Lost on the side roads to the highway.

I kind of got lost on the internet, again. I was trying to find out to which other teams the players of the Daemyeong Sangmu ice hockey team are contracted. See, the players from Sangmu are all doing their military service. Because the Olympics will be held in Korea in 2018, the government would like these young men to not lose out on the training and actual game time. Korea qualifies for all team sports in the Olympics by virtue of being the hosts, and they don’t want to be completely embarrassed on the ice, understandably.

From that page I clicked away to see what other sports the military offered and noticed that it had a baseball team that played in the Korea Baseball Futures League. “What is that?” I wondered, and off I went. I learned that it is a feeder league for first tier baseball in Korea. All the big teams have a team in this league and the players are basically young men being groomed and watched for a future in the big league.

On that page I noticed that the Doosan Bears have a team and that their games are played at a field in Icheon, my Korean hometown, so to speak. The field is out in the middle of nowhere, but I think I would like to make the trek out there sometime.

Even though the club was founded in Daejeon and later moved to Seoul, the Doosan Bears were known as the OB Bears until 1998. The residents of Icheon City, where I used to live, tend to support the Bears above other teams and I was told it was because the OB brewery is located in this city. Now that I know about the Futures League team playing nearby I’m thinking that the ties between Icheon and the Bears are indeed more than just coincidence.

Also form the Futures Teague page I also learned that Goyang has the only independent team in this lower league. All the other teams are owned by the top tier teams, with the exception of the Korean military and Korean police teams. Goyang is really my kind of place. Not only does it have a reasonably high level professional soccer team, but they also have one of only two Korean pro ice hockey teams, a pro basketball team and the only independent baseball team in Korea's second league .

What other sports are they hiding there?