Motor City to Montmartre

I just turned 34 years old (Happy Birthday to me) and just had a basketball game on Sunday.  France has an absolutely incredible amateur sports system.  In the US you usually have the chance to play sports in high school (sometimes only if you are really good and make the team) and then in college if you are one of the best.  Otherwise you are pretty much relegated to rec leagues.

 In France for just about every sport you can compete at a variety of levels.  In most sports they have multiple leagues at the Departmental level (about the size of a county in the US), the Regional level (there are 21 regions in continental France), and the National level (this doesn’t mean THE national team, but just that you would compete against teams spread out all across France).

 I play in D3 (or Departmental 3) which is not the lowest, there is D4 below and “Loisirs” (which is usually a non-competitive team without a real league structure). So there is still D2, and D1 above us at the Departmental level and then the next step above D1 would be R3 (Regional 3).  So our entire rankings of leagues looks like:

• Pro A (top professional league in France)
• Pro B (semi-pro)
• N1
• N2
• N3
• R1
• R2
• R3
• D1
• D2
• D3
• D4
• Loisir

At the end of every season the top teams in each division move up to the next division above and the bottom teams move down. This happens at the professional level in France as well.  For example in soccer there is the Ligue 1 (the number one professional league in France) and Ligue 2 (semi-pro).  The bottom couple teams in Ligue 1 drop down to Ligue 2 every year, which can be devastating to the club.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Detroit Lions had to drop out of the NFL if they underperform year after year?  Maybe the team ownership and management would try to do a better job if that was the case!

I really appreciate that I am able to find a very competitive league to play in with a formal structure and paid referees for every match.  By the way, my team is currently in 1st place and we have a good chance of moving to D2 next season!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 7:28 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.