Family Fun with the WNBA & the Atlanta Dream

A few weeks ago, courtesy of One2One Network and the WNBA, we got some fabulous tickets to a WNBA game. I took my three kids, husband, dad and stepmother.

I was looking forward to the game. I am big sports fan and I can watch pretty much anything live (even curling). The kids were excited. My dad, who knows the names of every player and follows the team, we beyond excited.

A little background:

My dad was always big into sports. When he had two little girls within two years of each other, he was determined to instill this love into his children. He coached our teams, he coached us and he made certain that when it came to sports, we could play anything that we wanted to. We even went to sports camps over the summers.

I still remember loving basketball camp although I never really excelled as I topped out at about 5'3″ – I tried though. I was as mean of a guard as kid who is 5'3″ can be. My sister got the tall gene and is 5'10” today. While it certainly helped me on the dating scene, I longed through most of school to always be a little taller. Thankfully we have heels.

Fast forward to 2009:

I still love sports to this day. I like playing, I like watching and I especially love introducing my children to sports.

On game day, we arrived about one hour early to continue our family tradition. We all meet and have dinner at the CNN food court. There are lots of places to pick from and everyone gets something that they like.

After dinner, we headed into Philips Arena. We were instructed to visit customer service as soon as we entered. They t-shirts and Thunder Sticks waiting for each of my three children. They kids were literally jumping up and down from excitement.

Now here is the super cool part. I am not familiar enough with the seating to know where our seats but we quickly located the area that we were supposed to enter through. We entered and an usher asked for our tickets. She asked us to follow her and down we went. And down. And down. We were getting dangerously close to the floor when the usher stopped.

That's right. Our seats were on the floor. Those leather seats that you see Jack Nicholson in while watching Laker's games? That was us. Sans the sunglasses. These were some serious seats.

The kids were enthralled. The adults were too. The mascot visited us no less than five times during the game. You could see the intensity of the players. After all, the player bench was less than 10 feet from us. An Atlanta Dream player was injured during the game. You could see the pain on her face and alternately the sweat dripping off of her.

It was surreal.

And amazing.

The game was wonderful.

The WNBA is a great time for families and definitely one of the most overlooked family fun times when it comes to sports.

I am so ready to do it again!