken present their annual look back at the ideas and events of the past year that have challenged our assumptions and made us think about things in new ways.

It’s two hours before tipoff, and droves of fans in a sea of blue and gold stand with signs, take selfies, and cheer as they watch the Warriors warm up. Up about 60 steps from the half court sideline, in a section broadcasters call “The Perch,” someone else is warming up, too.

This piece was produced Gabriel Chen, one of our high school student summer interns.

With the Olympics taking place right now, U.S. sports fans are getting treated to lots of coverage of summer sports like basketball, swimming, and gymnastics. But one sport may be overlooked by many Americans: Badminton.

On Sunday night, much of India was watching television with bated breath. All for one young woman at the Rio Olympics. Her name is Dipa Karmakar and a billion people’s hopes were resting on her shoulders.

  On the August 11th edition of Your Call, it’s our Friday media roundtable. This week, we’ll discuss coverage of the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The games are taking place against a backdrop of political and economic crisis engulfing the country.