Fun Facts About Sports That Use Nets
With ever week that passes, there seems to be some new sport or a variation of a current sport that often beggars believe in terms of how it is played, but for most sports enthusiasts the traditional sports are still their favourites. For many of those sports, a sports net of some kind is necessary to play the sport, and these come in all shapes and sizes.
Whilst you may know a lot about these sports as they are played in their current form today, but have you ever wondered how they actually got started or been puzzled by some of their idiosyncrasies? If so here are some fun facts about popular sports that use sports nets.
Football/Soccer – A Sport With Multiple Names
In most parts of the world, ‘Association Football’ is simply called football, but in others which have their own forms of football, such as the USA, it is called soccer. In Australia, the jury is out with a split between football and soccer, given that we have Aussie rules football here.
In the UK, there is a great annoyance when they hear Americans use the word football to describe the sport where the objective is not hitting the ball in the back of the net, but a touchdown, and so many fans simply refuse to call football, ‘soccer’. The irony is that the word soccer was actually first used in the UK in the 1800s to differentiate the different forms of football including rugby football which was given the name ‘rugger’.