Hey sports fans, wanna help me out here?
When my phone rang tonight with a call from a San Diego number, I decided to answer it just in case one of my friends from elsewhere in Southern California had decided to move further south without telling me. As it happens, I answered the phone to a survey person wanting my opinion about what it’s like to live in Seattle and how I feel about pro sports. By the end of the call I was pretty sure it was a thinly-veiled attempt to get my opinion about the Seattle SuperSonics with a few other questions thrown in for statistical and comparison purposes.
Anyway, the last part of the survey consisted of me answering where I thought my life would be better, worse, or unchanged if various pro sports teams left Seattle. These teams included the Sonics, the Storm, the Sounders, the Seahawks and the Mariners. (Do they ever feel bad that their name doesn’t start with an “S”, I wonder?) The final team named was “the Seattle Needles”.
This took me a moment and then I said, “Well, since I’ve never heard of the Seattle Needles, I don’t suppose it would make much difference to me what they did.” After the call I wracked my brain trying to think of what pro league these “Needles” could possibly represent. I know that it can be entirely possible to overlook a pro league–when the Seattle Storm won the WNBA championship, sportswriters kept talking about how it was the first league win for a professional sports team in Seattle since the Sonics won the NBA championship, but this wasn’t entirely true: I spent a season watching the Seattle SeaDogs of the now-defunct CISL (Continental Indoor Soccer League) work their way to a championship trophy while the vast majority of Seattle sports fans had no idea they even existed.
After calling a couple people to ask if they’d ever heard of the Seattle Needles and getting only “Seattle…what?” responses, I took the logical step of doing a websearch and found only this: The official site of the AVBA. Nowhere on this site is an explanation of what this “AVBA” might be and the only other web references I could find for AVBA were things like the Arkansas Valley Baptist Association and the Associated of Vanderbilt Black Alumni. If you look at this “AVBA” site you see what looks like stats for teams all across the USA and a page listing “stars of the sport” like Marvin Martion of the Atlanta Astronauts or Spayse Needle of the Needles. With the names and all it looks to me like some elaborate joke, but how this possibly imaginary team got listed on a survey that includes honest-to-goodness real, actual teams is a mystery to me. In any case, if any of you have any idea what this AVBA is all about it, I’d sure like to hear about it.
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Yes! I love web mysteries like this. Hopefully we can find something about it. My day is now ruined as this is all I will be able to think about.
I’m glad to share the pain, Tony.
Whatever they are, they are a 5 person sport that shares the same positions as basketball (check the all star balloting page).
wow, I really hate sports, but whenever I see VB I think volleyball. Unless I’m thinking of beer at the time.