This week, I was reminded of the time I played basketball as a teenager with the rest of my family at the old E.S.B Sportsco on the Curraheen Road, here in Cork. The building is gone now but it was the sports and social club for E.S.B’s Cork based employees, with a main sports hall for indoor games, changing rooms and pool tables downstairs, a bar and function area upstairs and two football pitches outside next to a carpark. Our Dad would bring us kids, myself, my sister and two brother’s there every Friday night during the school year to run around and arriving around half six we’d often have to wait for the men to finish playing indoor soccer before we’d be allowed in. The basketball nets would be winched down into position by hand and in the colder evenings during Winter the hall would be freezing due to the lack of heating, which was no bother since we’d be running around during practice. Boys and girls of all ages, kids of the employee’s and their friends, we’d bring our friends too, would turn up every week and a flurry of activity would always ensue. In the early years, we’re talking the very early nineties it was usually two or three of the dad’s who would be our basketball coaches for the evening getting us to do lay up’s, shooting practice, running, etc. As I got older we had a proper ‘coach’, a guy by the name of Freddie who had played with the Blue Demons team in the eighties, and with a few older kids joining our Friday Night’s, it began to turn into a proper practice. We were doing ‘suicides’ to warm up, drills and everyone would join in a full court game to finish out our 60 minute time slot. It was great!

After every session finished we’d all move upstairs, tired, sweating and go straight for the bar to get a pint of ‘rasa’ along with a package of Tayto crisps, and maybe a KitKat. It was almost a staple to get the same combination of ‘pint of rasa, crips and a chocolate bar’, that I still love the same to this day. Usually there’d be no one in the bar when we’d arrive as a group, so we would spread out sitting at those small bar tables and stools, drinking, talking and eating and maybe watch a game if it was showing on the old CRT TV’s hanging from the ceiling. The Dad’s would come back from cleaning and sorting out the hall to ensure all the kids were well behaved. All of us would stick around and then finish our drinks after which we would bundle ourselves into the car so our Dad would drive us back home. Sometimes we’d pickup a few bags of chips from The Fry in Ballincollig and watch the VHS pre-recorded episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when we got in the door at home. My Friday Nights at the E.S.B Sportsco stopped when I went into fifth year, and I have great memories of that time because of how positive effect it had on my life.

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